Among the seemingly unceasing news items about Art Briles was something in February that has been largely forgotten, but it was significantly more than mere wire filler.
Southern Miss planned to interview the disgraced former Baylor coach for the job of offensive coordinator. That such a hire these days is akin to a night out at the club with R. Kelly, athletic administrators quickly advised coach Jay Hopson that, discretion being the better part of valor, it was probably best that the coach with the good intentions “go in another direction.”
To that end, Hopson hired Buster Faulkner, most recently offensive coordinator at Arkansas State, to bring his system, coach the quarterbacks and call the plays on game day.
Then he promoted from within his wide receivers coach to be the co-offensive coordinator.
That was Scotty Walden, a graduate of Cleburne High School in Johnson County, not quite 30 years old.
The arrangement is working through the mid-point of the season. Southern Miss has a quarterback, Jack Abraham, playing at a high level, and throwing to Walden’s deep receiving corps. North Texas was the latest to see up close an offense averaging 30 points a game and 444.5 yards per game.
Against the Mean Green, the Eagles purred, their attack collecting 563 total yards in a 47-25 victory at The Rock in Hattiesburg on Saturday night.
It was done with the contagious high energy everybody there associates with the team’s receivers coach and co-offensive coordinator.
“It doesn’t matter [when it is],” said receiver Quez Watkins of Walden, “he wants to get you going, especially in the morning. Make sure you’re woke and get everybody fired up. He’s ready to go.”
In Walden, Southern Miss has on its staff, many believe, one of the bright young offensive minds in college football. He knows that his rapid ascent from nomadic college football player to an unlikely offer to be the offensive coordinator at Sul Ross at age 22 requires more than aptitude, attitude and ability.
“The good Lord has plans for you you don’t even know about,” said Walden last week. “God put me around the right people at the right time, right place at the right time. If I don’t go to Sul Ross, there’s no place in America that I would have gotten to be an OC my first year out of college. I’d have never gotten that opportunity.
“That was someone else’s plan.”
Out of Cleburne, Walden went north to play at Dordt University, an NAIA school and “the only school in America that gave me a scholarship.”
“I had a blast up there, but I wanted to get back to Texas and play ball.”
That led him to Hardin-Simmons, but that didn’t work out, either. He was stuck in the basement of the depth chart.
“I never wanted to give up football.”
His last option was Division III and Sul Ross, the school named for the famed Texas governor. He played out his eligibility and graduated with a degree in history. Rather than leave school, coach Wayne Schroeder offered him the job of offensive coordinator at the ripe age of 22.
For the standards at Sul Ross, that 2012 team was a success unseen in recent season, going 5-5 with a high-powered new offense under the new offensive coordinator. Sul Ross led all of NCAA averaging 582 yards per game and 49 points per game.
Then like that, poof. School administrators pulled its famous magic trick of making coaches disappear.
“I got a taste of coaching real quick,” Walden said.
Schroeder was fired soon after the first days of the start of the spring semester in January, leaving the staff in limbo. Walden and four others, including the team chaplain — who sometime later would marry Walden and his wife, the former Callie Phelps — ran the program until a new coach was hired. When John Tyree was finally hired, he didn’t retain Walden.
Walden submitted dozens of applications to FBS programs seeking a graduate assistant job. In his words, “I didn’t get a sniff at any of them.”
While in the state of anxiety most commonly associated with questions such as “what am I going to do?” he got a call out of the blue. It was Josh Eargle, the new coach at East Texas Baptist University in Marshall. The coach had noticed the numbers and points Walden’s Sul Ross offense had put up in 2012.
“I think he got on Google, and I guess we popped up,” Walden joked. “That was a complete God thing. I was sitting in my dorm room that night and got a call from East Texas.”
Eargle, with Walden as offensive coordinator, flipped ETBU. In their third season, the Tigers won the American Southwest Conference championship and received their first national ranking in Division III since 2004. They were 10th in a regional poll. ETBU also beat its first nationally ranked opponent in 10 years, Hardin-Simmons – the same Hardin-Simmons where Walden couldn’t crack the top of the depth chart.
Success was good for both coaches. Eargle left that season to take the offensive coordinator job at Austin Peay. (Today, he is at Kansas as an offensive analyst.) Walden was promoted to the head coach, at 26, the youngest head coach in the NCAA.
In his three seasons as offensive coordinator, ETBU’s record book was rewritten. Twenty-six combined individual and team records were established. He produced four 1,000 yard receivers, two 1,000 yard rushers and QB Josh Warbington was a Gagliardi Trophy (most outstanding Division II player) semifinalist in Josh Warbington. In 2014, ETBU finished ranked first in total passing offense, second in total offense (566 yards per game) and was among the nation’s top scorers at 42 points per game.
“If [Eargle] hadn’t called that one day, I don’t know where I’m at,” Walden said.
In Walden’s only season as head coach at ETBU, the Tigers went 7-3, led the country in scoring offense at 50 points per game and finished second in total offense at 564 yards per game.
That’s when Hopson called. The two had met through Tim Billings, the longtime coach and current defensive coordinator at Southern Miss. Receivers coach John Wozniak was leaving for Oklahoma State. Walden knew about the opening but, “I didn’t want to press it.”
“I was thinking, ‘I’m happy here [at ETBU], I can run my own program, it’s all good,’” Walden said. “It’s always about that time when you get comfortable something else pops up.”
His phone will certainly ring again. Well-deserved good fortune seems to find this really good guy with the energy and ideas.
