Aug. 18—With some college football teams less than a week away from their first game — most, like Eastern Washington — are still 11 days from their first contest of the 2025 season — hope generally abounds.
So does pressure.
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Among the Big Sky’s 12 football programs, just two are heading into this season with a new head coach. Thomas Ford Jr. took over for Jason Eck at Idaho, while Brennan Marion is now in charge at Sacramento State after Andy Thompson led it the previous two years.
But just three of the league’s head coaches have been at their post more than five years, including Eastern Washington’s Aaron Best who is entering his ninth as the Eagles’ head coach.
“It’s very unique,” Best said of longevity at Eastern, which dates back to 1996 as a player and assistant coach. “I pinch myself a lot, to be able to do what I do in a volatile profession, to not have moved and to have a senior (son) in high school.”
His tenure has included an FCS title game loss and two other playoff appearances, netting an overall record of 52-40. But the Eagles have also finished with losing records each of the last three seasons.
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EWU’s slump corresponds with a time when the transfer portal is more active than ever. According to an article published by NBC Sports in January, the number of FBS players who transferred during last year’s cycle was 3,700, more than double the 1,561 who transferred in 2018-19.
Those transfers naturally trickle down into the FCS level at which the Big Sky competes, though Eastern has been better at retaining players than most in the Big Sky. During the 2023-24 transfer cycle, Eastern lost just two players to an FBS or FCS program, fewest in the league. Last cycle it lost five.
But all the movement that has become the norm in college football begs the question as to which metrics are the best at gauging the success of a coach.
In short: It still comes down to winning games. But to the coaches themselves, the profession is about more than just that.
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Winning games amid those changes has just become more complex.
“We all have unique challenges,” Best said in July during the Big Sky football meetings. “But I don’t think it’s strictly a win-loss piece, because the landscape is so fluid. There’s so much going on.”
Best offered the example of Paul Wulff, the former EWU and WSU head coach who is now head coach at Cal Poly: If Wulff can evaluate and recruit and develop a guy who goes on to Michigan to play, should that factor into how Wulff is assessed?
“It still goes back to the old-school mentality of graduating your kids, helping your kids stay out of trouble, and whether they are being productive citizens after they’re gone,” Best said. “Those things are kind of lost now.”
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Recruiting, retention and development
Wulff’s head coaching resume begins with an eight-year stint at Eastern Washington in which the Eagles went 53-40 overall, won the Big Sky twice and reached the playoffs one other season.
His four years at Washington State, from 2008 to 2011, were far less successful, with a 9-40 record and just one season with more than two wins.
After a run of assistant positions over the 12 subsequent years, Wulff took over as Cal Poly’s head coach in 2023 on the heels of a three-year stint under Beau Baldwin in which the Mustangs went 4-21. Their last winning season came in 2016.
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“It’s not always going to be the wins and losses until you get your program to a position where you feel like you should compete year in and year out for a championship,” Wulff said. “Is the recruiting good? Is the retention good? Is the development of the individuals good? I think the whole graduation piece, it’s very important in the big picture.”
Development is a catch-22 for coaches in the Big Sky. If a player performs well enough to attract the attention of FBS programs, and the money that can come with transferring to one, coaches don’t often get to reap every seed that they sow.
During this most recent offseason, 79 Big Sky players transferred to FBS programs, according to HERO Sports data. Twenty of those left Idaho, but only seven of them followed Eck to New Mexico. Eastern Washington lost three: safety Derek Ganter Jr. (Boise State), tight end Jett Carpenter (Nevada) and running back Tuna Altahir (Stanford).
Brennan Marion took over a Sacramento State program that lost 11 players to FBS schools, though it more than made up for that number with its 34 transfers from FBS schools.
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He said that a coach’s effectiveness should be measured by looking beyond his own program.
“Just the impact and influence you have on the players,” Marion said, “whether that be at your school or when they leave your school.”
‘We’re always going to be judged on results’
That leads to another of the criteria Best laid out and others agreed with: development of players on and off the field.
Brian Wright is entering his second season at Northern Arizona. Last year, he led the Lumberjacks to the playoffs for the first time since 2017. He said he’d like to see coaches measured by the long-term success of his players even after their playing careers are done.
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“(See) how you develop people and see where those that the person coached five, 10 years ago are at now,” he said. “They’re not all going to be playing football, but a few of them are. A lot of them are going to be dads, and a lot of them are going to be running their own businesses and being husbands. We need a metric for that.”
Yet Wright admitted also that development can only be one part of the equation.
“We’re always going to be judged on winning. We’re always going to be judged on results,” he said. “And that’s a good thing. That’s what we’re all here to do.”
Transfers have certainly changed the nature of coaching. Multiple of the league’s coaches lamented that recruiting has become a year-round enterprise, one that robs coaches — assistants and head coaches alike — of the time they used to have around Christmas and in the summer.
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But those same coaches acknowledged what Wright did: That establishing a positive culture, graduating players and developing young men has to, ultimately, lead to victories at some point.
“There’s a scoreboard for a reason,” Montana head coach Bobby Hauck said. “You’ve got to win. … We’ve always had kids with great GPAs. We’re graduating our guys. We’ve got wonderful kids on our team. But ultimately we’ve got to win games. It’s always been that way and always will.”
