In search of stability and loyalty, Nevada turns to Jeff Choate
The Wolf Pack feel good about Choate, but are they willing to invest in him?
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
It’s hard to imagine an FBS program with a more dispiriting last two years than Nevada. The best counterargument is probably Kent State, which had a fine 2022 but lost HC Sean Lewis to Deion Sanders’ Colorado staff and then cratered to an FBS-worst 1-11 finish—but at least they had a solid season before collapsing last year. The Wolf Pack’s company at 2-10 could all make a case as well: Vanderbilt’s rebuild under Clark Lea took a firm step back after a promising year two, Terry Bowden’s encouraging efforts at ULM fizzled out with a series of agonizing close losses, Akron made no meaningful promise in Joe Moorhead’s second season, and East Carolina spiralled after losing Keaton Mitchell and Holton Ahlers before inexplicably keeping lame-duck coach Mike Houston for 2024.
None of those programs are in great places, but at least they have some level of stability to point to. Each has had either one or two coaches across this span, including the upcoming season. The frustration of losing an HC to another job, like what Kent State experienced, and the letdown of firing one who isn’t going anywhere, like what ULM went through, are both tough, but they happen. There’s a clear path forward for both programs—it’s far too early to judge Kenni Burns’ efforts at Kent State, and ULM moved forward with a great hire to replace Bowden (more on that next week).
Nevada, though, has suffered both in just two years. After 2021, his fourth straight winning season with the Wolf Pack, Jay Norvell abruptly departed for conference rival Colorado State, taking over the dumpster fire left behind by Steve Addazio. Nevada responded by promoting Ken Wilson, a longtime former assistant, after he helped lead Oregon’s defense to a, uh…16-spot drop in points allowed per game during his lone season as co-DC in 2011. Perhaps predictably, while a feel-good move for a program that direly needed one, this didn’t work out; the Wolf Pack went 2-10 in back-to-back seasons and fired Wilson about as soon as they reasonably could. The most encouraging thing Nevada has to point to is, honestly, probably Norvell struggling to get CSU off the ground. At least they’ve got schadenfreude.
Even this hire isn’t the most immediately exciting. The Wolf Pack completely disregarded the common mantra of making a hire that’s distinct from the guy you just fired; like Wilson, Jeff Choate arrives following a brief stint as a co-DC for a high-flying P5 program, in this case Texas. In his defense, he found a lot more success in that job than Wilson did in his—in many ways, you could argue he’s the reason the Longhorns finally made the CFP, propelling their defense from 99th to 15th in points per game while the offense barely changed during his tenure. That’s to say nothing of his performance at Montana State (2016-19), when he coached the Bobcats from the basement of the Big Sky to the FCS semifinals in just four seasons. And if Nevada is willing to risk the ire of their fanbase with such a stylistic retread from the athletic department, they clearly think a lot of Choate.
So are they…y’know, right? Who is this guy, anyway?
That’s an understandable reaction, because it feels like Choate isn’t a particularly well-known name within coaching circles. There’s no particular reason he shouldn’t be, considering comparable candidates like GJ Kinne (UCF co-OC 2021, Incarnate Word HC 2022) and Troy Taylor (Utah OC 2017-18, Sacramento State HC 2019-22) were getting their flowers in the 2023 carousel before taking jobs with Texas State and Stanford, respectively. Maybe it has to do with defensive coordinators being overlooked—even Ryan Walters, who took Illinois to an FBS-best finish in scoring defense for the first time since 1910, didn’t have a whole lot of buzz before Purdue hired him in the same cycle. But at the very least, it feels like Choate should’ve been a name to know, especially given how much Texas was able to accomplish because of the defensive turnaround he helped orchestrate.
Part of the reason he’s flown under the radar seems to be by his own design. In writing on Charlotte’s hire of Biff Poggi last year, I discussed how you can never really know that a college football coach is who they claim to be1, but Choate is one of those who, at the very least, pays lip service to the notion of caring about student-athletes. Up to this point, his biggest moment in the spotlight was a 2020 interview with The Athletic in which he denounced the NCAA’s handling of COVID-19, describing them as “bullied by the Power 5” and condemning the way his Montana State players had been left in limbo for months while the association made up its mind about whether they would sponsor the FCS championship that season. At worst, he came off as a guy who understands what journalists, fans, and recruits want to hear from their coach; at best, as a guy who genuinely cares about the people who play for him, which is a rare thing in this business.
It’s something Nevada could certainly use. The sting of Norvell leaving them in the lurch, stealing talent from the program and jumping to a cross-conference rival, is still keenly felt in Reno, part of the reason they chose Wilson as his successor. Choate might not have ties to the program, but he vocally preaches the need for his athletes to trust their coaches and one another, no matter the stage he’s on.
If the Wolf Pack were reluctant to shift their strategy despite Wilson’s failure to launch, this is why: they believe the underlying process, the need for a coach who puts his players above everything else, was sound. They’ve put more thought into the football side of things, but the athletic department still sees trust and loyalty as a necessary foundation above all else. Whether Choate can reach the same heights as Norvell remains to be seen, but the Nevada feels confident that if he does, it won’t be the fleeting success of his predecessor. Given their recent history, it’s hard to blame them from hoping for something that’ll last.
The Last Five Years
The Norvell era feels like an eternity ago. Nevada probably peaked in 2020, when they went 7-2 and would’ve had a shot at the Mountain West Championship Game if not for both San José State and Boise State going undefeated—though the season-opening win against California in 2021 was a great moment too. The Wolf Pack actually found themselves in the TERSE top 25 for a single week after that victory, and they finished the season having spent its entirety in the top half of FBS. Things were good.
Then Norvell left, prompting an immediate and disastrous collapse. Nevada fell to the bottom ten by Week 7 of 2022 and has yet to escape for a single week. The Wolf Pack ended last season as the second-to-worst team in FBS, only beating out that one-win Kent State team. Even finishing 132nd of 133 teams was, frankly, pretty surprising given how the first half of the year went—they started 2023 with six straight losses, including a 33-6 humiliation at the hands of FCS Idaho, and looked unlikely to finish better than 0-12. Rather remarkably, they then won consecutive games against SDSU and New Mexico, two underwhelming but hardly terrible teams that finished the season 4-8. Whatever spark Nevada found quickly vanished, though, and they closed out the year with four more losses by double digits. There’s a lot of work to be done.
The Next Five Years
It won’t surprise anybody if 2024 is another extremely tough season. It’ll be a lot more fascinating to see how much Nevada invests in Choate and in football in general, a point of concern that they mostly kicked down the road during Wilson’s time here. There’s a lot to be said about loyalty, but ultimately, Norvell went to CSU because they were willing to offer him a salary over $1 million higher than the one he had at Nevada (even after multiple winning seasons). The Wolf Pack are faltering financially, and they’re falling further behind given their lacking facilities and NIL collective as college football moves further into a new era.
This hire is a chance to wipe the slate clean. The last few years have put into perspective how much Nevada needs to do, and they’ll still be behind if and when they start putting up serious money, but it’s better to start late than never. And given that the Choate hire feels like a more fully-thought-through version of the Wilson hire, it’s not unreasonable to assume the Wolf Pack are at least thinking about taking the necessary steps to contend going forward.
Barring further disaster, Choate is one of the 2023 hires I’m most confident will still be here in five seasons. He’s a proven program builder from his time at Montana State, and the biggest question standing between him and success isn’t about his coaching ability, it’s about whether Nevada will support him the way it needs to. In any case, it seems pretty obvious that they understand another short tenure wouldn’t help matters, and even if Choate doesn’t have all the resources he needs, he should have time to work. Whether or not the Wolf Pack are ready to address the program’s monetary needs, they’re clearly excited about—and committed to—their new head coach, just as much as he is to them. Given where they’ve been in recent years, that’s a start worth celebrating.
Case in point: Michigan’s meteoric rise in 2021, which many linked to Poggi’s arrival, has since been much more clearly connected to a sign-stealing scandal that broke during the 2023 season. Poggi claimed to have no knowledge of the scheme, but he also claimed that head coach Jim Harbaugh was unaware, so it’s safe to say he might’ve had some involvement. That’s football, folks.