Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Farmer Dan sometimes reminisces
Clemson won its lone national football title in 1981. The Tigers’ coach was Danny Ford.
Few programs were winning like Clemson was under Ford.
From 1979 to 1989, Ford’s teams went 96-29-4, won five Atlantic Coast Conference titles and looked in position to compete for another national championship. Then Ford lost a power struggle with Clemson’s administration and, with the football program facing NCAA sanctions for recruiting violations for the second time in Ford’s 11-year coaching tenure, he stepped down. In those 11 years, Ford had the third-best winning percentage among active coaches, behind Nebraska’s Tom Osborne and Penn State’s Joe Paterno, and was on pace to rank among the alltime greats.
“He would have been right there at the top,” said Grant Teaff, the retired Baylor football coach who later became executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. “He would’ve come away as one of our very most successful coaches.”
Teaff is among those who note that Ford was never directly implicated in the NCAA rules infractions. And lingering suspicions did not keep Ford from becoming head coach at Arkansas in 1993, when the school hoped he could work his magic as Arkansas had recently joined the SEC.
Ford was 26-30-1 in five seasons at Arkansas before being fired in 1997.
On most college football Saturdays over the past 17 years, Ford has been on his 174-acre South Carolina farm that is home to about 140 cows, 10 horses and 3 dogs. “I don’t know how many cats, possum, rabbits, squirrel and deer,” he said, “but we got some of them, too.”
On some Saturdays, Ford listens to Clemson games on the radio while on his all-terrain vehicle, Bobcat loader or tractor.
“You naturally think, ‘What if I was there?’ ” Ford told USA Today. “You’re always thinking if you’re going to get back in, whether you do or you don’t. You always wonder what it would be like.
“Would I have liked to have coached another 10 years? Sure. Another 20? Sure, if we’d still be winning.”
Lewis engaged
Stacy Lewis has made a verbal commitment. The former University of Arkansas golfer is engaged.
Lewis, 30, the top-ranked American professional in the women’s game, said yes during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend when University of Houston women’s golf coach Gerrod Chadwell asked her to marry him, according to Golfweek.
They’ve been dating for about a year, and Chadwell popped the question when Lewis was giving him a tour of the University of Arkansas campus while there for a football game. She’s an Arkansas graduate and a member of the school’s Sports Hall of Honor.
Lewis told Golfweek that Chadwell made her six secondplace finishes in a winless year more bearable.
“Honestly, I think he helped me get through it all,” Lewis told the magazine. “Just having something good in my life when I came off the golf course every day.”