Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer went from NAIA to the big time. Why don’t more lower-level coaches?

Lance Leipold was in Nashville, Tenn., for the 2024 American Football Coaches Association Convention with his wife, Kelly, when he remembered he needed to fire off a text message to an old friend before the handshakes and small talk could make him forget. It was Jan. 7, the first night of the annual gathering, and Kansas’ head coach knew the next day would be the biggest of Kalen DeBoer’s coaching life, so he sent him good luck wishes.

DeBoer was leading the undefeated Washington Huskies against the undefeated Michigan Wolverines in the national championship game in Houston. Amid the schmoozing, Kelly reminded her husband that there was a time when Leipold, DeBoer and now-Kansas State head coach Chris Klieman would attend and weren’t necessarily part of the establishment.

“We used to be at these AFCA banquets, and the three of us would just stand in the corner and none of the big-time coaches would talk to us,” Leipold said.

Before DeBoer thrust himself onto the national stage with the memorable run to the title game with the Huskies and before Leipold and Klieman went on to lead rival programs in Kansas and K-State, the trio cut its teeth in the lower-division levels of college football at places many FBS football fans have never heard of.

Like the University of Sioux Falls.

Or University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Or Loras College.

Congratulations to former @USFCougarsFB coach @KalenDeBoer on accepting the head coach position for @AlabamaFTBL !🐾#GoCoo | #CooPride pic.twitter.com/r6u0s4VxzT

— USF Cougars (@USFCougars_) January 12, 2024

Their translation of success from the NCAA Division III and NAIA levels to major college football has led to the question: Why aren’t there more of them? Head coaches with extensive experience at the lower levels below the FCS are often viewed as less appealing hires because of their perceived lack of familiarity with the FBS level. If they’re not a known commodity, questions hover around their ability to continue to win at the highest levels.

For much of the past decade, prominent hiring practices have been to opt for the rising assistant coach with no previous head-coaching experience at a blue-blood program who got started as a Division I graduate assistant or quality control coach before launching himself up the rungs of power.

Two decades before DeBoer’s Huskies were the tantalizing offensive showcase of 2023, he was leading his alma mater, the Sioux Falls Cougars, up the ranks of NAIA. DeBoer won three NAIA national titles. He coached in a stadium with a 5,000-seat capacity, took lengthy bus rides to games and speckled his coaching staff with eventual rising stars like Ryan Grubb, who worked a manual labor full-time job before joining him.

After Michigan beat Washington in the title game, DeBoer became the successor to legendary Alabama coach Nick Saban. Leipold and Klieman, thanks to their own accomplishments, were targets for other top-tier openings this winter but opted to stay put.

Despite the examples of success, coaches and administrators who spoke to The Athletic believe it’s still not athletic directors’ preferred route to go in search of and hire a head coach who has won at lower levels.

“If an administrator has cut their teeth at the upper levels of Division I or whatever, they don’t understand what Division III and NAIA is,” Leipold said. “They view them more like high school coaches, which is really unfortunate.”

There have been 15 coaches hired at the Power 5 level since 2000 who once were head coaches at a lower level than the FCS, and their combined record since becoming part of the P5 is 582-434 (.572).

LSU’s Brian Kelly was once in charge of Division II Grand Valley State, where he went 118-35-2 from 1991 to 2003. Willie Fritz, who left Tulane for the Houston job this offseason, was 97-47 at Division II Central Missouri State from 1997 to 2009. Curt Cignetti, who spent six seasons at Division II Indiana University of Pennsylvania, continued James Madison’s dominance at the FCS level before the Dukes transitioned to FBS play in 2022. He became Big Ten basement-dweller Indiana’s head coach this offseason.

One athletic director, who spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity, said administrators are often obsessed with “winning the press conference,” which often coincides with potentially pleasing a booster base desperate to win. It’s harder, the AD said, to go out and convince supporters that a coach they maybe have never heard of is the right guy for the job compared with a coach who already has established cachet in the coaching realm.

The risk-reward calculation plays a larger role in lower-division coaches not getting more chances at the D-I level, according to former Minnesota and New Mexico State coach Jerry Kill. The outspoken 62-year-old is an assistant at Vanderbilt and said while he applauds the jobs that DeBoer, Leipold, Klieman, Fritz and others have done in recent years, he believes administrators are going to generally balk at the idea of going with someone who isn’t a household name.

DeBoer bounced around at various levels of D-I football as an assistant and coordinator and waited 10 years before he would become a head coach again, this time at Fresno State in 2020.

After one year as head coach at D-III Loras in Dubuque, Iowa, Klieman also waited a decade to become a head coach again at North Dakota State in the FCS.

Leipold, who won six D-III titles at Wisconsin-Whitewater, was hired at Buffalo in 2015 and spent five seasons there before taking over a Kansas program in 2021 that hadn’t had a winning season since 2008.

“There is a reassurance of sorts with three or four guys, but hey, let’s face it: If you get to a certain age, that’s not the normal trend,” Kill said. “But really everyone is hiring the 38-year-old cute guys that have never made (expletive) $250 a month and some of them haven’t even been GAs.”

Before Kill got to Minnesota in 2011, he went 38-14 at Division II Saginaw Valley State and later went 55-32 at FCS Southern Illinois. Beyond swimming upstream against the current, Kill believes the combination of age and coaching at the lower levels is an immediate turnoff to many folks in athletic departments during the hiring process.

Maybe the trio that once stood together in the corner at the AFCA Convention is the exception. Leipold is 59, while Klieman is 56 and DeBoer is 49.

“There’s a real stigma,” Kill said. “You turn a certain age, you’re not getting hired. They’re still gonna hire the 38-year-old kid that’s never been a head coach, and the reason they’re doing that is because they think they can relate to the players better, and that’s (expletive), too.”

In December 2018, Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor was tasked with replacing the legendary Bill Snyder, who coached 27 seasons in Manhattan. Taylor eventually went with his gut and went with a coach he knew from their time working together at NDSU, where he was AD from 2001 to 2014. Klieman won four FCS national championships with the Bison from 2014 to 2018.

But what stood out to Taylor during that process was the search firm the university hired did bring forth various levels of candidates. Taylor said the mining that firms are now doing goes well beyond the usual candidates like existing head coaches or Power 5 coordinators in the region closest to the school. Names at schools he’d never heard of were brought to his attention, which he viewed as a positive.

“Sometimes in this business, whether it’s an AD or someone else, we tend to typecast. We go, ‘Oh, God, they can’t coach at this level if they’ve never been at this level,’” Taylor said. “They think, ‘I’ve got to have a coordinator from a P5 or a sitting head coach somewhere,’ but there’s lots of talented coaches at lower levels. Sometimes you just need to take a chance.”

And if that chance doesn’t come as soon as one would like, sometimes you have to chart your own path. Leipold remembers that despite his dominance at Wisconsin-Whitewater (the program went 109-6) and despite being just 90 minutes away from one of the better MAC jobs in the country in Northern Illinois, he was never a candidate when the job opened.

“Couldn’t get a sniff,” he said, laughing. “I had to go out to the furthest job east at Buffalo to get the next one.”

Establishing a consistent winning program at the lower levels for an extended period of time made the jump to a major conference level simpler for these staffs. DeBoer said continuity allowed him to learn how to delineate power within his programs and not stress out about offensive installations in spring ball or strength and conditioning plans.

Grubb, who after two decades working with DeBoer took the offensive coordinator position with the Seattle Seahawks this offseason, said when you have less to work with, you have to become a better teacher of your scheme. And you earn a legit dose of perspective.

“At the lower levels, you have to have that ability to both adapt and always be thinking ahead,” Grubb said.

DeBoer hired Grubb in the summer of 2007 when Grubb was waiting for his big break while pouring concrete full time and living in his sister’s laundry room. Kill worked both as an assistant and in the financial aid department when he was at Pittsburg State. While at Wisconsin-Whitewater, some of Leipold’s staffers also doubled as course teachers at the school.

“I don’t know if any of us are particularly great interviews or have great catchphrases, do we?” Leipold said. “We’re not (Lane) Kiffin, Deion (Sanders) or Dabo (Swinney) or James Franklin. We didn’t have a bunch of cameras around us right after practice. We’ve learned you’re as good as you are this week, and the next week you’ll be evaluated.”

A crucial component, too, coaches said, is maintaining members of your staff as you move up the college football food chain. DeBoer calls it a “championship substance.” As they bounced around from job to job, DeBoer, Leipold and Klieman kept their assistants with them to help the transition.

“Instead of going out and getting Division I guys, I took guys that understood who I was,” Kill said. “If you can coach, you can coach.”

Next year’s AFCA Convention is scheduled to be held in Charlotte, N.C., the second weekend in January. With DeBoer in Tuscaloosa and the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams, there’s a chance the trio that once huddled in the corner will again be missing some members. And the corner might be filled with lower-level coaches waiting for their big breaks.

(Photos of Brian Kelly, Lance Leipold and Kalen DeBoer: Stephen Lew, Jay Biggerstaff and Kirby Lee / USA Today)