by Tiffany Coley

Created on: December 03, 2007

Who wouldn't want to become a college football coach today? Head coaches at top tier schools make millions of dollars and get to go to work everyday doing what they love most. Each college team has a large staff of assistant coaches, and there are 119 teams in division 1-A alone. Here are some tips to help you nab one of these choice coaching positions:

1.) You must first love the game of football. It really helps get you in the door if you were a college football player. Players know the sport from the inside out and have first hand experience with what it takes to be a good coach. The ability to talk X's and O's is also of high importance for would be coaches. Knowing as much as you can about several different types of offensive and defensive schemes will prepare you for the strategic aspect of game planning.

2.) You must have a desire to work with young men. As a coach, you spend your time around college players. A good coach really cares about the people on the team and their success on and off the field. Many college coaches end up as greedy ego maniacs, but none of them started out their careers this way. You have to be good with people and have a desire to inspire young men to victory in order to have any success in the realm of college coaching.

3.) You must have connections. Many college coaches decided to become coaches while playing ball in school. Other college coaches were once NFL players. A few came up the ranks from high school football. Regardless of where they came from, college coaches got jobs in the beginning of their careers mostly because of the connections they had. Old coaches hired them or put in a good word. Coaching is very political and often times golden opportunities are most bountiful to someone who already has made a name for themselves in the world of sports. That's not to say a graduate assistant who never played a day of college ball couldn't get on board with a program and eventually be hired as a positions coach, but the bigger the school, the higher the stakes, the higher the pay, the more teams are looking for star quality, name recognition coaches.

4.)You must be very patient. The typical coaching career begins with a stint as a positions coach. A man might do nothing but work with receivers for five years, then move up to being a quarterbacks coach. Once a coach has spent about 10 years or so mastering an offense he is now in the market for a coordinator position. Several more years must pass again before the leap can be made from coordinator to head coach. College coaches are also at the mercy of the teams that hire them. They are fired when the school and the alumni are no longer satisfied with the performance of the team. The average coach works at 4-5 colleges over the course of his 20-30 year career.

This is not the easiest career path in America, but with the right knowledge, experience, connections, luck, and love of the game, prospective coaches can break into the exciting world of coaching at the college level.

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