Kane Wommack-to-Alabama Move Continues Trend of Coaches Leaving Small-School HC Jobs
New Alabama football coach Kalen DeBoer went outside of his Washington coaching family to fill one of the biggest roles on his new Crimson Tide staff. Kane Wommack—a former assistant alongside DeBoer at Indiana who then took over as head coach at South Alabama—will lead the Crimson Tide defense.
Wommack finishes a successful three-year run with the Jaguars with a 22–16 record (13–11 in Sun Belt Conference games), two bowl appearances and a Sun Belt West title in 2022, when the team finished 10–3. His move from the ranks of Group of 5 head coaches to Power 4 coordinators is also a notable example of a growing trend in the small-school ranks.
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Sean Lewis’s move from head coach at Kent State to offensive coordinator at Colorado under Deion Sanders is the most notable move of this kind in recent years. Lewis already was considered a rising star in the profession, especially after leading the Golden Flashes to a 7–6 record and first-ever bowl win in the 2019 Frisco Bowl—a wild 51–41 shootout win over Utah State. Rather than wait for a bigger school to pluck him from Kent State as head coach, he left to run Sanders’s offense in Boulder.
While Lewis was controversially demoted at midseason despite the Buffaloes’ offense being explosive, especially early in the year, it didn’t appear to harm his coaching stock. A year removed from having one of the toughest FBS head coaching jobs at Kent State, he landed one of the best in the Group of 5 ranks at San Diego State.
This type of move remains rare, but it’s become a bit more common in recent years. Notably, some of the top coaches in the FCS ranks have started to leave for assistant roles with programs in power conferences.
After five years leading the FCS dynasty at North Dakota State—a run that included two national championships and a 60–11 record—Matt Entz is heading to USC as assistant head coach and linebackers coach under Lincoln Riley.
Across the country, one of the top HBCU coaches in the country made a similar decision. Florida A&M’s Willie Simmons—fresh off of a SWAC championship and Celebration Bowl win—joined Duke’s staff as running backs coach. Simmons led the Rattlers to a 45–13 (32–5 MEAC/SWAC) record in five seasons, going 12–1 in ’23, with the sole loss coming at FBS program South Florida.
In a move that flew under the radar relative to others, Mercer coach Drew Cronic is taking over as Navy’s offensive coordinator. He led Mercer to the second round of the FCS playoffs in ’23 and was 28-17 overall in four seasons. He was previously the coach as Division II Lenoir-Rhyne and NAIA program Reinhardt.
The moves bolster the idea that top assistant coaching jobs provide an easier path to power conference head coaching opportunities, something that hasn’t always been the case.
In 2023, at least, that seems to bear out. Of the 11 power conference head coaching vacancies (including Oregon State, despite its tenuous conference situation), four went to current P5 coaches, five went to P5 assistants (with internal promotions at Oregon State and Northwestern) and just two were Group of 5 head coaches making the leap to the power conference ranks, including Tuesday’s hiring of San José State’s Brent Brennan by Arizona.
College football is cyclical, and the experienced, low-level coach may come back into vogue. The success of coaches such as Lance Leipold at Kansas, Chris Klieman at Kansas State and Willie Fritz at Tulane (now Houston) are examples of veteran coaches thriving at difficult jobs after building programs at the lower levels. Still, there may be some wisdom in the move back to an assistant job at a higher-profile program.
This year’s biggest coaching hire did just that early in his career.
More than a decade before he led Washington, DeBoer was the coach at his alma mater, University of Sioux Falls, then an NAIA program, from 2005 to ’09, winning three national championships in four trips to the NAIA final. In ’10, he made the jump to become the offensive coordinator at FCS program Southern Illinois, eventually working his way up to the FBS at Eastern Michigan, a top Group of 5 program at Fresno State, and finally the Big Ten in ’19 as OC at Indiana. A year later, he returned to Fresno State to lead the program.
His recent path may look more traditional, but DeBoer made a similar gambit, albeit at the lower levels, to the one that Wommack, Lewis and Entz have taken in the past year. Now, he leads the sport’s top program, and is taking over for arguably the greatest college football coach of all time.