Sean Lewis has played his cards perfectly to end up at San Diego State
Despite resigning from Kent State and getting demoted at Colorado, he's stepped up to one of the strongest jobs in the Group of 5.
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 rare that a coach voluntarily leaves a top job, particularly one at which he’s done well and is highly regarded, to become an assistant or coordinator on another staff. You see this sort of thing a little more often in college basketball—Ron Sanchez, for example, resigned after his best season in a five-year tenure at Charlotte to become associate head coach at Virginia—but it’s almost unheard of within college football. Situations where a non-HC job is as attractive as holding a top role just don’t seem to arise often.
There were several such cases this offseason; most notably, new Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer was able to poach both Kane Wommack from South Alabama and Maurice Linguist from Buffalo to fill out his first staff in the post–Nick Saban era. But all these moves were precipitated by one in the 2022-23 offseason that felt much stranger in isolation: Sean Lewis jumping ship from Kent State after five largely successful seasons to become Colorado’s offensive coordinator.
Deion Sanders’ first season leading the Buffaloes was bizarre in a lot of ways, but the storyline of Lewis’ time with the program was probably the weirdest part of CU’s attention-grabbing 2023 campaign. It was a great hire, obviously; the ‘22 Buffs averaged a pitiful 15.4 points per game, 127th in FBS, and desperately needed the right guy to wrangle their transfer-laden offense and wring every bit of potential out of it.
Much has been made of the fact that Colorado, despite a rough finish to the season, still improved from 1-11 to 4-8 last year…but there’s a pretty strong argument that Lewis was the main reason for that rise. At the very least, his offense was: while the defense remained bottom-ten in points allowed per game, he had more than doubled their scoring average and guided them to four 40-point games by their Week 8 bye—those 40 points a mark they hadn’t reached once since the 2020 opener and hadn’t managed that many times in even a full season since 2016. For a while, starting quarterback Shedeur Sanders even had some serious Heisman buzz, as did two-way star Travis Hunter.
One game later, Lewis was demoted.
A lot of words could be spilled here about the ridiculous standards set by both Sanders and the media covering his coaching career, but those are better saved for the inevitable future chapters in this series (possibly as soon as next year) covering his next gig and Colorado’s choice to replace him. While obviously a baffling move that ended in predictable disaster—the Buffaloes topped 20 points just once in their final four games after the decision—it made a certain kind of sense given what we know about Sanders. Much more fascinating, and relevant to this discussion as we cover this hire at San Diego State, is the series of decisions Lewis made between that jump to Colorado and his return to top-level coaching for this season.
So: why did he take this job in the first place? In an interview with The Athletic in September last year, Lewis spoke at length about the importance of his family to the decision, knowing that giving up an HC role meant he wouldn’t have as much control at Colorado. He sought out a job with a coach who spoke to the value of respecting his staff members’ lives off the field1, but also one that could provide a path forward for his coaching career. Kent State, despite the success he’d found there, simply wasn’t doing that—he notes being ignored during Cincinnati’s coaching search in 2022 as an indication that upwards mobility seemed unavailable to him—and he responded by departing the midwest region in which he’d spent nearly his entire career. Power-conference teams in the west have recently been more welcome to the idea of hiring coaches at local G5 programs, and Lewis saw that as his way forward in the business.
From a certain perspective, then, everything has gone according to plan. Sanders may have felt that Lewis’ performance as OC wasn’t impressive enough to merit his current job, let alone a better one, but virtually the entire rest of the college football world disagreed. It wasn’t long before he began to draw interest from programs in need of a head coach, and he landed at San Diego State, completing a two-year upgrade from one of the weakest overall programs outside the power conferences to one of the strongest.
SDSU is everything Kent State wasn’t—a university that has strong resources, recent athletic success, and arguably even a shot at ending up in a power conference itself someday. The one thing they haven’t been lately, as Brady Hoke’s long career petered out here in the early 2010s, is successful on offense; the Aztecs managed to go 12-2 in 2021 despite averaging just 27.4 points per game (78th nationally), and they’ve finished in the bottom 25 in scoring offense in each of the last two seasons. Bring in one of the brightest offensive minds in the sport is just the move they need.
Considering all the messiness that led to Lewis’ arrival in San Diego, it’s remarkable how well he’s handled the last year and a half. Going from head coach to assistant isn’t an easy move to pull off and parlay into better jobs, and some of those who tried it this offseason might find it more difficult to get back into a top role than they had hoped, but it’s not so hard to see why they’d give it a shot. After all, as Lewis has shown, the possibilities if you get it right are more than worth the risk.
The Last Five Years
You have to be really special defensively to win with an offense as bad as the ones SDSU ran under Hoke. The 2021 team, which was the first in school history to finish the season ranked, had an absolutely suffocating unit on that side of the ball and still needed an offense that was at least mediocre to get that 12-2 record out of it. When their scoring cratered from 78th to 108th the next year, even another stifling defensive performance couldn’t get them any higher than 7-6; then the defense regressed in 2023 and the Aztecs ended up as one of the worst teams in the Mountain West.
Subpar returning production from a roster that lacked many exciting pieces last season means San Diego State probably won’t be much better this season, if at all. We’ll get some glimpses of Lewis’ aggressive, up-tempo offense as he implements it and sets up SDSU’s future on that side of the ball, but on-field results won’t be much of a focus. What might be more interesting to keep an eye on: how does Lewis capitalize on having access to high-level facilities and recruiting potential that were less powerful or completely nonexistent at Kent State?
The Next Five Years
This is another one of those hires that’s easy to like. If there’s a reason for concern, it’s probably Lewis’ lack of history in the region, but San Diego State hasn’t lacked for success under coaches like him before; Hoke, too, had spent nearly his entire career in the midwest outside of a single stint at Oregon State before the Aztecs hired him in 2008. But there’s a better question than whether this is a good hire—how good is it?
SDSU is a strong program, good enough to be nationally ranked in the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2010s and 2020s, and expectations are naturally going to be high here. More than that, though—San Diego State is under considerable pressure to ace the next decade, as their lengthy history of success over the last fourteen years under Hoke and Rocky Long got them to the brink of earning a P5 spot, but they came up short in the end. The landscape of college football is changing rapidly, but an upgrade to the Big 12 or potentially the ACC is still a target to aim for, even if those specific conferences don’t exist in their current forms the next time SDSU has a chance to move up.
Lewis probably won’t be leading the Aztecs if and when the next wave of realignment hits, but the foundation he sets after the program’s first losing season since 2009 is critical to setting up their immediate future. He’s certainly a coach you can trust to get this team to something like that seven-win floor it’s had lately, but if everything goes right, San Diego State will hope for more: conference titles, top-25 rankings, and maybe even a ticket to the next level of college football when the time comes. As someone who knows just how delicate a task it is to maneuver through the various levels of this sport, and who did so masterfully to make it here, Sean Lewis is about as perfect a leader for this program as you could hope for.
I’m not sure how much I believe Sanders on that, given his willingness to pull the rug out from under Lewis just months into his time at Colorado, but make of it what you will.