Perhaps there will be a day when Will Healy can coach a college football Goliath.
Until that day, however, he will have to find various ways of challenging the 9-foot Philistines of the sport.
The former Boyd-Buchanan quarterback and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga receivers coach is in his first year as Charlotte's head coach. The 49ers of Conference USA are 2-1 so far this season but are 41-point underdogs Saturday night against top-ranked Clemson.
Healy spent the past three seasons as the head coach at Austin Peay, where he endured a 73-33 loss at No. 18 Central Florida in 2017 and opened last year with a 45-0 humbling at No. 3 Georgia. The loss to the Bulldogs, which was shortened to 55 minutes, provided lessons Healy hopes he can take into this week's matchup on the ACC Network.
"I made a mistake last year thinking that if we just lined up and played them that we were going to get our butts kicked," Healy said. "I thought we had to do some different things from motion shifts to being unbalanced to getting into different formations that they maybe haven't seen before. What you end up doing is you make your guys who are blown out of the water by the fact you're playing in front of more than 80,000 versus 18,000 - you make them think a little more, and things start getting a little faster. Then a guy jumps offsides.
"I think that being simple early is probably the better way to go, because sometimes you can build it up and make your guys even more nervous and even more scared than they should be."
Charlotte briefly had a football program in the 1940s and revived it in 2013 with Brad Lambert, who went 22-48 the past six seasons. Healy inherited an Austin Peay program that had lost 16 consecutive games and went 0-11 in his debut season in 2016, but he went 13-10 his last two years and won Football Championship Subdivision national coaching honors in 2017.
The 49ers have wins this season over Gardner Webb, 49-28, and Massachusetts, 52-17, and a 56-41 loss to Appalachian State.
The 34-year-old Healy is known for being energetic, and he became a head coach without ever having served as a coordinator, which also describes how Clemson counterpart Dabo Swinney ascended to his lofty perch. Both coaches have been described as CEO types who assemble impressive staffs, but Healy believes that's where the comparisons should end.
"I can never ever be Dabo Swinney," said Healy, who was a guest this week of "Press Row" on Chattanooga's ESPN 105.1 FM. "I went to listen to him at an FCA event we had in Charlotte, and if he had a church here, it would be the largest church in the country. He lives it every day, and that's what makes him so unique. I learned that day that I'm not near the human being as Dabo Swinney, or as good of a coach.
"If you compare the career records, we're talking multiple national titles versus someone who has 14 or 15 wins."
Healy has a lot of company when it comes to not possessing Swinney's career credentials, but he could be in the process of turning around another program. The 49ers have averaged 522.3 yards and 47.3 points per game with quarterback Chris Reynolds, who has completed 69.8% of his passes and has seven touchdowns, and running back Benny LeMay, who has averages of 117.0 yards per game and 7.6 yards a carry.
LeMay is the younger brother of former Georgia signees Christian and Uriah LeMay.
"Our running back is a really good player," Healy said. "I didn't know how good we would be at the receiver position, and we had a quarterback battle going, so to say I knew we would be averaging 47 points through three games would be a complete lie. Our offensive coordinator, Alex Atkins, was the offensive line coach at Chattanooga and left for Georgia Southern and then was at Tulane with Willie Fritz, and he's done a great job.
"Our balance has been really good, but there is no better test than playing the No. 1 team in the country."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524. Follow him on Twitter @DavidSPaschall.