Intriguing new coaches join the SEC for 2021
For the second straight year there are four new head football coaches in the Southeastern Conference, which means more than half the league has turned over its regimes since the end of the 2019 season. Only two teams have head coaches who have been in place longer than five years: Alabama (Nick Saban) and Kentucky (Mark Stoops).
But it’s not only the head coaches we’re watching closely this season. Two SEC programs hired former NFL head coaches as coordinators. Two more teams hired lesser-known NFL assistants to revive their offenses. As the Post-Dispatch continues to preview the 2021 SEC football season, here’s a look at the 10 most intriguing new coaches across the conference.
1. Bill O’Brien Alabama offensive coordinator
The former Penn State and Houston Texans head coach is the latest high-profile coach to enter the Saban rehabilitation circuit, and he’ll lead a batch of five-star talents to postseason glory and NFL riches and (likely) cash in with a prime headcoaching job of his own soon enough.
The plan worked for past offensive play-callers Lane Kiffin, Mike Locksley and Steve Sarkisian, each of whom parlayed their time in Tuscaloosa to head-coaching jobs elsewhere. Before the Tide completed last year’s undefeated romp to the national title, Sarkisian accepted the head-coaching job at Texas.
Now it’s O’Brien’s turn. The former Bill Belichick assistant in New England did an outstanding job in two years at Penn State, producing two winning seasons in the aftermath of the Joe Paterno/ Jerry Sandusky scandal. In 2014, he jumped to the NFL
and guided Houston to four division titles in his first six seasons. Some roster management snafus and an 0-4 start sent him packing last fall, but he landed on his feet with one of college football’s best jobs.
2. Bryan Harsin Auburn head coach
Harsin wasn’t your typical SEC head-coaching candidate.
He’s an outsider to the SEC who grew up in Idaho and spent just three seasons of his 20-year career coaching in the current SEC footprint: two years as Texas’ offensive coordinator and a season as Arkansas State’s head coach.
The 44-year-old is an SEC rookie, but he arrives with a proven track record at Boise
State, where he won 78% of his games and posted winning records against against Power Five opponents (7-6) and rival Brigham Young University (4-3). Harsin’s offense should score points in the SEC, but can he recruit at an SEC level and close the gap on Auburn’s in-state rival to the west, Alabama?
3. Josh Heupel Tennessee head coach
These are some fascinating times on Rocky Top. The Volunteers are on their fourth head coach in 10 years and their sixth athletics director this century while facing certain NCAA sanctions and likely postseason bans. Oh, and no program in the country lost more high-end talent to the NCAA transfer portal this offseason.
That’s the situation Heupel faces in his second headcoaching job. On the bright side of orange, you can count on Heupel patching together a prolific offense — he was 28-8 in three seasons at Central Florida behind a juggernaut offense — but will that be enough to turn Tennessee into a national success instead of a national punchline?
4. Clark Lea Vanderbilt head coach
There’s no harder job in the SEC, maybe in the entire Power Five outside of Lawrence, Kansas, and that’s why Vandy needed a Vandy man to tackle the SEC’s mission impossible.
Lea was born in Nashville and played for the Commodores, so he understands the landscape at the conference’s only private institution and the challenges that lie ahead. He’s also coached at a private school with pristine academic standards — he was Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator the last three seasons — but this marks his first head-coaching job.
Good luck.
5. Shane Beamer South Carolina head coach
He has the Beamer bloodlines and plenty of experience at different SEC programs, but like Lea, this is Beamer’s first job in the big chair.
The son of Hall of Fame coach Frank Beamer has been a position coach and special teams coordinator while working under some of the game’s top coaches: Steve Spurrier at South Carolina, Kirby Smart at Georgia and Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma, plus his father during a fiveyear run at Virginia Tech. Can he run his own ship in the game’s most grueling conference?
6. Steve Wilks Missouri defensive coordinator
Coach Eli Drinkwitz took an unconventional approach to revive Missouri’s defense. Wilks, a longtime NFL coach, hasn’t worked on a college campus since 2005 and sat out the 2020 season to study the nuances of modern offenses.
Wilks was an NFL coordinator with the Panthers and Browns and spent the 2018 season as the head coach in Arizona. The Tigers are banking on his track record to both stabilize a unit that struggled last year and entice recruits with his NFL pedigree.
“Experience is the best teacher,” Drinkwitz said. “So he’s going to be able to immediately walk in and tell these guys, ‘Hey, you want to play in the NFL? These are the things that you have to do.’”
7. Liam Coen Kentucky offensive coordinator
Here’s another NFL import. When Kentucky’s Stoops needed a new voice to manage his offense, he looked to the pros, hiring Coen off the staff of the Los Angeles Rams. (He coached Sean McVay’s receivers and quarterbacks the last three years.)
Just 35, Coen has never coached on a Power Five staff — his college experience is at
Brown, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine — but Stoops is hoping McVay’s influence pays off with more creativity and he becomes the Wildcats’ version of Joe Brady, the little-known NFL underling who revolutionized Louisiana State’s offense all the way to the national championship in 2019.
8. Derek Mason Auburn defensive coordinator
Eight years ago Mason was widely considered one of the game’s rising stars in coaching, a charismatic, defensive savant who thrived at Stanford under head coaches Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw.
Then he tackled one of the sport’s toughest gigs — head coach at Vanderbilt — and Mason’s upside couldn’t overcome the job’s immense challenges. Fired after seven straight losing seasons, he now is in the SEC West with a chance to reset his career arc as Harsin’s defensive play-caller. He’ll have fewer headaches as a coordinator, plus the luxury of better talent and depth.
9. Jake Peetz LSU offensive coordinator
Louisiana State coach Ed Orgeron is hoping lightning strikes twice in Baton Rouge with another 30-something fairly anonymous NFL assistant.
It was Brady in 2019, now it’s Peetz, 35, who came from the Carolina Panthers, for whom he coached running backs last season under Brady’s watch. Peetz has been an NFL position coach at four stops but this marks his first coordinator role — with plenty at stake as Orgeron seeks to rebound from a turbulent 2020.
10. Clayton White
Beamer found a good one to run his defense, hiring the three-time Broyles Award nominee from Western Kentucky, for which White’s defenses were routinely among the best outside of the Power Five.