Wyoming promotes from within, but Jay Sawvel is no ordinary internal hire
Hires like this rarely raise the ceiling, yet Sawvel is determined to prove he can make it happen here.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
You might be surprised to see Wyoming this far up in the end-of-2023 ranking for teams undergoing coaching changes. Craig Bohl’s Cowboys have a longstanding habit of being understatedly solid, but last year took that a bit further than usual, as they quietly and tidily worked their way to their best season since leaving the WAC in 1999. They needed a lot of one-score wins—35-33 in the season opener over Texas Tech, 22-19 against Appalachian State, 24-19 against ranked Fresno State, and 16-15 in the Arizona Bowl against Toledo—but every one of those victories was undeniably impressive, and they got the Pokes to a century-high nine wins by season’s end.
Bohl had lived three lifetimes in a sport where many men are lucky to enjoy one; he’d been an itinerant assistant from 1981 to 2002, then a dynasty-building legend at North Dakota State from 2003 to 2013, and the guide of this mild-mannered Mountain West stalwart ever since. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting sendoff than that walk-off bowl win to put him over .500 for his Wyoming career, and he rode off into the sunset to conclude his decades-long tenure as a college football coach.1 And on the same day Bohl announced his retirement, the Cowboys confirmed the promotion of defensive coordinator Jay Sawvel as his successor.
The fact that this all came together so quickly is somewhat surprising, given how immense the task of moving on from Bohl was for Wyoming’s athletic department. When the head coach requested a meeting with AD Tom Burman on November 26, just days before the public announcement of his departure, Burman noted the event on his calendar by writing “Oh S***” for the scheduled date. That’s not to say he wasn’t considering options before that point, though—any coach in Bohl’s situation would’ve been considering retirement towards the end of such a strong (potentially farewell) season. Burman knew that well, and he looked at other options before ultimately deciding to stay within the program.
Framing this move properly is…a bit difficult, because unlike most HC promotions, this one comes with some insistent program messaging that Wyoming does not want to be complacent with the success of the Bohl era. (Not just from Burman, but also from Bohl himself, who said simply that Sawvel will “be a better head coach than I am”.) That’s a good thing to say, certainly—as a former top-25 regular and one of the most recognizable brands outside the power conferences, the Pokes have evident potential—but it’s hard to square with the inherently safe, unexciting move of hiring a coordinator. It’s easy to talk a big game about taking the next step and how Sawvel can help realize that possibility, but how realistic is it, really?
Well, the fact that Wyoming believes he can be the face of a forward-looking program has more to do with Sawvel than anything else. Burman and Bohl have both spoken about the desire to keep building the Cowboys further, but nobody hammered it home more at Sawvel’s introductory press conference than the new head coach himself. While it’s more than evident how much he and his predecessor admire each other, it’s a testament to how definite his expectations are that he explicitly charted a potential future in which, ten years from now, he could retire having won multiple MWC titles—something Bohl never did.
Of course, Sawvel correctly acknowledged after that statement how few of Wyoming’s current facilities were in place when Bohl first arrived here. But there’s no mistaking from his words that he believes the Cowboys’ ceiling is higher than 9-4, and he wouldn’t feel satisfied with simply repeating the last decade. That’s quite a lot of confidence for any first-time head coach, particularly an internal promotion who wouldn’t be blamed in the slightest for embracing 2023 as a model for Wyoming’s foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, as committed as Sawvel may be to accomplishing great things here, the trick will be convincing outsiders that he is. You can’t build without materials, and promoting from within makes it harder to go out and get more pieces to work with—that’s part of the reason it’s seen as such a status-quo decision in the first place. It’s still early, and things may change quickly once Sawvel starts to coach games and make his mark on the Mountain West, but so far…well, it’s been just as difficult as expected. Wyoming has only added six players through the transfer portal this offseason, tied for the fewest in the conference with Hawaiʻi and vastly behind most of the competition; of those, only former UNC running back2 DJ Jones has played significant minutes at the FBS level.
Those poor portal numbers reflect what we already know: it’s a tall task to stand out as a coordinator promoted in the wake of a head coach’s retirement. Most in this position don’t try to do too much, relying on the talent they already have to do what the program’s already done. Sawvel isn’t interested in taking that route, which is an encouraging sign for the Cowboys if he can weather this transition neatly, but the position he’s in makes it particularly tricky to pull a powerful movement together and get Wyoming to the next level. For as much as Bohl has done for him, I’d imagine he’d rather be coming to this job as an outsider, fresh blood that’s obviously worthy of excitement without needing to look a little closer.
That being said, those in Laramie already know how committed Sawvel is to using the Cowboys’ recent accomplishments as a stepping stone, not an end goal. There isn’t much energy outside Wyoming for this hire yet—it’s almost impossible for there to be, given the circumstances—but the atmosphere within the program is in a good place. If that leads to early success, the path for Sawvel to demonstrate his clarity of purpose will open up, and it’s not hard to see the Pokes capitalizing on one historically great decade with another, even better one.
The Last Five Years
After winning eight games in three of the four seasons leading up to 2020, the Cowboys hit a definite speed bump in that COVID-affected season, finishing under .500 for the first time in five years with a 2-4 record. You can see from the spike at the start of 2021 how quickly Wyoming recovered, though their 4-0 start to 2021 was admittedly about as sketchy as it gets. They pulled through to finish 7-6, however, and they continued to rise steadily throughout Bohl’s last two years, regardless of an offense that hasn’t placed higher than 80th in points per game since 2016. None of this has come easily for the Pokes, but if anything, that only proves Sawvel’s belief that they can be even stronger than they already are.
As mentioned above, Wyoming didn’t add a whole lot of pieces to this roster through the portal, but an internal hire did secure some solid returns. The Cowboys lost “only” fourteen transfers, also tied with Hawaiʻi in the MWC, this time for the second-fewest portal departures after Fresno State. Other sources of turnover ultimately place them 75th nationally with 60% returns, primarily on defense, though that’s solidly above average in the MWC (55.7%). All told, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a fourth straight bowl in 2024, thanks to impressive continuity in the roster and staff. Beyond that, it’s hard to say how much Sawvel can wring out of a group that pulled off so many close wins last year, but keeping within the territory established by Bohl’s 9-4 swan song would go a long way.
The Next Five Years
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this hire, to say the least. We’ve looked at plenty of uninspiring picks this season, searching for the best light to believe in their potential, but Sawvel doesn’t really fall into that category despite seeming like it on the surface. Then again, surface-level perception matters more than anything in college football (just look at Oregon State’s undeserved plight), and those who don’t or can’t look deeper will see this as a boring move for stability and complacency.
I think Sawvel can battle out of the hole he’s been dug into by the long tradition of dull promotions in college football, but it’s hard to say just how hard it’ll be. Coaches in this position so rarely do want to build something bigger than those who went before, and when they do, it’s usually because the previous coach fell short of expectations in a way that’s obvious to anyone in college football. Coaches like DeShaun Foster are rare, but not unheard of; coaches like Sawvel are far more unusual.
Of course, I’m here to take the optimistic angle, because that’s what this series about, and it’s the kind of person I like to be. But even if you think this is probably bound to fail, simply because of how off-putting hires like this can be, well…it’s still worth a shot, isn’t it? Sawvel has rarely put a foot wrong in his time at Wyoming, and his approach to the last few months has been about as encouraging as you could hope for despite a process that naturally invited external concern. It’s hard to imagine an internal hire doing truly exceptional things, but few have been as motivated to do so as Jay Sawvel; if anybody can pull it off, it’s him.
He’s now the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, which oversees the Coaches Poll.
“Former” here obviously refers to “UNC”, but also maybe to “running back” as well. The Tar Heels moved him to defensive back in 2023, and while Wyoming played him on offense in the spring game, they could always make the same switch given how deep the RB room looks to be.