Tajh Boyd lost his father and left football. Then he reconnected with the game at Clemson.

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CLEMSON, S.C. — Football was the lifeline Tajh Boyd didn’t want. The glory of his high school and college days long past, the bitterness of his professional cameos lingering, he was done with the game.

Sell industrial-strength packaging such as polyethylene and polypropylene? Jump into residential real estate? Dance The Nutcracker? Boyd did all of the above — and then some.

“I had a weird thing with football for a while,” he said, “where I couldn’t even watch it when I was finished playing. I hated it probably for the same reasons that I loved it.”

Indeed, the recognition that the incurably affable Boyd embraced as an All-American quarterback at Phoebus High and Clemson became a burden, a constant reminder of what was and might have been.

One sales call for Piedmont National packaging took Boyd to a meat processing plant on White Horse Road in Greenville, South Carolina — yes, he still recalls the street. There in the cutting room, some workers asked for a group photo.

But first they had a question: What are you doing here?

As politely as he could, Boyd explained that his, like theirs, was a job that needed to be done.

“So, part of me is like, ‘Damn, are my best years behind me?’” Boyd said. “Because that’s all I’d hear, is what I’d done as opposed to where I was.”

The nadir came Nov. 17, 2020.

Tim Boyd, Tajh’s father, underwent an early morning outpatient procedure to repair a herniated disk. He and Tajh planned to have lunch together that afternoon.

But complications ensued. Tim went into cardiac arrest and died that day at age 55.

Tim was Tajh’s rock. From the rec leagues in Virginia Beach, to the state championships at Phoebus, to the Orange Bowls at Clemson, Tim was omnipresent. Practices and games alike, Tajh could always glance to the sideline or into the stands and find his dad.

Processing Tim’s death, Tajh’s first call was to Clemson coach Dabo Swinney.

“I’ve got so many tears in my eyes that I can’t breathe,” Boyd said, recalling the moment.

Swinney had lost his father five years earlier and had long marveled at the Boyds’ father-son bond. Moreover, he appreciated how Tim had never meddled in the Tigers’ program.

Most important, and much like Boyd’s coach at Phoebus, the late Bill Dee, Swinney knew instinctively what Boyd needed in his darkest moment.

“It’s the damnedest thing,” Boyd said, “because I know how much Coach Dee cared for us, and (Dabo) cares in the same way. … He knew what the game meant to my dad, and he knew where I was with football.”

After giving Boyd time to grieve, Swinney approached him in early 2021 with a request: Abandon real estate and return to football. Spend a year in a support staff role at Clemson and see where it leads.

So began Tajh Boyd’s reunion with the sport that long defined him.

“That first year back, all I could think about was how excited (my dad) would have been that I was back in football,” Boyd said.

But while Boyd’s return to football was rooted in tragedy and death, his promotion this season to quarterbacks coach coincides with life and hope.

The secret president

Amid a gray morning drizzle, Clemson staged its annual media day last month, a battery of interviews for dozens of coaches and support staff. But when Tajh Boyd enters a room, clouds tend to vanish.

He fist-bumped, back-slapped and/or bro-hugged everyone in his midst. He playfully apologized to awaiting reporters for not having a fresh haircut.

“He’s secretly the president of South Carolina,” said Cole Stoudt, Boyd’s backup during their playing days and co-worker now.

Social rounds complete, Boyd sat before a swath of Clemson media. For all the good vibes, there was business to conduct, namely to hear Boyd’s take on a quarterback competition that could determine the Tigers’ fate in 2026.

Redshirt junior Christopher Vizzina, he of one career start, is the frontrunner. Freshman Tait Reynolds is the young insurgent.

Few doubt Clemson’s talent elsewhere on offense, and the defense, especially vulnerable to the pass in 2025, appears stronger with the addition of transfers such as Old Dominion safety Jerome Carter, an All-Sun Belt Conference selection last season.

Long and defiantly averse to mining the transfer portal, Swinney subsequently signed 10 transfers, a tacit acknowledgement of the program’s steady decline from national title contender to 7-6 also-ran last year, Clemson’s worst finish since 2010.

But Swinney didn’t take a transfer quarterback, ramping up the pressure on the Tigers’ homegrown talents — and their rookie position coach.

Poised as ever, Boyd hit all the right notes, praising Vizzina and Reynolds as quick studies. He approved of Vizzina’s affinity for Drake, the superstar rapper and singer, and reminded folks that Reynolds missed most of his final high school season with a hamstring injury.

“A hungry Tiger hunts best, right?” Boyd said. “We know where we’re at. Last season was disappointing — by a large margin. But we’re excited about what’s coming.”

Another subplot hovers: Boyd’s reconnection with Chad Morris, Clemson’s offensive coordinator for Boyd’s final three college seasons, 2011-13.

Morris left Swinney’s staff in 2014 to become head coach at SMU, where success led him to the same position at Arkansas. Fired by the Razorbacks in 2019, Morris returned to various assistant roles before taking last season off to shadow his son Chandler in his final college season at Virginia.

When Swinney dismissed offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Garrett Riley last December, he rehired Morris as OC and elevated Boyd to quarterbacks coach.

The centerpiece of Swinney’s first full recruiting class, Boyd has “a track record,” Morris said. “He’s got skins on the wall. They know he’s been a part of this system, and when he talks, they listen.”

Clemson won 32 games and the 2011 ACC championship in Boyd’s three seasons as QB1. The conference Player of the Year as a junior, he graduated as the ACC’s career leader in total offense, touchdown passes and touchdown responsibility.

His last appearance in a Tiger uniform was epic, a January, 2014, Orange Bowl victory over No. 7 Ohio State. Boyd passed for 378 yards and five touchdowns, while rushing for a career-best 127 yards and another score.

His 505 yards of total offense that night remain an Orange Bowl record, and Swinney often cites that moment as the springboard to a Clemson dynasty that included six consecutive College Football Playoff bids and two national championships.

“Tajh has always been there for me,” Vizzina told reporters this spring, “but to see it now, and have a very similar system to what he ran, and watching him do it on (film) and him talking about, ‘Well, I was thinking this.’ I don’t know how many teams in the country can have a quarterback coach that played in the same system, and you can watch him do it on the screen. So that means a lot…

“When he became the quarterback coach, I knew that he was ready for it. I have my full trust in him, because of all the time we spent with each other. And another thing: He really cares to get to know us off the field, too. He wants to go eat with us and hang out with us, and I think that just means the world to all of us.”

Just as it meant the world to a young Tajh Boyd when coaches mentored him beyond the football field.

Bruce Pearl with the Virginia Beach Mustangs, Robert Jackson, Tommy Reamon and Bill Dee in high school. The Peninsula All-Star Camp, where organizers Carl Francis and Vernon Lee exposed Boyd to Hampton Roads NFL stalwarts such as Mike Tomlin, Aaron Brooks and Kwamie Lassiter.

Those folks and memories like a 2001 Pop Warner national title won with teammates Percy Harvin, Bubba Jenkins and Rick Kresinske are why Boyd has “757” tattooed on his arm.

“People not from there don’t understand the pride that comes with that,” he said. “… I’ve always considered myself a winner, but it’s because I played for winners. I played for organizations that won (with) expectations and standards…

“I want to be what I had. I had so many people that believed in me, that poured into me, that cared for me and who I was becoming (other than on) game day. And that’s what I am for these guys (at Clemson).”

The monsters weren’t real

A 2024 Clemson Athletic Hall of Fame inductee, Boyd was a precursor to the greatest quarterbacks in program history: Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence, national champions and NFL starters both.

Selected by the New York Jets in the sixth round of the 2014 NFL draft, Boyd never found a stable pro football home. Not with the Jets and then Pittsburgh Steelers, or later the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes and Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

The ensuing years were a self-imposed estrangement from the sport that Swinney interceded to end. I asked Swinney why, and his answer lasted 6½ minutes.

“Sometimes you see things in people they don’t even see themselves,” Swinney said, “and sometimes it takes just one person to believe in you for you to believe in yourself. Tajh Boyd is a winner. He’s a leader, he’s charismatic, he’s a communicator, he loves the game. He was obviously a great player, but he was (also) a great teammate.

“As I told him, I felt like he was mad at football. Why are you mad at football? Everybody in the United States knows who you are because of football. Why are you mad about that? You got drafted. Things didn’t go according to the script, but God’s plan is always different, and I just felt like that he would be someone great to have around Clemson. I didn’t know where it would go.”

Nor did Boyd. He remained restless for months in his off-the-field role until then-Tigers running back Will Shipley told him how much gravitas he still carried in the locker room.

Newly emboldened, Boyd moved up the organizational depth chart, and the professional stability has translated to his personal life.

In early July, Boyd and his wife, fellow Clemson graduate Elizabeth, welcomed their second child. His name is Teague, and his sister is 2-year-old Nila.

“I’ll see him walking through the neighborhood pushing a stroller,” Tigers chief of staff Woody McCorvey said with a wide smile.

“It’s been fun for me to watch that transformation,” Swinney said. “… His whole perspective is different, and to see him as a husband and a father, and what a great leader and a great teacher. And to see him sitting in the office on meeting prep and all these details: He’s just a full-blown football junkie. He’s completely bought in to being a great coach.”

Boyd’s expanded role also entails off-campus recruiting, travel that has brought him back to the 757, where he went 43-2 as a starter at Phoebus, leading the Phantoms to a pair of state championships.

“So many people are in such a rush to get where they’re going, they wish the moments away,” Boyd said, “and as the years go by, you realize, man, the (time) goes by like that. So, to be at a place where I played … and to go back home and walk the hallways of so many places I visited growing up. It was awesome.

“To go back to Phoebus, to go to Bethel and Warwick and Denbigh. And go back to Virginia Beach, where I grew up, and see some of those schools and some of those coaches and people I hadn’t seen in so long.”

Aside from his journeyman’s time in pro football, the Clemson-Greenville region has been Boyd’s home base for more than 15 years. His mother, Carla, lives a half-hour away and is a tailgate warrior at Tigers home games.

Still prone to look for his dad in the stands or on the sideline, Boyd now sees his mom, wife and children.

“He’s in a good place now,” said Virginia football general manager and Clemson graduate Justin Speros, Boyd’s friend of more than a decade. “He can’t go five steps in that zip code (without being recognized). Deshaun, and to a degree Trevor, shied from the spotlight. Tajh was like, bring it on.”

The spotlight shines in the community, too.

Resplendent in a tuxedo, Boyd has performed in Ballet Greenville’s production of The Nutcracker. He’s given the keynote speech at Swinney’s All In Team Foundation gala and prayed the blessing for a charity Thanksgiving meal in Greenville.

As we conversed privately, Boyd’s contentment was apparent. He’s thicker around the midsection than during his playing days — parenthood can do that — but he looks and sounds happy.

The suggestion revealed Boyd’s erudite side, not surprising for someone who chose his first-born son’s name because it translates to “poet or philosopher.”

“Life’s been good,” he said. “You invest so much into the game, but at some point, the ball goes flat, the air leaves it and you question: Did any of it mean anything? But time, people, situations, they have a way of telling you it meant everything…

“I had a chance to see if the monsters under the bed were real, and they weren’t. A lot of it was expectations I had created for myself and all these different ideas of what should have happened as opposed to what did happen. And what did happen was I had a chance to make some unbelievable memories with some unbelievable people, and now I get a chance to share them.”

David Teel, david.teel@virginiamedia.com

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