Around FCS: Facing The Changes

-David Bowie's Changes

They may be able to satisfy themselves temporarily with March Madness and spring football practice, but the die-hard FCS fan also realizes that it is almost six more months before the kickoff of the 2008 football season.

The memories of 2007 are beginning to fade. It's been almost three months since Appalachian State beat Delaware in the NCAA Division I championship game, and Jackson State stopped Grambling in the SWAC title clash.

It's even been a month since the last all-star game was completed, and we're a week past the NFL combine. It's enough to drive a serious FCS aficionado crazy.

It is also the time of year when you can analyze the past and contemplate the future. As much as we may find balance in the consistency of college football, there are those nasty, little changes that show us that time is moving on.

We are creatures of habit, and there is something comfortable about familiarity.

You expect Montana to be on top of the Big Sky Conference and involved in the playoffs every year. We are getting used to the other teams in FCS taking aim at Appalachian State as a three-time national champion. And we anticipate schools like McNeese State, Delaware, Georgia Southern and Northern Iowa to be ranked in the top-10.

The names may change in cycles of four years, but much of the FCS landscape stays the same. Then, every once in a while, events happen that alter that sameness.

I can't remember another football offseason that has been so filled with coaching changes among major FCS schools. Since the beginning of the 2007 season, we've had 17 teams name new head coaches. That in itself is not dissimilar from recent years, but what is surprising is the number of coaches from prominent programs that have chosen to move to greener pastures.

Four teams that made the playoffs last year are breaking in new coaches this spring, while several other big names have come and gone.

Coaches like Jerry Kill of Southern Illinois and Paul Wulff of Eastern Washington used playoff success to springboard themselves to bigger jobs.

Kill, who took SIU from the edge of oblivion to the edge of going to the FCS championship game in just seven years, is the new head man at Northern Illinois.

NIU was impressed by how Kill's teams came within a dropped two-point conversion pass of beating them once, and then finally turned the trick with a two-minute comeback last season.

In addition, Kill won four Gateway Conference titles in five years, and led the Salukis to five straight playoff berths.

Wulff, meanwhile, coached the 2005 Walter Payton Award winner in quarterback Eric Meyer and took his 2004-05 clubs to back-to-back playoff berths, including a 2004 quarterfinal run.

After rebuilding in 2006, Wulff just missed a third Big Sky Conference championship with a young squad in 2007, and engineered an upset over previously unbeaten McNeese State before the Eagles lost to eventual national champion Appalachian State in the playoff quarterfinals.

Wulff's reward was an offer to move to the ultra-competitive Pac-10, as the new head coach at Washington State, his alma mater. The Cougars figured that if Wulff could win in Cheney, WA., he could win in Pullman, WA. too.

Dave Clawson has been a coach on a lot of people's radar screens since his days as a young assistant on Kevin Higgins' staff at Lehigh. His work as the offensive coordinator at Villanova, developing Payton Award winners Brian Finneran and Brian Westbrook, and as a head coach at Fordham and Richmond, has earned him the offensive coordinator's job at Tennessee and the sky is the limit for this heady, personable coach.

Clawson took a moribund Fordham program that finished 0-11 in his first year of 1999 and vaulted the Rams to a piece of the league championship and the FCS quarterfinals just three years later. At Richmond, he moved the Spiders into the quarterfinals in his first year (2005), and to a share of the Colonial Athletic Association title and the semifinals of the playoffs in 2007.

Clawson, Wulff and Kill all left their programs with a full cupboard of quality players, as Mike London, Beau Baldwin and Dale Lennon take over those respective programs.

Richmond should battle James Madison, Villanova and Massachusetts, among possible others, in the CAA again next year, and will likely begin the season in the top-10 of the Sports Network preseason poll.

Eastern Washington will be the likely favorite in the Big Sky Conference, with quarterback Matt Nicholls a likely Payton Award candidate. The Eagles, like Richmond, won't just be a probable top-10 club in the preseason, but will be viewed as a national championship contender.

Southern Illinois has a few more seniors to replace than those other two teams, but we've learned to never count out the Salukis, who seem to have a capacity for reloading.

Lennon, who had been a finalist for the Montana State job last summer, comes on board after building a Division II powerhouse at North Dakota.

ELSEWHERE ON THE COACHING CAROUSEL...

- Eastern Kentucky lost Danny Hope to Purdue, where Hope will take over as the new head coach when Joe Tiller retires after the 2008 season. Hope got the Colonels, one of the longtime FCS powers, back to the playoffs for the first time since 1997, and has left EKU's roster with plenty of talent to make another run under Dean Hood in 2008.

- One of the biggest eye-poppers of the off-season was Joe Taylor's move from head coach and athletic director at Hampton to head coach at Florida A&M. Taylor had developed a pipeline of NFL talent while at Hampton, and his move to FAMU could revitalize a once-great Rattler program that hasn't been the same since they ushered Billy Joe out the door.

Hampton promoted defensive coordinator Jerry Holmes into Taylor's role as head coach, but it remains to be seen what this shuffle will do to the power structure of the MEAC.

With the restoration going on at Delaware State and Norfolk State under the respective guidance of Al Lavan and Pete Adrian, the presence of Buddy Pough at South Carolina State and those changes at FAMU and Hampton, the MEAC could be ready to sneak up on some of the other leagues in the near future.

-Two of the classiest acts among FCS coaches left the subdivision during the offseason.

Mike Kelly had turned in a spectacular career at Dayton, capped by winning the Sports Network Cup with an 11-1 record, a Pioneer League co-championship and a Gridiron Classic victory in 2007. He has retired and left the reins to Rick Chamberlain.

Also, Jim Reid's two-year run at VMI ended, with him taking his defensive prowess to the NFL as the linebackers' coach for the Miami Dolphins. His replacement was a big name from the FCS past, Sparky Woods.

Woods was one of the primary architects of the Appalachian State program, serving as offensive coordinator under Mack Brown for one year, before taking the head coaching job for the Mountaineers in 1984.

Under Woods' guidance, ASU made its first playoff appearance in 1986 and was the top-seeded team in 1987, beating two-time national champion Georgia Southern in the quarterfinals before losing to Marshall in the semifinals. Woods went 38-19-2 in six years, with a pair of Southern Conference titles, before moving to South Carolina.

It will be interesting to see if Woods will be able to work his magic at VMI, a program that will feature its third coach in four years, and that hasn't had a winning season since 1981.

-Another name that will be missing from the FCS ranks in 2008 is Tim Stowers. Stowers, who won a national championship as the head coach at Georgia Southern in 1990, was relieved of duties at Rhode Island after eight years and one winning season.

Darren Rizzi takes over for Stowers at a school that has some of the worst facilities in FCS, but Rizzi made some immediate in-roads during recruiting.

-Like Rizzi, Trent Miles has had some early recruiting success at Indiana State. But Miles faces an immense rebuilding job for a Sycamore program that hasn't seen a winner since 1996 and has won just one game in the past three years.

-Drake had experienced one of its greatest periods of success under Rob Ash from 1989-2006. But with Ash leaving for Montana State last summer, the Bulldogs had hired former Minnesota Vikings offensive coordinator Steve Loney as a interim coach for the 2007 campaign. Loney managed a win over No. 7 ranked Illinois State to open the season, but Drake went just 5-5 the rest of the way, and Loney has given way to a permanent replacement in Chris Creighton.

-Western Carolina has been on a downward spiral, with just two winning seasons in the past nine years. The Catamounts are taking a different direction by removing former WCU quarterback Kent Briggs for an outsider, Dennis Wagner.

-At Texas Southern, Johnny Cole comes on board for another program that has wallowed in six consecutive losing seasons. Cole was part of the success when his brother L.C. Cole was the head coach at Tennessee State and Alabama State from 1996-2002.

Other SWAC teams looking for lifts from new coaches are Alcorn State, with Ernest Jones, and Arkansas-Pine Bluff, with Monte Coleman. Also hoping for a spark are downtrodden programs at Savannah State and Southern Utah, who have hired Robert Wells and Ed Lamb, respectively.

Every year, you see some teams make vast improvements with new coaches, while others regress, or continue to struggle. With all of the changes in this off- season, particularly among top teams, it will be more intriguing than ever to witness how things work out in 2008.

And with more weeks of winter to survive, it gives all of us something to relieve the boredom of the off-season.