A Craigslist ad led to kickboxing, and an unclear path forward uncorked an uncertain journey into the future.
Taylor Housewright, who “had known since middle school I wanted to be a coach,” found his trail to an ascending college coaching career sitting on a friend’s couch, in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, after a harried, closing shift as a manager at a Charlotte, North Carolina-area restaurant and with a couple strangers in his friends’ shared apartment.
“I grew up boxing, and I had moved to Charlotte with some friends but didn’t have a job,” said Housewright, who also played under Matt LaFleur -- yes the Green Bay Packers' head coach -- at Ashland. “They were basically letting me live in their closet, and I found that job on a Craigslist ad.
“Then I walked into this bar, figured I’d apply to be a bus boy and they ended up offering me their front-house manager job. Did that for about three months, usually got to bed at like 4 or 5 on Sunday mornings after closing down the restaurant, counting the money and everything.”
It was a fine routine right up until one of the five offensive coordinators Housewright had learned under while starring as quarterback at Ashland University, an NCAA Division II school in his native Ohio, disturbed his Sunday morning slumber.
Miami (OH) had just moved on from head coach Don Treadwell.
“Mike Bath, who was my offensive coordinator for a year, called me at 8 a.m., and said this is your chance to get into coaching, but you have to be here by practice Monday,” Housewright recalled. “That’s about a 10-hour drive, but I drove straight to Oxford, Ohio, and the next morning, I’m waking up in Mike Bath’s basement at 5:30 and on the practice field that afternoon.”
Six days later, Housewright was in charge of substitutions in his debut on a college staff – inside the New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium against UMass.
And a decade henceforth, Housewright has been on sidelines and in coaches boxes ranging from some of the sport’s most iconic venues – via stops on staffs at Southeastern Conference resident Mississippi State and Pac-12 power Oregon – to his present post, coordinating the offense at Football Championship Subdivision powerhouse Montana State.
The No. 4-seed Bobcats host Weber State Saturday afternoon in the second round of the FCS Playoffs.
They do so with Housewright, who also coaches quarterbacks, orchestrating the division’s No. 3 scoring offense, 45 points per game, and No. 2 rushing offense, 325.7 ypg.
“I think first and foremost, I want to have a system -- and I attribute a lot of the terminology to Coach (Joe) Moorhead and what he has used – that is easily learned so that if we do have freshmen, if we do have transfers, it makes sense right away and it all plays off of each other,” said Housewright, who worked with Moorhead at both State and Oregon and has helped the Bobcats to a 22-4 ledger in his first two seasons as offensive coordinator.
While Housewright spends countless hours each week working to make everything from the practice field to the game plan as easy as possible on his players, nothing about the career arc of the former 2012 AFCA NCAA DII All-American’s own path has been simple.
After being enticed into the sudden transition to coaching from his former play-caller with the promise of a salary and the hope of staying on full-time, neither happened – through no fault of Bath’s.
Though Housewright was able to spend the 2014 campaign as a defensive graduate assistant at Miami, working with the RedHawks’ defensive backs, the end of that season brought more uncertainty.
Ultimately, he latched on at Wittenberg coaching wide receivers. Housewright returned home, to Ashland, as the program’s wide receivers coach in 2016 – but it was a salary-restricted post.
So in 2017 he again worked with the secondary.
But those circuits on both sides of the ball helped shape the coach that Housewright is today. And it was crossing paths with second-year Montana State head coach Brent Vigen during their shared 2018 season at Wyoming that brought about their Bozeman, Montana, reunion.
“Coach Vigen trusted me,” said Housewright, whose wife, Geri, is a former college soccer coach who has transitioned into a booming commercial insurance career. “I give Coach everything.
“He let me call it last year and this year. He lets me make my own mistakes and all that. That takes a lot of faith on his end.”
Housewright has rewarded Vigen’s faith by deploying an offense capable of imposing its will upon the opposition on the ground – six Bobcats have 250 or more rushing yards – as well as an aerial attack that has victimized teams with downfield shots. A half-dozen MSU players have notched double-digit receptions on the season; nine players have caught passes for 27 or more yards.
“It starts with running; we have to run the football,” Housewright said. “How can we get that done? The passing game plays off of that. We want to mix it up, run sprint-outs, nakeds, work our quick game and drop back. I think the drop-back passing game is the hardest thing to do in college. But we want to mix it up and not have the same launch point every time for our quarterback. It’s details, timing and spacing and it’s like a ballet when it comes together.”
Housewright’s coming back together with Vigen was a “no-brainer” for Vigen as he assumed the mantle for his first head-coaching post.
“I think in taking on this role of head coach, I want to be head coach,” Vigen said last year. “I want to have guys on either side that I trust to run not only rooms but to lead those men.
“The experience I had with Taylor was back in ‘18 while at Wyoming together, and then he worked with Coach Moorhead both at Oregon and Mississippi State.”
One area where Vigen and Housewright meshed to fortify the Bobcats’ roster and augment depth has been their approach on the practice field.
“We double-rep, which a lot of people in the country don’t do,” Housewright, who at Ashland under venerable defensive coordinator Tim Rose played 22 men on defense, said. “Nebraska did it in the 1990s, and sometimes I think a lot of coaches worry about the wrong things. It’s about playing football. We’re going to play more football and get in those situations, watch more film and teach more [with the double-repping].
“In spring ball, for example, we have a team period, we split up coaches. We’ll have a 40-play team period. We split our coaches in 1s and 3s, 2s and 4s going every four reps. Everybody in our program gets reps. Guys are getting the same reps, running the same team scripts, both sides, and we spend a lot of time watching tape and everybody is growing and getting reps.”
It’s the same for Housewright, who’s come a long way from sleeping on couches and in closets to emerge as one of college football’s top young play-callers.