Tim Skipper finds his way home to Fresno State, however long it takes
Taking on the duties of an interim coach for a full season is no easy task, but few could be better prepared for the challenge.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
At the end of the 2019 season, having guided Fresno State to 26 wins, two bowl victories, and a ranked finish in his three years as head coach, Jeff Tedford stunningly resigned due to health reasons. Heading into an offseason that was already going to be difficult after a down year—and which became far tougher a few months later when COVID-19 shut down the world—the Bulldogs decided to keep things simple and hired a coach who already had strong ties to the program, having served as its OC in Tedford’s first two seasons.
When that coach left town a couple years later, Fresno State announced the possibly even more shocking return of Tedford to the HC role. Health issues still plagued him, to the point that he had to hand off coaching duties for the team’s bowl game last year, but that didn’t stop him from leading the Bulldogs to another 18 wins across two seasons, reaching the AP rankings in both 2022 and 2023. Ultimately, though, that success was followed by a rather less surprising announcement in the late months of the 2024 offseason—Tedford was once again resigning for health reasons, and Fresno State once again turned to a coach with strong program ties.
Of course, stepping in at this point would be a challenge for any coach; as discussed in yesterday’s article on Utah State interim Nate Dreiling, spinning a season-long interim job into a full-time gig tends to be quite difficult, given the circumstances that lead to a situation like this. And it’s true that while Tim Skipper shares much in common with the previous coach to take over from Tedford, he’s in a markedly tougher spot due to taking over so late in the offseason, and needing to prove himself within his first year.
That being said…when you follow this closely in the footsteps of Kalen DeBoer, who coached Washington to the national championship game last season and is now no less than Nick Saban’s much-anticipated successor, the potential before you is obvious. Sure, it’s probably not quite as far-reaching as DeBoer’s proved to be; Alabama is arguably the final career move in college football coaching, and forecasting a first-year interim G5 coach to reach any top-tier job would be an absurdly long shot. But matching what he accomplished here—a promising first season and a second-year breakthrough that could earn attention from P4 programs—that’s certainly possible, and arguably easier for Skipper given that Fresno State has been steadily contending for MWC titles over the last three years. Keep it up in 2024 and he’ll probably have the full-time job; keep it going after that and a team like Washington could certainly take an interest soon.
The opportunity is clear. Less obvious, and far more interesting, is the question of whether Skipper is particularly capable of capitalizing on it. He certainly fits the DeBoer archetype—a well-travelled coach in his mid-forties who’s spent significant time in non-positional roles like AHC and has firm Fresno State ties. In this case, those ties are even stronger than DeBoer’s two years here as an OC; Skipper was a standout for the Bulldogs in the late 1990s, when he racked up 418 career tackles, and was on the staff in various roles from 2006 to 2011 and again from 2022 to the present.
That history provides a bit of insight into the somewhat perilous position Skipper has put himself in—because his first stint in the Valley ended in much the same way. Amid a frustrating 4-9 season that would mark the end of HC Pat Hill’s college coaching career, he took over as interim defensive coordinator upon Randy Stewart’s resignation in mid-November. Stewart’s unit had allowed an average of 37.4 points through Fresno State’s first ten games; Skipper cut that mark by nearly ten full points over their last three, pinning down Hawaiʻi and SDSU offense that ranked among the top fifty nationally. But, as is typically the case for members of an outgoing coach’s staff, he wasn’t retained and had to start over at Colorado State, back to being an LB coach for a Mountain West program. To many, that brief experience in a more senior role might seem like a waste of time at best, and a needless (if minor) career risk at worst.
Skipper evidently disagrees—though not without good reason. For one thing, full-season interim HC and three-week interim DC under a lame-duck coach aren’t exactly identical cases; there’s more opportunity here than there was in 2011. But there’s also something to be said for the fact that experience in trying times like these is valuable in its own right, even if it might lengthen the path to a full-time coach or coordinator job. Tedford heavily prioritized past experience and program ties when bringing on a new staff in 2021, and his decision to bring Skipper back likely had something to do with that brief, impressive performance at the end of 2011. The fact that Skipper ultimately ended up in this role might have something to do with it, too. He’s kept things steady while taking on additional responsibility here once, so why not see if he can do it again?
It’s a pretty safe bet that Skipper’s career won’t play out quite the same way DeBoer’s did. Going from a P5 OC to a G5 HC after a year, or from a G5 HC to a P5 HC after two years, or from a P5 HC to head coach of the premier program in the sport after two more years: all those moves are relatively ordinary, but almost nobody takes such a linear and rapid path through each of those steps. Skipper’s career—a decade coming up as a low-level defensive coach, a brief rise to interim DC, a few more years working his way up as an assistant, a couple years as a coordinator, five more years as an itinerant assistant, before finally getting half a shot as a head coach 22 years after his first coordinator job—is a lot less even, and a lot more normal. Sure, potentially washing out from this role and having to latch on somewhere else would be a bump in the road, but what’s one more? What makes a great interim coach isn’t just on-field excellence and a sense for stability, but a readiness to keep rolling with the punches, come what may—and in that regard, Skipper is the perfect man to take the reins.
The Last Five Years
If there’s any program that knows how to bounce back from adversity, it’s Fresno State. In 2019, Tedford became the third Bulldogs coach in a row to go from at least eight wins to at least eight losses in two seasons, and it would’ve been easy to sink into a fairly lengthy rebuild after his resignation, DeBoer’s arrival, and the onset of the pandemic. Of course, the program’s rapid rise to a ten-win season and multiple ranked wins just two years later is a credit to DeBoer, but it was also another reflection of how good Fresno State has become at recovering quickly. It’s little surprise that, the very next season, they became the first team in FBS history to go from 1-4 to 10-4 and won their fourth Mountain West championship, followed up with another strong campaign last year.
The Bulldogs could very well be a contender for the title this year, too. Boise State may be the presumptive MWC favorite, but they’re far from the dominant force they once were, and the league is sorely lacking in experience after an offseason in which most teams bled talent. Fresno State sits 50th nationally in returning production, but with so many rivals experience heavy turnover, they’re second in the conference in that stat. The catch: those returns are much better on offense (24th) than on defense (81st), Skipper’s primary specialty. It might take some time for everything to click, but the conference schedule is very forgiving1, and the road to the conference championship game is clear.
The Next Five Years
An unusual number of coaches have taken on an effective one-year interview like this over the last couple seasons. David Braun at Northwestern and Dreiling at Utah State were both officially given an interim role, and Zach Arnett’s year at the helm for Mississippi State effectively fell under the same category, though he was technically hired as a full head coach.2 Skipper has a more stable program in his hands than any of the others who’ve been in this situation lately, but that’s not to say this’ll be easy by any means.
Still, if there was ever a full-season interim of whom you could feel pretty confident saying they would be around five years down the road, it’d be Skipper. Not just because Fresno State is set up so well to succeed, but also because he’s eminently experienced in handling the precipitous ups and downs of college football. The Bulldogs are probably going to walk out of Ann Arbor tomorrow with a blowout loss and an 0-1 record, but that sort of thing never fazed Tedford (see 2022), and I doubt it’ll faze Skipper. The road to glory is rarely direct and obvious, and the best coaches can weather a tough loss or an aborted upward leap in the coaching ranks.
For a role that seems to demand audacious, quick action with an aim for immediate results, it’s remarkable how often interim coaches who make the most of their position take things slow and steady. Just look at Braun, whose trial season at Northwestern started with a 24-7 loss to Rutgers and ended with a well-earned five-year contract, or Georgia Tech’s Brent Key, who took a 16-9 loss to an awful Virginia team within his first few weeks as interim, but pulled through and is now a full-time coach who just stunned #10 Florida State in Week 0. In the most tumultuous of circumstances, the key to success isn’t adding to the chaos but calming it, finding a way to forget the tension and intensity of such a tight deadline and taking things one day at a time. Tim Skipper has done that before, and he and Fresno State are more than capable of doing it again, of finding a way to start a new chapter in the Bulldogs’ golden era without missing a beat.
Namely: New Mexico, UNLV, Nevada, San José State, Hawaiʻi, Air Force, and Colorado State. More than half of that schedule consists of the bottom four teams in this twelve-team conference; five MWC wins should be an absolute baseline.
Though, for the record, MSU did sign him to a fairly standard four-year contract. I still have no idea why they would do this if one season of underperformance was enough for them to fire him ten games into his tenure.