The middle of February isn’t an ideal time to be looking for assistant football coaches. Not with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s spring practice set to begin in 11 days.
Regardless, Mocs coach Russ Huesman is looking for a running backs coach to replace Jason McManus and could be looking for a defensive line coach by the end of the week. Huesman said that Jimmy Lindsey, who has been on the staff less than two weeks, interviewed Tuesday for a job at Vanderbilt.
Lindsey, a former Mocs linebacker, came from UT-Martin on Feb. 5.
“I hope Jimmy doesn’t leave, but it happens in this profession,” Huesman said. “The bottom line is people want to take care of their families and move up in the profession, and I really don’t fault him for looking, because they did approach him.”
Staff turnover is a challenge throughout Division I college football, especially at the FCS level where budgets are so limited. Even though Lindsey just returned to his alma mater, he’d likely double his salary by accepting the same job at Vanderbilt.
This offseason, Huesman already has had three of the 10 assistant positions come open. Staff turnover was a consistent problem during Rodney Allison’s tenure as head coach. In his six years at UTC, Allison had more than 24 assistant coaches.
Huesman said turnover is inevitable, but the key is keeping the coordinators in place for as long as possible.
“We’ve retained a lot of good coaches, and obviously retaining the coordinators, that’s huge,” he said. “It’s going to be a little crunch if we lose Jimmy to get somebody going, but we’ll work it out.”
It has been a week since McManus resigned, and in that time Huesman has received dozens of calls, e-mails and resumes. He said he expected to bring one or two candidates in to interview for the running backs job by the end of the week. Spring practice begins on Feb. 28.