There’s another NFL legend enjoying a breakthrough season as a college football coach

In his fourth season at Tennessee State, Eddie George's team is 8-3 and on the verge of a historical accomplishment

Earlier this week, NFL scoopsmeister Adam Schefter reported that hall-of-fame linebacker Ray Lewis had emerged as a candidate for the head-coaching vacancy at Florida Atlantic.

The report, such that it was, was quickly shot down, but in this world, the brief moment in which “Ray Lewis, FBS head coach” was a possibility didn’t feel all that surreal. Lewis has no coaching experience and he has at least one thing in his past that would make passing a background check a dicey proposition, but thanks to Deion Sanders’ success at Jackson State and now Colorado, a legendary former player bypassing a care-free life of retirement to go through the wringer of coaching modern college football no longer seems so outlandish. In a copycat sport, desperate programs now want their own Coach Prime.

It’s an approach destined to fail much more likely than it succeeds, kind of like the scene in “The Waterboy” when other college football programs try to replicate the eponymous waterboy’s success with the SCLSU Mud Dogs, but watch in horror as their towel boys and student managers are carried off the field on stretchers after nearly being decapitated. We got something close to that in real life two years ago when Ed Reed was hired as the head coach at Bethune-Cookman, an HBCU in Florida, only to be out after 25 days when the university opted not to ratify his contract.

Every now and then, though, it works. Just look at Eddie George.

In April 2021, a few months after Sanders finished his first season at Jackson State, Tennessee State hired George to lead its football program. George didn’t have experience as a college coach, but he was arguably the most revered player in Tennessee Titans history, someone whose name commanded respect and credibility in a way that few in the Nashville area did. For the Tigers, it was unquestionably a gamble, but one they hoped might one day pay off.

Three years later, it looks like it is.

Heading into its regular-season finale in its fourth season under George, Tennessee State is 8-3 – its most wins in a season in 11 years – and ranked No. 25 in the FCS Coaches Poll. On Saturday, it will take part in its biggest game in years when it hosts No. 11 Southeast Missouri. With a victory, the Tigers would clinch at least a share of the Big South-Ohio Valley Conference championship.

"It's good to see things come to fruition,” George said to The Tennessean. “Taking on this job a few years ago, you were just like, 'Man, let's find a way to win some games here.' ... We took our Ls, got our ass kicked a lot, and we learned from that. We grew from it. Now we have a product, I think, that can compete.”

How Tennessee State found its way to Eddie George

At the risk of straining the comparison more than it already has been, there were parallels with what Sanders took over at Jackson State and what George inherited at Tennessee State.

Like Jackson State, a fellow HBCU, Tennessee State had a proud, often-overlooked football history. In the decades following World War II, the Tigers were a powerhouse, winning 11 Black College National Championships between 1946-82. Many of those came under legendary coach John Merritt, who won at least eight games in 16 of his 21 seasons at the school and coached the likes of Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Richard Dent. From 1970-73, his teams went 41-2.

In Dec. 1983, on the heels of an 8-2-1 season, Merritt died after a battle with heart disease. He was only 57 years old. The year after Merritt’s death, the Tigers went 11-0 and over the better part of the next 40 years, they had spurts of success, winning conference championships or making the occasional FCS playoff appearance. Largely, though, they struggled to get anywhere close to where Merritt had them, in part due to the effects of major southern universities desegregating and opening their doors to the kinds of players with whom HBCUs were able to thrive for years. From 1987-2020, Tennessee State finished with a winning record in just 11 of 34 seasons.