Finishing What You Started
Matt Wells and Tom Hager
In Partnership with Athletes For God
If you ask people who have been following Utah State football long enough, they might remember a different version of the man you see on tv these days. When I was half my age, I wasn't walking out of the Maverick Stadium tunnel as the Aggies head coach.
I was sprinting out of there as the USU quarterback.
My early years in Logan were some of the most formative of my life, and one event in particular paved the way for me to become the Christian and coach I am today.
In some ways, you already know how the story ends, because life is pretty good for me right now. I've got a beautiful wife, three awesome kids, and a great job coaching at Utah State. But how I got to this point was quite the spiritual and professional journey.
I could say the story started when I got to Logan, Utah to be the Aggies quarterback, but in reality the story has to begin in Oklahoma, in a small town called Sallisaw. It was there that my parents raised me in a Christ-centered home, which laid the foundation for the way I wanted to live my life. It also proved crucial as I was about to navigate through some treacherous waters in my life when I got to college.
When I got to Utah State in 1992, the coaching staff decided to redshirt me. Everyone has hopes of starting day one as a freshman, but the redshirt can be seen as a positive thing for players. I got to keep my four years of eligibility, and in the meantime I could study for a year under my head coach, Charlie Weatherbie.
My redshirt freshman year saw me only throw one pass, but it was a great time to be on the football team. Not only was I the heir to the starting quarterback position for the next season, during that 1993 year we had one of the greatest seasons in Utah State history. We went to our first bowl game since 1961 and won the first bowl game in the program's history.
To put in perspective how big of a deal this was around campus, the last time we were in a bowl game the Beatles hadn't even made their first record yet. And the following season, with me as the starting quarterback, the headlines and statistics would all have my name next to it.
I was going to be the star quarterback on the biggest show in town.
It was at that time God decided to teach me some major lessons in humility, grace, and selflessness.
The season didn't go the way any of us had planned. We finished 3-8, and going into the last game I had more thrown more interceptions than touchdowns. As bad as it was, though, I showed progress and in the season finale I threw for 247 yards and three touchdowns. I thought the starting job might still be mine after all.
God showed me that was not to be the case.
I was named the backup, and learning to cope with that news was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was at that time that I truly relied on my faith and looked inside myself at what I stood for. It's hard not to be jealous of your teammates and it's hard not to want something that somebody else has, but my upbringing reminded me of the Godly way to respond.
After all, the 10 Commandments tell us not to covet our neighbor's possessions, and I had to do some major soul searching as to how I would show that trait.
I decided not to whine, not to complain, and just keep my mouth shut as I competed for the starting job. Perhaps just as important, I tried to be a good teammate and support Patrick Mullins, the teammate who became the starting quarterback. I ultimately threw 39 more passes over my final two years, and although I never grabbed the starting position back for good, that trial prepared me for some struggles that were yet to come – struggles that had much bigger ramifications than who was taking the ball under center.
Fighting for a starting job is one thing. Trying to support your family is a completely different matter.
I decided to enter the coaching profession, and gave myself five years to move up into a full-time position. If I could actually reach that level, I told myself, I would stay in the coaching industry.
Before I could ever land a full-time job, however, my first unofficial position in the coaching industry was the glorious responsibility of bagel boy.
As a young staff assistant at the Naval Academy, one of my responsibilities was to show up at the Einstein Bagels at 5:50 a.m. each morning and get breakfast for the coaching staff. And let me tell you, I was the best Bagel Boy the Academy had ever seen. I knew exactly what the two-dozen order was, and learned the name of each lady at the store. If I could nail that task, I hoped, maybe I could eventually get paid to actually coach football.
I really needed the paycheck, too, because by that point I was in a serious relationship with my girlfriend, Jen, and I had dreams of becoming a husband and dad someday.
During that grind, I met another influential person in my life – Steve Belichick. If that last name sounds familiar, it's because his son is five-time Super Bowl Champion Bill Belichick. But this was back in the late '90s, before most people knew who Bill or Tom Brady were, and certainly before I was financially stable.
With Steve's guidance, I became closer and closer to achieving my goal of getting a full-time job at the Academy. But as months turned into years, the hourglass on my coaching dreams was starting to run out of sand.
Then finally, in the fifth year of the contract I made with myself, I became the receivers coach at Navy. God had lined up all the pieces for myself and Jen, who by this point was my wife and pregnant with our first child, to become a stable family.
By the end of that season I would be fired.
I hoped that another team would come calling, eager to sign me up for a position, but the phone wasn't ringing. And I kept waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Jen was not only preparing for our first child, Jadyn, she also was the only one earning any income. She had done most of the heavy financial lifting during the beginning of our career, but now she was the only one bringing in any money. I had no job, no insurance, and no phone calls coming in.
But in those hard times, Christ was in the middle of all that and He knew what we were going through. We didn't just rely on our faith, we drew strength from it, and knew that God had everything under our control. He wasn't going to give us something that we couldn't handle, and we had a complete trust and faith that the Lord was going to walk us through this.
Finally after more than three months, I got the phone call that gave us stability once again. We were headed to the University of Tulsa so I could become the Tight Ends coach and recruiting coordinator.
I was there from 2002-2006 and eventually worked my way up to become the receivers coach at New Mexico and the quarterbacks coach at Louisville. It was then back to New Mexico for one more season as the receivers coach before truly coming home to Logan.
Throughout this entire process, I had a pretty complicated answer to the basic question of where I was from. If somebody asked, I would say I was from Oklahoma, but I work in this city or at that school. It was finally in returning to my alma mater that I eventually found a place to call home.
But doing so was a bold decision. I made the move from the Mountain West to the Western Athletic Conference, to a program that was coming off a 4-8 record and had recorded exactly zero winning seasons since 1998.
But God was calling our family to Logan.
I joined forces with Utah State head coach Gary Andersen, and as a program we changed the perception of what we could achieve. We went 7-6 in 2011 before putting the school on the national scene in 2012.
We won our first two games before heading to Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin. The Badgers have been a solid program for three decades now, and in 2012 were in the midst of a three-year stretch when they went to the Rose Bowl every year.
But on this day we nearly stunned them.
We led for the majority of the game and trailed only 16-14 when we attempted a field goal with 11 seconds left. That field goal sailed wide-right, our team knew we let a golden chance slip by. It was a tough loss, but we rebounded to win our next two games against Colorado State and UNLV to move to 4-1. We lost another heartbreaker, this time 6-3 against BYU, but instead of imploding we rallied to win seven straight games to end the season.
Our players and staff accomplished exactly what we set out to do – turn the program around.
After that season Gary left to go coach the team he nearly beat, Wisconsin, and I was given the reigns to the program. Finally, after 16 seasons of being an assistant, my time had arrived to be a head coach.
I was in the right place at the right time, and we began to win immediately. We won 19 games in my first two years, and the players helped me earn the MWC Coach of the Year Award in the process. God had granted me more success than I could have ever asked for or deserved.
But God's tests don't stop just in your early years, and over the last three seasons our program has averaged five wins a season. That's not what I had envisioned when I was accepting the 2013 Poinsettia Bowl trophy or the 2014 New Mexico Bowl trophy.
It is then that you realize just how glorious God's plan can be. My journey of perseverance was coming full circle.
When I was benched as the quarterback here at Utah State, I almost transferred before deciding to stay. After all, I was a captain of the team and that meant something important to me. Plus, there was the concept of finishing something you started, and in 1997 I walked out of Logan with my degree in hand.
With that memory in the back of my mind, I am determined to face adversity head on and help turn the program around. I'm set on mentoring these young men to become mature adults, and helping them graduate from college. My family and I are trying to impact their lives and academic careers, and if I can win football games along the way, that is just an added blessing.
Ultimately, however, I know my coaching career will be judged by wins and losses. It's the nature of the industry. Fortunately, God's priorities are completely different. So were my dad’s.
If it wasn’t for his faith and guidance, I don’t know how I would have turned out. Now that I have kids of my own, I’m just hoping to leave the same impact on them that my dad had on me.
This offseason, my dad passed away. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through, but he was a strong believer in Christ, and I believe he is now in Heaven and I will see him again.
As I continue to walk this journey of life, I am striving to continue to grow in my own personal relationship with God as well as be a light of God’s love to others!
For more great content like this, visit Athletes for God