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Sometimes you can see the next great head coach coming a mile away, while sometimes you can’t. That’s the beauty of college football is that you never know what’s going to be any given year, and who is going to take which program to great heights.
For instance, during his interim stint coaching Ohio State, many didn’t think much of Luke Fickell. However, he remained on staff, redeeming himself as a position coach before going onto great things at Cincinnati. We’ve seen stars born in recent years from the likes of Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley — who started under Bob Stoops in Norman — to varying degrees of success from former Nick Sagan acolytes across America.
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With that in mind, 247Sports put out a list of the top 10 current college football assistants who could be that next big thing, as the site tries to prognosticate who the next Jeff Hafley or Clark Lea will be. And while many wouldn’t suggest that Michigan football has any staffer ready to become a head coach right now given what happened in 2020, Wolverines offensive coordinator Josh Gattis did come in at No. 10 on the list.
Michigan’s offense hasn’t set the Big Ten ablaze, but coordinator Josh Gattis is well-liked in the coaching industry and has head-coaching chops.
Gattis began his college coaching career under James Franklin at Vanderbilt and Penn State before joining Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama, where he spent the 2018 season alongside Mike Locksley helping to coach the Tide’s offense. Locksley and Gattis had a bit of a tiff in 2019 about who was responsible for the success of the Tide’s offense.
Meanwhile, Michigan’s offense has not quite reached the levels of the early Jim Harbaugh years. The Wolverines’ scoring offense ranked fifth and sixth in the Big Ten during Gattis’ first two years of calling plays.
That’s certainly always been the plan when Gattis came to Ann Arbor, for him to revitalize the offense and then move up the coaching ranks. While it hasn’t quite worked out, you can see the building blocks.
Though Gattis is 247Sports’ choice, keeping in line with how Jeff Hafley worked out as defensive coordinator at Ohio State, our pick very well could be Mike Macdonald, Michigan’s new defensive coordinator. They have similar pedigrees — Hafley was a defensive backs coach with the 49ers, while Macdonald comes aboard from the Ravens — and both were (are, in Macdonald’s case) with revitalizing a storied defense. It would be no surprise if Macdonald finds quick success and is able to secure a head job elsewhere within two years. In WolverinesWire’s exclusive conversation with Joel Klatt, he mentioned the parallels between the two.
Either way, if Michigan is to have any assistants depart for a head coaching job, the Wolverines will need to turn things around in a hurry, given how bad the team was in 2020.
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