One of college football’s oddest coaching careers has come to an end

Jim McElwain will retire from Central Michigan at the end of this season, the latest development in a journey filled with all sorts of weird, sometimes hilarious twists

Update No. 1: I try my best to have two newsletters a week, but I’ve been battling a gnarly illness most of this week that, when compounded with some traveling and my full-time job, made writing something up next to impossible. My apologies on the gap in content.

Update No. 2: On a much cheerier note, Eddie George and Tennessee State pulled it off! The Tigers knocked off Southeast Missouri 28-21 last Saturday to claim their first conference championship since 1999. They now advance to the 24-team FCS playoffs, where they’ll head west to face off against No. 14 Montana Saturday.

Now, on to the latest newsletter…

Whether it’s due to some unforeseen developments like Florida being surprisingly competent or schools realizing that impending revenue sharing with athletes means they won’t be able to waste obscene amounts of money on coaching buyouts, this year’s coaching carousel has been surprisingly quiet heading into the final weekend of the regular season.

As I type this, there are 14 FBS vacancies, representing only about 10% of schools at that level. Among Power Four programs, only North Carolina has made a change. Perhaps the most notable trend is that all four FBS schools that have an owl mascot – Florida Atlantic, Temple, Rice and Kennesaw State – have all fired their coaches.

At least for me, one of those changes raised my eyebrow a bit higher than the others.

Last Tuesday, it was announced that Jim McElwain would retire at Central Michigan following this season, his sixth at the school. The decision wasn’t totally unexpected, as it had been openly discussed in the college football media ecosystem for the past several months. McElwain’s turning 63 in March and has gone 13-22 over the past three seasons at a program that’s consistently fielded bowl-bound teams for the past 20 years.

But for reasons that admittedly escape me, I’ve always been fascinated by the man. Perhaps it’s because the Dan Le Batard Show, as part of its “looks like” game that gives intricate descriptions of what various sports figures look like, once said he looks like the otter in an animal jug band that plays songs about being lonely at Christmas.

More than that, though, I think it’s because at each of his stops in 13-year coaching career, he always seemed to find himself at the center of an odd story, sometimes through his own doing and other times due to factors largely outside of his control. Some were funnier than others and in those more humorous instances, it was made funnier because, yes, he does look like the otter in an animal jug band that plays songs about being lonely at Christmas.

As he heads into retirement, I figured it was as good of a time as any to look back at some of the various turns in one of the more underratedly odd coaching journeys in recent college football history:

He was college roommates with Colin Cowherd

This one predates his time as a head coach and his coaching career entirely, but McElwain was indeed college roommates with the nationally syndicated radio host while the two were students in the early 1980s at Eastern Washington, where McElwain was a quarterback on the football team and Cowherd was an aspiring broadcaster.

Years later, early in McElwain’s tenure as the Florida head coach, he joined Cowherd on his radio show, an appearance dedicated partially to reminiscing about their days of living together.

“Thirty years ago, you and I were sitting in an apartment complex in Cheyney, Washington and you were drawing up plays on a yellow notepad and I was practicing my Keith Jackson and Vin Scully impersonations,” Cowherd said. “Can you confirm to the audience that we were a couple of college kids with dreams, no money, Skoal and nothing else?”

Decades later, they both had plenty of money – though, interestingly enough, the guy who wasn’t the SEC football coach was the higher earner. When Cowherd moved from ESPN to Fox in 2015, he reportedly made upwards of $6 million a year. Following a successful first season at Florida, McElwain got a raise that paid him $3.5 million a year.

He got into a public beef with the Denver mayor

After more than 25 years as an assistant coach, including a four-year run as Alabama’s offensive coordinator in which he helped the Crimson Tide earn its first two national titles under Nick Saban, McElwain earned his first head-coaching job, at Colorado State.

In his third and ultimately final season with the Rams, he was part of what I still consider to be one of the funniest feuds in the history of organized college athletics.