When Jimmy Rogers leads Washington State onto the field at around 6:53pm on Saturday, he will become roughly the 21st head coach to make the leap from FCS football head coach straight to an FBS football head coach job since the 2012 season. He will join Mike Uremovich, Scott Abbell, Tre Lamb and Jason Eck as this year’s class of head coaches also making the transition. Uremovich moves from Butler to Ball State, Abbell from Davidson to Rice, Lamb from East Tennessee to Tulsa and Eck from Idaho to New
Mexico.
Of this group of about 26 coaches since 2012, Rogers will be one of the youngest at 37 years old, with the average age of coaches who make the jump being nearly 47. He also enters with the second shortest tenure as a head coach, having only led the Jackrabbits for two seasons compared to the average of about seven seasons for most coaches. Bill Clark left Jacksonville State for UAB after his first season as the head coach.
Notable names in today’s college football landscape are a part of this group. Last Saturday marked Chris Klieman’s seventh season at Kansas State. He led Rogers’ former rival North Dakota State Bison to four FCS national championships in his five seasons in Fargo, North Dakota. He’s continued that success at K-State with a Big 12 title in his fourth year and back-to-back nine-win seasons the last two years.
Over in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Chris Creighton enters his 12th season as the head coach at Eastern Michigan. After some early struggles, winning just three games in his first two seasons, he’s built EMU into a respectable MAC program. Excluding the 2020 season, the Eagles have won an average of 6.5 games between Creighton’s third and 11th seasons. Before Creighton, the Eagles had only won 6 games once in the last 17 seasons.
This is what you envision when you hire a coach. Somebody who builds your program up, finds a consistent level of success, and sticks around for years. But it isn’t always this easy or common.
On average, between 2012-2019, the coaches who were hired from FCS schools lasted about five seasons. Some like Creighton and Klieman are still around; some, like Clark and Craig Bohl, retired after long successful tenures; others didn’t even get to see the freshmen they recruited go through senior night.
Of the 20 coaches to make the jump since 2012, five were fired before they even reached their fifth season. Only one of them even got their team to bowl eligibility in their short tenures. Trent Miles took Georgia State to the Cure Bowl in his and Georgia State’s third year at the FBS level.
Now not all FBS opportunities are created equal. When Dino Babers took over Bowling Green, he inherited a program fresh off a 10 win season after Dave Clawson left for Wake Forest. He was able to just roll that success into two more great years, and it landed him a job at Syracuse. The average amount of wins prior to an FCS coach taking over since 2012 is 4.5. This isn’t counting Trent Miles taking over at Georgia State and Willie Fritz at Georgia Southern as those programs were entering their first years at the FBS level.
Looking into the 18 coaches’ first year at the FBS level, eight led their teams to more wins than the year prior, seven won less, and three won the same amount. Of course, some of these had a low bar of 1 or 2 wins, while others had the near-impossible task of winning more than 10 or 11.
But only three of these coaches took over Power Five programs. Klieman at K-State, Deion Sanders at Colorado and Troy Taylor at Stanford. Klieman and Sanders still have their jobs and have both seen progressive success, while Taylor was canned after two seasons. Rogers will become the fourth on Saturday.
Rogers case is an anomaly. He takes over a program that won eight games last year, yet it still left Cougar fans believing they underachieved. This year, Rogers faces a much different beast of a schedule. The Cougars will travel over 8,000 miles this year, the fourth most in the country behind Hawai’i and two schools that choose to do this almost annually, Stanford and Oregon. After the Apple Cup on September 20th, WSU won’t take Gesa Field in front of the home faithful for over a month when they host Toledo on October 25th. He doesn’t even get to scout out how to attack his conference foes in the future like almost every other coach to take a new job, as the Cougars only play Oregon State. (twice!) And this is also only his third season as a program leader. All in all, this is about as rough of a landing for Rogers as you could get. But, in this wicked storm, calm waters can be seen ahead. In Rogers second year, WSU won’t have to travel across the country; they’ll play in a comfortable, fairly local conference schedule. Rogers second year could serve as a launchpad into an even more successful third season, when most coaches begin to truly hit their stride.
Of the 14 coaches to make the leap and stick around for their third season, 12 had their best season to date in their third season.
It’s not wild to believe that Rogers can be one of the next greats to come straight from the FCS ranks. What Rogers does bring is a brief but wildly successful resume. In his first year as a head coach, he reached the summit of FCS football, winning the national championship with the South Dakota State Jackrabbits. In his second year, he brought the Jackrabbits to the doorstep of another but ultimately fell short in the semi-finals to the eventual champions, North Dakota State.
The only coaches since 2012 to move straight from FCS to FBS who share that level of success are Bohl, Klieman, and Mike Houston. Bohl and Klieman both led North Dakota State to national championships and then turned that into successful careers at the FBS level. Bohl retired after 10 seasons of leading the Wyoming Cowboys, winning at least six games or more between his third and 10th years, excluding 2020. After taking James Madison to an FCS championship, Houston spent five and a half seasons with the East Carolina Pirates, achieving two winning seasons in that time before being fired mid-season in 2024.
Rogers has the opportunity to become one of the next greats out of the FCS ranks. With a championship pedigree and what history tells us about the level of coaches who bring that type of resume with them to the FBS, Rogers could be in Pullman for a long time should he choose to.
