Before Spence Nowinsky built college football’s stingiest defense, he was running through airports, inspecting storage tanks and checking gas dispensers for leaks.
Football had spit him out.
After a coaching change at Idaho left Nowinsky without a job, the former Minnesota State defensive lineman took work with a compliance company servicing the oil industry. The money was good. The football prospects weren’t.
Then came a chance to get back in.
“I think I took a $150,000 haircut to go coach football again.”
More than two decades later, that decision looks like one hell of an investment.
Nowinsky is the architect of a New Mexico defense allowing a meager 10.89 points per game, the backbone
of one of college football’s most improbable transformations under Jason Eck. The Lobos have won 17 of Eck’s first 22 games, including 14 of their past 16, and cracked the US LBM Coaches and AP polls for the first time in school history.
Getting from the oil industry to Albuquerque, though, requires more than an atlas.
The story traces almost 1,200 miles northeast, far closer to International Falls than New Mexico, to Mankato, Minnesota.
There, at Minnesota State, the threads connecting Eck, Nowinsky and Lobos offensive coordinator Luke Schleusner began forming at different times, on different paths, before ultimately converging in Albuquerque.
The plucky NCAA Division II football program is playing a disproportionate role in college football across the country this season, but especially at New Mexico, where Eck, who might be the hottest name in college football coaching circles right now, drives lowriders, fraternizes with fans as an everyman and suddenly sells out University Stadium.
A former Wisconsin lineman, Eck does all of this with a modest operating budget, a different athletic director than the one who hired him two years ago and an unrelenting, uncompromising defense.
Enter Nowinsky.
He arrived to find one of the nation’s leakiest defenses, the No. 130 scoring unit in 2024. He helped reduce that figure to 22 points per game a year ago, then nearly halved it to claim the nation’s top spot through the first 10 weeks of this season.
It’s a remarkable rise for a coach who once ran contracts for oil rigs in the nascent days of his yet-to-lift-off career and now operates college football’s stingiest defense.
“It wasn’t on the patch and that type of thing, I worked for a compliance company, above ground and below ground checking storage tanks, is it leaking, are your gas dispensers in proper working condition," the barrel-chested Nowinsky says. "I literally traveled every single day, running through airports catching planes. It was ridiculous but I got an opportunity to then go back to Mankato and work."
A football lifer with high school coaching roots in addition to oil-rig boots, Nowinsky now is the coordinator sticking by Eck even as larger programs inquire about his defensive services.
Not unlike, Eck notes, the Lobos’ defensive players.
Opponents have scored just 11 touchdowns across 36 quarters against Nowinsky’s Lobos.
The unit returned some of the nation’s most experienced production this season, including coach’s son and linebacker Jaxton Eck, along with safeties Austin Brawley and Tavian Combs. Mercury Swaim and Darren Agu, returners in the front seven, have combined for 19.5 tackles for loss and 11 quarterback pressures.
One man, above any one dollar, is a big reason why.
“We were able to retain all of our key defensive players from the 2025 season even though many of them could've made more money going into the transfer portal,” Eck says. “(Spence) has a very aggressive scheme that features a lot of movement and makes offenses play slow. It appears very complex to the offense, but he has simplified the teaching so that our players play very fast and there are not many busts.
“Spence has a unique knack to coach guys extremely hard while also keeping things light and fun. He pushes his guys, but they know he really cares about them.”
None of this is new in football circles.
Earlier this decade, Nowinsky engineered a 90-spot climb while running Ohio University’s defense, taking a unit that yielded 30.3 points per game and cutting that figure to 15.8 two years later. In his lone season at Memphis, alongside coach Ryan Silverfield’s up-tempo offense, the Tigers cut five points per game and climbed 40 spots in the scoring-defense rankings.
“I don’t talk very good, I really don’t; I’m not the most eloquent speaker of unacceptable language,” says self-effacing Nowinsky, whose highest-profile program stop came during a G.A. stint at Wisconsin that also serves as the origin story of his relationship with Eck. “I heat ’em up every day, but I hug ’em.
“There’s so many kids today that don’t have relationships with their families or their parents passed away or parent was never present. Now, I’m a dad figure. Used to be a big-brother figure. Brawley, who won the Bronko Nagurski Defensive Player of the Week earlier this season, has had some tough, tough times. And I’m probably closer to him than anybody. Recruited him at Ohio, got him to come over here. He gets that pick-6, I’m kissing him on his face.”
The love is as real as the results. Nowinsky doesn’t expect outsiders to understand it.
“We have errors and mishaps and guess what? We’re going to face them," he said. "Kids appreciate that I’m consistent like that. It can’t be tanning leather nonstop. Football is a tough game played by tough people but there has to be some levity.
“It's a big, dysfunctional family but our family and we make it work. I didn’t leave this past year because, No. 1, I believe in Jason Eck. You get to a certain point, you love coaching football and just want to be around good dudes. These guys keep me young. Yeah, we’re dysfunctional. But we’re family.”
From Minnesota’s lakes to New Mexico’s mesas.
From oil fields to football fields.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: His days on oil rigs are done. Spence Nowinsky strikes it rich with New Mexico football
