Why don’t more FCS head coaches get Power 5 jobs? Inspecting a seldom-used CFB pipeline
In December 2018, Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor was tasked with hiring the right coach to replace the retiring Bill Snyder, a coach so revered that the Wildcats play at Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium. Taylor, who had arrived the previous year from North Dakota State, went with the same coach he’d hired in Fargo: Chris Klieman, who was at the time leading the Bison to their fourth Football Championship Subdivision national title in five years.
The reaction among K-State fans was … not great.
“I got about 300 emails, and most of them were, you hired your drinking buddy! Or, why did you hire a D-II coach?” recalled Taylor.
Any concerns about how a lower-division coach would adapt to the Big 12 quickly dissipated that fall when the Wildcats beat a top-five Oklahoma team en route to an 8-5 season. Klieman went on to upset the Sooners twice more in the next three seasons, notch three top-10 wins last fall and capture the program’s first Big 12 championship in a decade.
Yet last December, when Colorado hired Deion Sanders from Jackson State and Stanford hired Troy Taylor from Sacramento State, they became the first FCS head coaches to land Power 5 jobs since Klieman four years ago. Klieman himself was the first since 2010. Group of 5 schools have hired 19 lower-division head coaches since 2010, but in total, lower-division coaches accounted for just 6.5 percent of all FBS head coaching hires in that span.
Which is odd, considering the list of successful coaches over the years to rise from those ranks. Jim Tressel (Youngstown State) won a national championship at Ohio State in his second season. Brian Kelly (Division II’s Grand Valley State) led Cincinnati to two BCS bowls and Notre Dame to a BCS national championship game and two College Football Playoff semifinals. Jim Harbaugh (San Diego) resurrected both Stanford and Michigan, with a 49ers Super Bowl trip in between. And then there’s Klieman, Paul Johnson, Dave Clawson, Jeff Monken, Lance Leipold and the reigning Cotton Bowl champion, Tulane’s Willie Fritz.
Still, FBS schools are five times more likely to hire a first-time head coach from the college or NFL assistant ranks than they are a sitting head coach from a lower division.
GO DEEPER
How first-time Power 5 coaches learn on the job
“For my money, a person that’s been a successful head coach like Chris Klieman is infinitely more qualified to be the head coach at Kansas State than somebody’s offensive or defensive coordinator,” said Bob Bowlsby, who as AD at Stanford hired Harbaugh away from a non-scholarship FCS school. “There’s 100 little decisions that go into putting a staff together and putting a football team together, and if you haven’t done it before, it’s just not the same.”
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There have certainly been FCS busts, like Washington State’s Paul Wulff (hired from Eastern Washington) and Virginia’s Mike London (Richmond). And there have been wildly spectacular former coordinators like Bob Stoops, Lincoln Riley, Ryan Day and Kirby Smart. But of the 20 lower-level head coaches hired from 2010 to ’19, less than a third (six) were fired within four years. Most of the others either succeeded and moved up or remain in the same job years later. Over that same span, 42 percent of all first-time head coaches hired by FBS programs were fired within four years.
FCS coaches hired to the FBS since 2010
* Previous experience as an FBS head coach
** Division III
Chad Chatlos, managing director at the search firm TurnkeyZRG, worked on Kansas State’s 2018 search, in which Taylor wound up picking Klieman over the likes of Group of 5 head coaches Mike Norvell (Memphis) and Seth Litrell (North Texas). He admits that’s not usually how a search plays out. During the last cycle, he worked with five schools in their head-coaching hires; only two FCS coaches even got interviews at one of them.
“It’s hard to go down to the FCS level if you have really good (assistant coach) candidates that have coached at the level you’re hiring to,” Chatlos said. “I’ve sat in a lot of these interviews, and a lot of times the AD will say, hey man, you’ve never been around resources like this. How are you going to build a huge recruiting staff? These FCS coaches, their whole budget might be the cost of one Power 5 defensive coordinator.”
Stanford’s new head coach knows all the concerns. A former Cal quarterback and assistant in the ’90s, Taylor spent two seasons as Kyle Whittingham’s offensive coordinator at Utah in 2017-18 but has spent most of the past two decades coaching in high school or in the FCS, where most recently he took a moribund Sacramento State program to three Big Sky championships and playoff appearances.
The biggest adjustment, the 55-year-old Taylor said, is in recruiting, which was primarily local and regional at his last job. Stanford by necessity recruits nationally. And there aren’t as many fierce recruiting battles at the FCS level because in many cases there is only one suitor.
“In FCS, you’re discovering these guys at the same time as everybody else,” Taylor said. “A lot of times you’re trying to not draw too much attention to a prospect if you think they’re really good. In FBS, there’s no one really that goes unnoticed. Everybody gets evaluated now. … There’s going to be somebody that you’ve got to beat on (a recruit).”
Other differences may not be as vast as many assume.
“At the end of the day, it’s really about building a culture and a staff and players that really like playing for you,” Taylor said. “And then the big thing is ultimately player development. Those are the things that have allowed us to be successful, and we will continue to do.”
Taylor’s success at Sacramento State put him in position to succeed David Shaw at Stanford. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today)
He may be right, but “culture” and “development” aren’t the kinds of buzzwords that fire up a fan base at most schools. Especially the ones that fashion themselves as national title contenders. It’s why seemingly half the SEC has spent the past decade hiring anyone they can find on the Nick Saban coaching tree, even though national champions Smart and Jimbo Fisher have been greatly outnumbered by duds like Will Muschamp, Derek Dooley, Jeremy Pruitt, Jim McElwain and Geoff Collins.
“The athletic directors feel like they have to win the press conference,” said American Football Coaches Association executive director Todd Berry. “And hiring someone who is coming in from an FBS program that’s had significant success — that tends to energize your fan base and your donors, and maybe even potential recruits, because of the name recognition.”
But that press conference is for one day. Ultimately, ADs are judged by how their hires have fared four years down the line.
In Klieman’s case, that’s a 30-20 record with a 10-win season that recently earned him an eight-year contract extension. Klieman was one of 11 Power 5 coaches hired in the 2018-19 carousel, from which only four others — Maryland’s Mike Locksley, UNC’s Mack Brown, Ohio State’s Ryan Day and West Virginia’s Neal Brown — remain with the schools that hired them.
Colorado’s Sanders has dominated the offseason media cycle so far, though less because of his HBCU-to-Power 5 jump than his star power and unconventional methods. Taylor by contrast is flying under the radar, but his attempt to turn around a recently bottomed-out Stanford program may become another referendum on the preparedness of FCS coaches.
He recently got a taste of the big-money Power 5 world when attending his first Pac-12 head coaches meetings, held annually at a high-end resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. His former job also had yearly coaches meetings — at the Big Sky’s conference office in Farmington, Utah.
Even that experience did not feel all that different from the FCS, though.
“At the end of the day,” said Taylor, “everyone’s got Diet Cokes and waters.”
(Photo: Tim Heitman / Getty Images)
In December 2018, Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor was tasked with hiring the right coach to replace the retiring Bill Snyder, a coach so revered that the Wildcats play at Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium. Taylor, who had arrived the previous year from North Dakota State, went with the same coach he’d hired in Fargo: Chris Klieman, who was at the time leading the Bison to their fourth Football Championship Subdivision national title in five years.
The reaction among K-State fans was … not great.
“I got about 300 emails, and most of them were, you hired your drinking buddy! Or, why did you hire a D-II coach?” recalled Taylor.
Any concerns about how a lower-division coach would adapt to the Big 12 quickly dissipated that fall when the Wildcats beat a top-five Oklahoma team en route to an 8-5 season. Klieman went on to upset the Sooners twice more in the next three seasons, notch three top-10 wins last fall and capture the program’s first Big 12 championship in a decade.
Yet last December, when Colorado hired Deion Sanders from Jackson State and Stanford hired Troy Taylor from Sacramento State, they became the first FCS head coaches to land Power 5 jobs since Klieman four years ago. Klieman himself was the first since 2010. Group of 5 schools have hired 19 lower-division head coaches since 2010, but in total, lower-division coaches accounted for just 6.5 percent of all FBS head coaching hires in that span.
Which is odd, considering the list of successful coaches over the years to rise from those ranks. Jim Tressel (Youngstown State) won a national championship at Ohio State in his second season. Brian Kelly (Division II’s Grand Valley State) led Cincinnati to two BCS bowls and Notre Dame to a BCS national championship game and two College Football Playoff semifinals. Jim Harbaugh (San Diego) resurrected both Stanford and Michigan, with a 49ers Super Bowl trip in between. And then there’s Klieman, Paul Johnson, Dave Clawson, Jeff Monken, Lance Leipold and the reigning Cotton Bowl champion, Tulane’s Willie Fritz.
Still, FBS schools are five times more likely to hire a first-time head coach from the college or NFL assistant ranks than they are a sitting head coach from a lower division.
GO DEEPER
How first-time Power 5 coaches learn on the job
“For my money, a person that’s been a successful head coach like Chris Klieman is infinitely more qualified to be the head coach at Kansas State than somebody’s offensive or defensive coordinator,” said Bob Bowlsby, who as AD at Stanford hired Harbaugh away from a non-scholarship FCS school. “There’s 100 little decisions that go into putting a staff together and putting a football team together, and if you haven’t done it before, it’s just not the same.”
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There have certainly been FCS busts, like Washington State’s Paul Wulff (hired from Eastern Washington) and Virginia’s Mike London (Richmond). And there have been wildly spectacular former coordinators like Bob Stoops, Lincoln Riley, Ryan Day and Kirby Smart. But of the 20 lower-level head coaches hired from 2010 to ’19, less than a third (six) were fired within four years. Most of the others either succeeded and moved up or remain in the same job years later. Over that same span, 42 percent of all first-time head coaches hired by FBS programs were fired within four years.
FCS coaches hired to the FBS since 2010
| YEAR | SCHOOL | COACH (FCS SCHOOL) |
| 2023 | Colorado | Deion Sanders (Jackson State) |
| 2023 | Stanford | Troy Taylor (Sacramento State) |
| 2023 | Texas State | G.J. Kinne (Incarnate Word) |
| 2019 | Kansas State | Chris Klieman (North Dakota State) |
| 2019 | East Carolina | Mike Houston (James Madison) |
| 2019 | Charlotte | Will Healy (Austin Peay) |
| 2019 | Akron | Tom Arth (Chattanooga) |
| 2018 | South Alabama | Steve Campbell (Central Arkansas) |
| 2016 | Southern Miss | Jay Hopson (Alcorn State) |
| 2016 | Louisiana Monroe | Matt Viator (McNeese State) |
| 2016 | Texas State | Everett Withers* (James Madison) |
| 2015 | Buffalo | Lance Leipold (Wisconsin-Whitewater**) |
| 2014 | Wyoming | Craig Bohl (North Dakota State) |
| 2014 | Army | Jeff Monken (Georgia Southern) |
| 2014 | Bowling Green | Dino Babers (Eastern Illinois) |
| 2014 | Eastern Michigan | Chris Creighton (Drake) |
| 2014 | Georgia Southern | Willie Fritz (Sam Houston State) |
| 2013 | Georgia State | Trent Miles (Indiana State) |
| 2013 | San Jose State | Ron Carragher (San Diego) |
| 2012 | Akron | Terry Bowden* (North Alabama) |
| 2011 | Ball State | Pete Lembo (Elon) |
| 2010 | UNLV | Bobby Hauck (Montana) |
| 2010 | Virginia | Mike London (Richmond) |
* Previous experience as an FBS head coach
** Division III
Chad Chatlos, managing director at the search firm TurnkeyZRG, worked on Kansas State’s 2018 search, in which Taylor wound up picking Klieman over the likes of Group of 5 head coaches Mike Norvell (Memphis) and Seth Litrell (North Texas). He admits that’s not usually how a search plays out. During the last cycle, he worked with five schools in their head-coaching hires; only two FCS coaches even got interviews at one of them.
“It’s hard to go down to the FCS level if you have really good (assistant coach) candidates that have coached at the level you’re hiring to,” Chatlos said. “I’ve sat in a lot of these interviews, and a lot of times the AD will say, hey man, you’ve never been around resources like this. How are you going to build a huge recruiting staff? These FCS coaches, their whole budget might be the cost of one Power 5 defensive coordinator.”
Stanford’s new head coach knows all the concerns. A former Cal quarterback and assistant in the ’90s, Taylor spent two seasons as Kyle Whittingham’s offensive coordinator at Utah in 2017-18 but has spent most of the past two decades coaching in high school or in the FCS, where most recently he took a moribund Sacramento State program to three Big Sky championships and playoff appearances.
The biggest adjustment, the 55-year-old Taylor said, is in recruiting, which was primarily local and regional at his last job. Stanford by necessity recruits nationally. And there aren’t as many fierce recruiting battles at the FCS level because in many cases there is only one suitor.
“In FCS, you’re discovering these guys at the same time as everybody else,” Taylor said. “A lot of times you’re trying to not draw too much attention to a prospect if you think they’re really good. In FBS, there’s no one really that goes unnoticed. Everybody gets evaluated now. … There’s going to be somebody that you’ve got to beat on (a recruit).”
Other differences may not be as vast as many assume.
“At the end of the day, it’s really about building a culture and a staff and players that really like playing for you,” Taylor said. “And then the big thing is ultimately player development. Those are the things that have allowed us to be successful, and we will continue to do.”
Taylor’s success at Sacramento State put him in position to succeed David Shaw at Stanford. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today)
He may be right, but “culture” and “development” aren’t the kinds of buzzwords that fire up a fan base at most schools. Especially the ones that fashion themselves as national title contenders. It’s why seemingly half the SEC has spent the past decade hiring anyone they can find on the Nick Saban coaching tree, even though national champions Smart and Jimbo Fisher have been greatly outnumbered by duds like Will Muschamp, Derek Dooley, Jeremy Pruitt, Jim McElwain and Geoff Collins.
“The athletic directors feel like they have to win the press conference,” said American Football Coaches Association executive director Todd Berry. “And hiring someone who is coming in from an FBS program that’s had significant success — that tends to energize your fan base and your donors, and maybe even potential recruits, because of the name recognition.”
But that press conference is for one day. Ultimately, ADs are judged by how their hires have fared four years down the line.
In Klieman’s case, that’s a 30-20 record with a 10-win season that recently earned him an eight-year contract extension. Klieman was one of 11 Power 5 coaches hired in the 2018-19 carousel, from which only four others — Maryland’s Mike Locksley, UNC’s Mack Brown, Ohio State’s Ryan Day and West Virginia’s Neal Brown — remain with the schools that hired them.
Colorado’s Sanders has dominated the offseason media cycle so far, though less because of his HBCU-to-Power 5 jump than his star power and unconventional methods. Taylor by contrast is flying under the radar, but his attempt to turn around a recently bottomed-out Stanford program may become another referendum on the preparedness of FCS coaches.
He recently got a taste of the big-money Power 5 world when attending his first Pac-12 head coaches meetings, held annually at a high-end resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. His former job also had yearly coaches meetings — at the Big Sky’s conference office in Farmington, Utah.
Even that experience did not feel all that different from the FCS, though.
“At the end of the day,” said Taylor, “everyone’s got Diet Cokes and waters.”
(Photo: Tim Heitman / Getty Images)
