To describe the situation at Kennesaw State with the job change of football coach Brian Bohannon, you can start with confusing and ill-advised.
After On3 broke the news of his firing Sunday afternoon, the athletic department then issued a news release announcing that the only coach that the program has ever had had decided to resign nine games into its first season at the FBS level. That was followed Sunday night with Bohannon posting his own announcement on social media that he had not, in fact, stepped down but had been fired.
Monday afternoon, after a barrage of criticism, the athletic department released a statement from athletic director Milton Overton saying that he had indeed made the decision to fire Bohannon because of a downturn in results over the past three seasons. Overton said that, in informing Bohannon of his decision, he had offered the coach the option to announce it as a resignation.
“At the conclusion of our meeting, it was my understanding that Coach Bohannon had accepted my offer,” Overton’s statement read.
If that is indeed the truth of the situation, it still raises the question of how Overton could have allowed a misunderstanding over such an important decision to happen, let alone the question of why a school would fire its coach – especially one with a highly successful track record at that school who had served it with distinction – in the midst of its first season at the FBS level?
“They put him in a no-win situation,” Hall of Fame coach Paul Johnson, who had Bohannon on his staff at Georgia Southern, Navy and Georgia Tech, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They move up with no budget, no plans, no facilities, and then you expect that you’re going to win?”
But maybe problematic and embarrassing are the more meaningful descriptions. The botched operation speaks poorly of Overton and the university. It is ineffective leadership and a graceless way to treat an employee whose job performance, commitment to the school and personal character merited better.
It’s Overton’s right as AD to make a change. And, if Bohannon is to be judged on recent performance, there’s room to criticize. From the first season in 2015, the former Georgia wide receiver led a standout operation. The Owls were 63-18 in their first seven seasons (2015-2021) with three Big South titles and four FCS playoff berths.
More recently, the wins have slowed. The school announced the move to FBS in October 2022. The Owls were 5-6 that year. They were 3-6 in 2023 as an FCS independent, although they had one-possession losses to two teams that went to the FCS playoffs and another to a team in its first year at the FBS level. Further, Bohannon aimed to redshirt as many team members as he could because, ineligible for the postseason, there was no championship to pursue.
KSU is now 1-8, although the one win was monumental – an upset of undefeated Liberty, a team that was vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Perhaps Overton saw the immediate success of other programs making the jump to FBS, namely James Madison and Jacksonville State, and thought Bohannon ought to be able to do likewise.
Here’s the thing. While it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison, James Madison’s athletics website lists 41 coaches and support staff members for football. Jacksonville State, which is in Conference USA with KSU, has 46. Including Bohannon, KSU had 30.
JMU boasts a two-story athletic performance building that has a locker room, equipment room, offices and meeting rooms for the football team adjacent to its stadium. Jacksonville State has its own football complex next to its stadium.
Kennesaw State’s football headquarters are in an office park with coaches offices, meeting space, a weight room and locker room. Players drive to the practice field, which is about a mile away from the football offices and separate from the stadium.
“It has not changed,” said Kennesaw State alumnus and former Owls player C.J. Collins, who was part of the inaugural team.
The compensation for coaches is similarly below standards. USA Today’s assistant coach salary database for the 2023 season has record of about 80 assistant coaches in Conference USA, the league that Kennesaw State joined this year. About three quarters made $90,000 or more and just under half made $125,000 or more.
According to salary records on OpenPayrolls, a database of public employee salaries, the highest-paid assistant coach on Bohannon’s staff last year (of the nine coaches out of 10 whose data was available) made about $75,000. A challenge Bohannon has faced repeatedly in his tenure is losing assistant coaches to higher-profile programs in part because of pay.
The point is not to ask for pity for Owls players or coaches. Yes, driving from the locker room to the practice field is not the end of the world. But it speaks to the level of commitment that Overton’s department is giving to the football program relative to its new competitors. For better or worse, facilities matter in recruiting. Salary matters in attracting and keeping high-quality coaches. Staff size matters in preparing and developing athletes and recruiting their replacements.
“I’ve seen these places,” said Collins, a coach at Cherokee County High. “You can see pictures of all these places. It’s a stark difference between Kennesaw and everybody else in their conference.”
If Kennesaw State offers a low level of support for football, why should Overton have expected Bohannon – or any coach who replaces him – to deliver winning results?
Bohannon’s coaching ability has been made abundantly clear. This would not seem to be a matter of him being over his head in FBS. Rather than tearing it up and starting over, there would have been wisdom in either giving Bohannon support commensurate with his competitors and seeing how he fared or understanding the challenges he was facing and being patient.
“That’s really my issue, is, if you’re going to make that decision, I think you at least need to give him the chance to prove that he can do it with the necessary supports that all these other programs have,” Collins said.
And if the answer is that Kennesaw State can’t afford the sort of resources that others in Conference USA have, then perhaps that should have been more of a consideration when making the jump to FBS.
And, while the notions of decency and loyalty may have become quaint for this age, you’d like for those qualities to have been extended to Bohannon, even if Overton had determined to make a change. This is someone who someday should have the field at KSU’s Fifth Third Stadium named in his honor. He had poured himself into the school since his hiring in March 2013.
And he went out with a late-season kneecapping that turned into a fiasco and brought KSU all the wrong attention.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: Daniel Varnado
Credit: Daniel Varnado
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