Wallace talks coaching PRCC, Ole Miss legacy
OXFORD — Nearly a decade later, college football is finally catching up to Bo Wallace.
Wallace, who was Ole Miss' starting quarterback from 2012-14 and ranks second in school history in passing yards and passing touchdowns, is making his way through the coaching ranks. On Dec. 9, Wallace was hired to be the quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator at Pearl River Community College.
It's another step in Wallace's coaching journey. Wallace has been coaching since 2015, first as a high school defensive backs coach, then as a high school quarterbacks coach. In 2017, Wallace returned to East Mississippi Community College, where he set NJCAA records as a player in 2011, to be the quarterbacks coach.
In 2018 and 2019, Wallace coordinated offenses at high schools in Tennessee before getting his first junior college coordinator job in 2020 at Coahoma.
Now, Wallace is tasked with re-imagining Pearl River's offense to fit his identity. Fortunately for Wallace, his identity happens to revolve around running the offense everyone in college football is trying to perfect.
“A lot of things you see us do on Thursdays this year will be a lot of stuff you saw us do at Ole Miss,” Wallace said.
“But obviously football evolves so fast that you have to keep studying and keep learning and make sure that what you're bringing into your scheme is something that works for you. Being a coach at a couple different places and getting to learn from some pretty good coaches, it's obviously taking things from them and being able to apply it to what I like to do on offense.”
Wallace's Ole Miss teams were vanguards of modern offensive football. Then-ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze was calling offenses built around run-pass options before those plays even had names. As early as 2012, Ole Miss was running plays where Wallace had the option to throw a 10-yard curl to the long side of the field, hand to a running back on an inside zone, keep the ball himself on an outside zone or throw a swing screen to a receiver on the short side of the field.
Today, those plays are the norm at all levels of football. That wasn't the case when Wallace and Freeze got to Ole Miss in 2012.
“Us and Auburn were really the only teams running the spread at the time,” Wallace remembers. “All the other SEC teams were kind of a pro-style offense and play great defense at the time. I think Freeze and (former Auburn coach Gus) Malzahn, they showed that the RPOS and the spread offense can work in the SEC.”
Playing in those offenses inspired Wallace to design the offense he wants to run at Pearl River. Being a good coach means devising concepts that are difficult to stop and still be easy enough to teach to players. Taking inspiration from Freeze, Wallace is trying to do just that.
Wallace talks X's and O's as fluidly as he can spell his own name. He talks about wanting to draw plays that make life easy on his quarterback but wreak havoc on a defense.
That means cutting plays in half where the route concepts on one side of the field are designed to exploit coverage. It also means designing plays where a quarterback reads the field from right to left or left to right instead of having to constantly swivel his focus back and forth.
It means running the plays you see in the SEC on Saturday, just at the junior college level on Thursday.
“That's a huge recruiting tool that I've always used,” Wallace said. “When you come here, you're going to be running the SEC offense. It's the same offense you see on TV. So these coaches from the schools you want to go to, when they come in and say ‘How does he learn?,' we say ‘We're in the SEC system.'”
Wallace understands the value of the Mississippi junior college system as well as anyone. Over the course of a year, Wallace went from starring at East Mississippi to starting at Ole Miss.
Now, it's his chance to help a new generation of junior college athletes make the same jump he did.
And, if everything works out, Wallace can make the jump for a second time.
“I think my number one (goal) is to make sure that at the place I'm at I'm doing the best job that I can possibly do,” Wallace said. “But me personally, I feel like I've been able to rise pretty fast. I've had to go and do it the blue collar way and work my way through high school and prove myself.
“I want to continue to do that. I want to call plays at the highest level. I want to call plays in the SEC. So every day when I wake up, I make sure that I'm doing things (where) I'm getting a step closer to that goal.”
Contact Nick Suss at 601-408-2674 or nsuss@gannett.com. Follow @nicksuss on Twitter.