Nevada Football: Head Coach Ken Wilson Fired
The Wolf Pack are on the hunt for a new leader after Wilson couldn’t get the program out of its current hole.
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The next chapter begins soon.
After leading the Nevada Wolf Pack to back-to-back 2-10 seasons, head coach Ken Wilson has been fired.
The news, first reported by Matt Zenitz of On3Sports and confirmed by Chris Murray of Nevada Sports Net, doesn’t necessarily come as a shock. Nevada failed to turn the page after previous head coach Jay Norvell left the program for Colorado State in December 2021, a move that launched a substantial transfer portal exodus which may have ultimately defined Wilson’s tenure in Reno.
He won his first two games as head coach in the 2022 season, but the Wolf Pack then suffered a 16-game losing streak that extended into 2023. After another pair of consecutive victories against San Diego State and New Mexico in October, the team lost its last four games, sealing Wilson’s fate.
Despite starting with significant holes on the roster, the Wolf Pack never found many long-term solutions on either side of the ball after two seasons. By Brian Fremeau’s FEI efficiency metric, Nevada fell from 53rd in 2021 to 124th last year and 128th this season; by Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, they dropped from 67th to 125th to 131st. The Wolf Pack are also the only team in the Mountain West to average fewer than 20 points per game in each of the last two years, a period in which they also finished either next-to-last or last in the conference by yards per play on offense and yards per play allowed on defense.
As Murray noted, Wilson’s 24-game stint as head coach is the program’s shortest since Jeff Horton’s infamous Red Defection to UNLV in 1993.
