Mountain West Football: Examining The Conference’s New Coordinator Hires
The conference’s five new head coaches have already made crucial hires, but those aren’t the only new coordinators in the Mountain West.
Contact/Follow @MattK_FS & @MWCwire
New faces in new spaces.
Boise State
When Zak Hill departed for greener pastures in Tempe, the Broncos decided to promote from within, elevating Eric Kiesau from wide receivers coach to offensive coordinator. His history in that position is, to be charitable, checkered.
Since 2009, Kiesau has spent parts of six seasons as a coordinator at Colorado, Washington, Kansas, and Fresno State. By Offensive SP+, just one of his offenses, the 2013 Washington Huskies, finished ranked better than 66th. His most recent turn at the helm was his most disastrous, as well, as the 2016 Fresno State Bulldogs finished next to last nationally by SP+, 123rd in yards per play, and 120th in points per drive.
The caveats, at least compared to his most recent history, is that Kiesau will be working with a higher level of talent across the board and also with an offensive-minded head coach, but it’s anyone’s guess as to how things will turn out if the responsibility for calling plays falls to him. Bryan Harsin wasn’t forthcoming about that after the team’s Las Vegas Bowl flop, so it might have given him pause.
Colorado State
Steve Addazio didn’t waste a lot of time filling out his new staff and his coordinator choices make for some fascinating contrasts to the Mike Bobo era. On offense, Joey Lynch arrives in Fort Collins from Muncie, Indiana and his alma mater, Ball State. His six-year tenure had its ups and downs, which is certainly reflective of the MAC at large: The 2019 Cardinals finished 60th by Offensive SP+, a high water mark, but three times they finished in the triple digits.
What will be most interesting is how closely the new CSU offense hews to what we’re accustomed to seeing from Addazio. Ball State ran the ball 58.1% of the time last fall and finished as the MAC’s highest-scoring team, but they threw it 54% of the time back in 2018.
The defense, meanwhile, has an old hand in charge with Chuck Heater. His career, which stretches back to 1976, has too many stops to list but Rams fans can be encouraged by his most recent work. In five years as Marshall’s defensive coordinator from 2013-17, the Thundering Herd finished outside the top 20 by yards per play just once.
Fresno State
New head coach Kalen DeBoer and offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb have an extensive history of working together, having done so at NAIA Sioux Falls and Eastern Michigan before arriving in the Central Valley together, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise that Grubb was retained for 2020. The offense, which averaged a respectable 2.39 points per drive after averaging 2.69 the year before, was hardly the problem last year.
The defense missed its star power and regressed in 2019, so DeBoer turned back to Indiana and brought in William Inge, who coordinated special teams for the Hoosiers in 2018 and 2019. His career has been something of a winding road but, for the most part, it’s hard to argue the results: He worked with Khalil Mack during his time at Buffalo in 2010-11, for example, and shepherded breakouts from Tegray Scales at Indiana and Alex Daniels at Cincinnati (for good measure, IU also finished in the top 50 by Special Teams SP+ in 2018 and 2019).
Hawaii
Todd Graham reached into the Warriors past, and into the depths of college footballl, for an inspired hire on defense, bringing Victor Santa Cruz back to the islands after a prolonged stint at Division II Azusa Pacific. 2019 was something of an off year for the Cougars defense because they finished third out of four teams in the Great Northwestern Athletic Conference in yards per play allow, but they allowed under 5.5 yards per play every other season since joining the GNAC in 2012.
Graham’s choice to coordinate the offense is just as inspired, albeit a little more risky. If G.J. Kinne‘s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you remember his successful stint as a quarterback at Tulsa, under Graham, where his career passing yards rank third in program history. In the years since, he worked as a graduate assistant at SMU and an offensive analyst at Arkansas before jumping to the NFL ranks to join Doug Pederson’s staff in Philadelphia.
It is his first time in a coordinator role, however, so the hire is still something of a roll of the dice. Learning from an offensive mind like Pederson, however, is a plus, and his background suggests a wide-open passing attack that will feel right at home in a Warriors program that’s long developed high-flying offenses.
Nevada
The ousting of defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel was a mild surprise, which could make Brian Ward‘s arrival one of the most important in the Mountain West. Nevada Sports Net’s Chris Murray has a detailed summary of Ward’s background but, depending on your perspective, some of the red flags noted could be overblown.
On a per-play basis, Syracuse’s drop-off from 2018 (5.83 YPP allowed) to 2019 (6.07 YPPA) is not as drastic as you might expect. This bears out in Defensive SP+, where the Orange dipped from 60th to 75th but still outperformed a reloading offense, and in other measures like sack rate (8.3% to 6.8%, the latter of which was still 51st nationally). And despite getting the axe in November, Syracuse was bested in the ACC by only Clemson in takeaways.
New Mexico
It’ll be interesting to see what new offensive coordinator Derek Warehime brings to the table after the Lobos took only a mild step toward being more balanced under the departed Joe Dailey. Under Tom Herman at Texas, the Longhorns have typically held a run-pass split near 50-50. They did not, however, feature tight ends that often and his work as an offensive line coach before that — at Texas in 2017 and at Houston the two previous years — doesn’t look quite as pretty by the advanced metrics.
So where’s the upside, you ask? He’s had past success with this New Mexico program, most notably as Bob Davie’s run game coordinator in 2014. That year, the Lobos finished 4th nationally by rushing yards per play and in the top twelve by IsoPPP+, which measures explosiveness, and Rushing SP+. They may not be running Bob Debesse’s offense anymore, but it’ll be interesting to see just how much of that big play element they can rediscover.
As for Danny Gonzales’s defensive coordinator hire, well, what can you really say about Rocky Long that hasn’t already been said? By SP+, Long has engineered top-50 defenses for five straight years, peaking at 15th last fall, and he did the same in his last three years at New Mexico from 2006-08. The 3-3-5 will be alive and well in Albuquerque, so even though there will be lots of production to replace right away, don’t overlook how important his arrival could be in the long run.
San Diego State
It’s been a long time since he’s been at San Diego State, but new offensive coordinator Jeff Heclinski and head coach Brady Hoke go way back. The two worked together at Ball State, SDSU, and Michigan and it’s reasonable to say he had a hand in jumpstarting the Aztecs’ current renaissance.
2010 is a whole other lifetime in college football, though, but there’s reason to be enthusiastic. His work as a passing game coordinator at CSU-Pueblo in 2015 is overshadowed by the record-setting McDondle brothers, while his offense at Indiana State improved from 14.4 points per game and 4.8 yards per play in 2017 (a true bottoming out across the board) to 31.7 PPG and 5.9 YPP in 2018.
At San Diego State, however, you have to have a strong defense and it will fall to Kurt Mattix to pick up where Zach Arnett and Rocky Long left off. In the last update of his beta-test FCS SP+ rankings, Bill Connelly had Eastern Kentucky in the top 50 and you have to think Mattix’s defense was a big reason why: The Colonels finished 22nd this fall in scoring defense and 17th in yards per play allowed. His four-year stint as a coordinator there have echoes of what we’ve been accustomed to seeing on the Mesa, too, continually ranking among the FCS’s best in sacks and one turnover measure or another, but the expectations will be high nonetheless.
UNLV
Marcus Arroyo dipped into the Pac-12 ranks to fill the defensive coordinator role, tabbing Peter Hansen for his first DC role on the collegiate level. His background as a linebackers coach, at Stanford and with the San Francisco 49ers, suggests he’s a good fit for the West Coast aesthetic that Arroyo may want to build.
Despite the Cardinal’s recent downturn, it’s hard to pin too much of that on the defense. Stanford finished 87th in Defensive SP+ this fall, but they finished just outside the top 40 by that same measure in 2017 and 2018.
Utah State
Year one of the Gary Andersen 2.0 era didn’t go quite as expected and now the Aggies will undergo changes on the sideline as well as on the field. Mike Sanford Jr. has moved on, replaced by Bodie Reeder as offensive coordinator. Reeder brings some “quarterback guru” bonafides with him to Logan, having worked with Mason Fine at North Texas and Gabe Gubrud at Eastern Washington in the last several years.
Wyoming
Nick Rolovich’s hiring at Washington State impacted the Cowboys most directly since Jake Dickert’s departure marks the second straight season a Power 5 program has raided Craig Bohl’s program for a coordinator hire. It’s certainly a flattering compliment, but making consecutive “right hires” is always a tough task.
Enter Jay Sawvel, who arrives in Laramie with a wealth of recent experience helming Power 5 defenses. His most recent stint at Wake Forest didn’t end well after back-back-back lopsided losses to Boston College and Notre Dame in 2018, in which the Deacons gave up roughly 7.5 yards per play, but Wake finished 51st by Defensive SP+ in 2017.
Additionally, Sawvel also fielded top-50 defenses nearly every year at Minnesota from 2011-16, peaking at 16th in his last season with the Golden Gophers. In that run, he also had a hand in getting seven players selected in the NFL Draft, most notably Ra’Shede Hageman. That kind of success is right in line with what Scottie Hazelton and Dickert have accomplished in recent years, so it’d be a surprise if things didn’t come together the way Craig Bohl surely hopes they will.
