Less than one year after leaving an HBCU championship squad at FAMU to join Duke University as an assistant coach, Willie Simmons is now the coach at an FBS program.
Simmons joined a small group of former HBCU coaches to become head coach at an FBS program. He is just the fifth man to do so — but the second this week.
Simmons’ hiring comes less than a week after former North Carolina Central head coach Jerry Mack was hired as head coach at Kennessaw State.
Those moves came fairly close together compared to the previous three former HBCU coaches that got FBS jobs.
Willie Jeffries had a red-hot career at South Carolina State in the 1970s before being hired as head coach at Wichita State.
Jay Hopson coached four seasons at Alcorn State, leading it to back-to-back SWAC championships in 2014 and 2015. After making history as the first white coach in SWAC history he was then hired as head coach at Southern Mississippi.
And then there was Deion Sanders. The Pro Football Hall of Fame took the HBCU and greater college football world by storm at Jackson State, winning back-to-back SWAC titles in 2021 and 2022. Sanders was quickly hired away to Colorado where he has turned that program around in a matter of two seasons.
Unlike the previous three coaches Simmons and Mack had to leave the HBCU space to get their goals accomplished.
Mack spent four seasons at North Carolina Central from 2014 through 2017 before joining Rice and later Tennessee as an assistant before spending a year with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Simmons talked about his decision to leave on top of the HBCU world to take a job as an assistant with a Power Four school.
“There guys before me that have made similar decisions to leave head coaching jobs at HBCUs to get to that level and try to navigate these these know these waters, of minorities being in positions of leadership,” Simmons told HBCU Gameday’s Vaughn Wilson. “130 plus FBS programs in America, less than 20 are led by hate by minority head coaches. Not saying that it couldn’t be done at FAMU. I have full confidence in myself and my abilities. But again, everything in life is about decisions — the tough decisions that have to be made. And for me I roll the dice, to make this move.”
Simmons’s dice roll has paid off in less than a year. FIU isn’t a Power Four job, but it is an FBS job — one step closer to what he says his goal is. Hopefully, the next star HBCU coach won’t have to make that move.