DeAndre McDaniel

When he was a third-grader living in the projects of Tallahassee, DeAndre McDaniel learned his mother was taken to jail yet again.

From there it took a village to keep McDaniel on the straight and narrow, as his grandmother Dot and godmother Kim wrapped their arms around him and protected him through middle school and high school.

When Dabo Swinney began recruiting McDaniel in high school, that support group was convinced Clemson and not FSU was the place where DeAndre would grow into a man.

Tonight McDaniel will be inducted into the Clemson Athletics Hall of Fame. He is in his ninth season on Swinney's staff, and he has his master's degree plus an enormous amount of gratitude to the people who shaped him.

In this interview, McDaniel shares his life story in full for the first time -- from growing up way too fast as a child, to the devastation of not making it in the NFL, to working at a Wal-Mart as he adjusted to the real world, to returning to Clemson when Swinney told him it was time to come back home.