The bloom is back on the rose for Will Healy as a college football head coach.
Healy, the former Boyd Buchanan state championship quarterback and former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga offensive assistant under Russ Huesman, was once a youthful, rapidly rising star in the profession, earning Football Championship Subdivision national coach of the year in 2017 for taking Austin Peay to an 8-4 record after an 0-11 mark the year before in his first season with the Governors.
He would parlay the turnaround in Clarksville into a Football Bowl Subdivision opportunity at Charlotte, where his first team in 2019 posted a 7-5 regular season to earn the first bowl trip in school history. His 49ers opened the 2021 season by defeating Duke 31-28, which remains their only triumph over a power conference program, but his 2022 team started 1-7 and possessed the worst defense in the FBS, surrendering 523.5 yards and 43.3 points per game.
In late October of that year, Healy found himself unemployed for the first time.
“You go through the stage of not necessarily depression but denial,” said Healy, who would spend the 2023 season as a senior offensive analyst under Gus Malzahn at UCF and worked this past year as Georgia State’s running backs coach. “You think how it was everybody else’s fault but yours and, ‘If they had just let me do this’ — all the things that you try to justify to where you were always right, and I probably lived in that world for a little over a year.