CLEMSON, S.C. — Not long ago, Ronan Hanafin was the one leaning on someone else in Clemson’s secondary to explain the defense. Now, standing inside the Smart Family Media Center after practice, he’s the guy other players lean on instead.
That arc is most visible in how Hanafin talks about Clemson’s overhauled safety room, which brought in two portal transfers this offseason in Corey Myrick and Jerome Carter. Hanafin doesn’t hedge on either one. “Just a dynamic player,” he said of Myrick. “Obviously very fast and agile and just able to go and high point the ball whenever it’s up in the air, and just a dog on defense.” Carter gets similar praise, tied specifically to what shows up on tape. “You see all the picks that he got, and just watching his film throughout the year and then watching him progress from spring to summer,” Hanafin said, “The offseason work that he’s done really is helping out our team a lot.” The two arrived in January, and Hanafin says the relationship building started immediately, on the field and off it. “We got right to it, having that relationship on and off the field, whether it’s just meeting on odd times of day, Saturdays, or going out to eat and taking the other guys out,” he said. “We’ve bonded real well.”
None of that comfort with new teammates happened on its own, and Hanafin traces a lot of it back to Nolan Turner, Clemson’s first-year safeties coach and a former Clemson standout himself. Early on, Turner was the one who met with him daily to walk through concepts that hadn’t come naturally yet. “He’s the guy that was meeting with me every day and just making sure I knew just the little things,” Hanafin said. “I didn’t know much about defense when I switched over, and just the ins and outs of it. But he was the one that met with me every day and has really helped me progress from not knowing much to be able to play on a game-to-game basis.” Hanafin credits Turner’s communication style specifically for translating scheme language into something a new defensive player could actually absorb. “He really knows how to portray it to guys our age,” he said. “Especially when I was switching, I didn’t know a bunch of the terminology and stuff. For him to be able to dumb it down, and now be able to speak on a much deeper level about all that stuff, has really helped me a lot.”
Underneath the new faces is a defense now in its second year under coordinator Tom Allen, and Hanafin says that continuity is doing real work that doesn’t show up in a highlight. “It’s just like some of it’s just muscle memory at this point,” he said. Last year’s struggles, in his telling, weren’t about a lack of effort so much as a group still learning a new system in real time. A second full offseason inside it has changed what the room can handle. “Having a whole two offseasons to learn his scheme, learn all the checks and learn all the different formations, whether it’s we’re getting in one thing and checking another thing off in motion, it’s just different things like that has really helped out a lot.” Part of that progress, he said, is simply hours logged in the film room with the same group of teammates. But part of it is a shift in who’s allowed to correct whom. “We’re at the point now where we can just correct each other and not even have the coaches help us out,” Hanafin said. “That’s honestly the point where you have to be at. You learn something best when you could actually coach it to other kids on the team.”
One of those kids is Polo Anderson, the freshman safety Hanafin has watched up close since spring. Hanafin doesn’t oversell the polish yet. “He’s a good player. You could tell he’s just so raw athleticism. Obviously he has to learn a lot, and he’s continuing to do so.” But he points to a specific rep from this week as the moment the physical tools started catching up to the mental side of the game. “There was an out route, and he broke on it like he knew it was coming,” Hanafin said. “I don’t think he would have done that in the spring. Being able to see that is one of those moments that just clicked. It was like, man, that dude can fly.” Hanafin sees a version of his own development in it, and a version of the mentorship he got as a young player from former Clemson defensive backs Tyler Venables and R.J. Mickens, now paid forward to a freshman still learning the position.
Being one of the older players in that room is a strange feeling for Hanafin, who still talks about it with some hesitation. “It’s weird. I feel like I’m a year older than everyone else already,” he said. “It’s cool to just be able to see all those guys grow up and go throughout their journey. It’s sad to see other guys leave, those are my tight group of friends that left in the last senior class. But being able to step into that leadership position is encouraging. You have to recycle out leaders, and new leaders need to step up. I think that’s where we’re at now.” Asked to describe his own leadership style, Hanafin lands somewhere between direct and still developing. “I think I’m very authoritative. I try to be more actions-based,” he said. “I’m working with the communication part of that. I’ve always been kind of a quieter one, but in this role you have to speak up and say what needs to be said. I’m not afraid to say anything, whether it’s good, bad, or ugly. If it needs to be fixed, it’s going to be fixed.” He described the same three-level accountability framework that’s clearly become a program-wide standard on defense this year, not just a linebacker room concept: a player holding himself accountable first, coaches holding players accountable second, and players holding each other accountable as the hardest and most valuable level. “I think we’ve taken a huge step from that, from even last year in the spring to now,” he said.
Turner isn’t the only staff relationship Hanafin leans on. He speaks about defensive coordinator Tom Allen in almost identical terms, describing an open line that runs at all hours. “Any questions that I have, on or off the field, meeting room, I’ll just text him any time of the day. He’ll answer,” Hanafin said. “He’s been awesome to have, and just being able to help us out in any way we need and be able to communicate with us very well.”
What ties all of it together, for Hanafin, is a program that’s been through the full range in his time on campus, an ACC championship, a playoff appearance, and then a difficult 2025 season that forced real change. He doesn’t pretend last year didn’t happen, but he’s careful not to make this year’s optimism about results yet. It’s about how the group actually spends its time together. “I feel like I say it every year, but we’re tighter than we were,” he said. “Last year’s team was obviously very tight, I love all those guys. But this year I feel like we’re just taking it to another level, being able to go out and do the stuff off the field, taking each other to dinner, playing games with each other, pulling up to each other’s houses. That kind of thing has been great to see this offseason.”
