Skip Holtz is nearing his 40th season as a coach, and, as the son of College Football Hall of Famer Lou Holtz, has been involved in the game his entire life. And at the age of 60, in his 11th job, he has found his place in the coaching profession. Or, perhaps more accurately, his place has found him.
Because over the weekend, Holtz established himself as the architect of the ongoing greatest dynasty in professional tackle football.
His Birmingham Stallions defeated Wade Phillips's San Antonio Brahmas to win the inaugural championship of the United Football League.
The UFL formed this season after the merger of the XFL and the USFL, which Holtz's Stallions won in both seasons of its revived existence.
Overall, Holtz is 32-4 as head coach of the Stallions -- 26-4 in the regular season (9-1 this spring/summer) and a perfect 6-0 in the playoffs. Birmingham blanked San Antonio 25-0 on Sunday, and won the title behind its third different starting quarterback in as many seasons.
“It has been an incredibly rewarding experience for me and a true blessing from God to give me the opportunity to be here,” Holtz said, via AL.com, “and I’m grateful to (Daryl) ‘Moose’ (Johnston), Jim Popp and everybody with the UFL, the USFL, the people that originally put me in place.
Domination of spring football was certainly not on Holtz's vision board when he first landed a job as a GA on Bobby Bowden's Florida State staff back in 1987. He was Notre Dame's offensive coordinator by age 28 and UConn's head coach at 30. Holtz led the Huskies to the FCS quarterfinals in his fifth season on the job, then became the offensive coordinator and assistant head coach on his father's South Carolina staff in 1999.
That led to the head coaching job at East Carolina in 2005, where he won back-to-back Conference USA championships in 2008-09. He took a step up to South Florida, then a member of the Big East, in 2010, where he lasted three unsuccessful seasons. Holtz then landed at Louisiana Tech in 2013, where he won three C-USA West championships and reached seven consecutive bowl games (with six wins), in nine seasons.
His Ruston run concluded in 2021, and he opened a new, most successful and most unexpected chapter just months later in Birmingham.
And now Skip Holtz's Birmingham Stallions are not only the only back-to-back-to-back champions going in professional or major college football, they're a living example of the coaching cliche that failure is never fatal.
“As somebody wrote in an article earlier, I’m just a fired football coach – you know what I mean? – just trying to win a game.”
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.