There now are nearly as many Football Championship Subdivision teams – 129 – as there are Football Bowls Subdivision teams – 134 – as college football prepares for an unprecedented 2024 season with the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff atop the sport.
Meanwhile, the FCS is closing in on 50 years of playoffs and boasts a 24-team field – the sport’s model since 2013.
West Georgia is college football’s latest addition to the FCS ranks, with Joel Taylor’s debut season as a head coach coinciding with the Wolves’ climb from NCAA Division II.
As a first-year head coach at the FCS level, Taylor has plenty of company; 30 programs are kicking off the coming season with new head coaches – almost a full 25-percent of all FCS programs.
Starting today, FootballScoop is launching a brand-new, comprehensive series examining the “Fresh Faces in FCS Places” across the sport.
There are numerous coaches like Taylor, getting a first head coaching opportunity, and there are those such as ETSU’s new first-year skipper Tre Lamb, continuing to rise in the sport after engineering record-setting success in his previous stint atop the Gardner-Webb football program.
Some new coaches – such as Marist’s new leader and first-time head coach Mike Willis – bring back a majority of their rosters.
“As the dust settled,” Willis, a former Ivy League-winning player and offensive coordinator/assistant head coach at Princeton, tells FootballScoop, “we had just over 70 players interested in being back at Marist.
“I like to carry roster of approximately 110 players, with the 120 number now the limit at the Division I level per the NCAA.”
Bobby Wilder, who knows quite a bit about launching a major-college football program from his work lifting Old Dominion off the ground in its infancy, is seeking to make a consistent winner of Tennessee Tech – which enters the Wilder era without back-to-back winning seasons since 2000-01.
While much of one of the Ohio Valley Conference’s top defensive units returns, Wilder is nearing the onset of fall camp carrying a roster with considerable infusions from the NCAA Transfer Portal.
“I’m going to say something to you that might shock you,” Wilder says. “The Transfer Portal has been really good for Tennessee Tech. It’s been our friend. We signed 14 transfer players in January and just signed 18 more in May. We’ve got 25 high school players reporting July 30. So, when you look at the roster, 56 players are returning and 57 are new.
“The No. 1 thing was coming in and having a blueprint and a plan to present to our president (Phil Oldham) and our A.D. (Mark Wilson) for the budget and the program. We now have, as far as the data I’ve found from the Big South and OVC, we now have the highest-paid coaching staff in the league. The support has been tremendous.”
Likewise, Lamb is preparing for his first season at ETSU with a roster long on newcomers but hardly shirking expectations. He’s steering the Bucs ship after posting 14 wins, ruling the Big South and twice advancing to the FCS Playoffs in his final two seasons at Gardner-Webb.
ETSU has 42 new scholarship players, 35 of them on campus seven months after arriving in January.
“The biggest advantage because we got hired so early, late November early December, was that we were able to spend almost two months getting kids enrolled,” says Lamb, already with a notable coaching tree and who doesn’t turn 35 until September. “Our administrative office really busted their tails to get that done and help us out.
“Having them here for spring practice was absolutely huge.”
New head coaches, year after year, are now as much a part of college football as two-a-day practices from years gone by and omnipresent discussions of Name, Image and Likeness, Transfer Portal and revenue sharing in today’s game.
In the coming weeks, FootballScoop will continue taking readers inside those programs – at both the FBS and FCS levels with this new series.
Able to recruit really good coaches. Four guys with me at ODU are here. Got guys on staff that were on defensive side last year, here.