USFL 2022: Birmingham Stallions coach Skip Holtz on how he got here

By RJ Young
FOX Sports Writer

Skip Holtz knew what he was getting into when United States Football League president Brian Woods approached him about the opportunity to become head coach and general manager of the Birmingham Stallions.

Holtz had spent 35 years in coaching, including 22 as a college football head coach, and he was ready for a different flavor of football. Plus, he believes his nearly 40 years of experience helped prepare him for the challenge of a 10-week season, a 45-man roster and a nine-man coaching staff at the pro level.

"I just wanted a new challenge," he said. "I was excited about the opportunity to sit down and have the opportunity to talk with Brian Woods, to listen to all the people that are involved in this [league] and that are behind this [league], that are committed to making this work. The more I started talking to Brian, the more and more excited I got about the USFL and what it was gonna be. I was excited to have the opportunity to get into pro ball."

You can watch the "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young" on YouTube or subscribe on podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts.

Holtz has earned a reputation as an outstanding offensive mind and the kind of coach other men want to work for. Members of his Stallions staff included former Broyles Award winner and LSU defensive coordinator John Chavis (defensive coordinator) and San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl-winning wide receiver coach Larry Kirksey (running backs coach). He started building that reputation in Tallahassee, Florida.

For Holtz, the opportunity to win the inaugural USFL title is on par with his first opportunity to coach at Florida State and then to serve as a coordinator at Notre Dame.

Having graduated from and played wide receiver at Notre Dame, Holtz worked as a graduate assistant for legendary Seminoles coach Bobby Bowden in 1987. He had a memorable first day in Tallahassee, too.

"The first person I met when I walked into the office became my wife," Holtz said.

In his first season on the staff, FSU finished 11-1 and No. 2 in the AP Poll, with a Fiesta Bowl victory over Tom Osborne’s No. 5-ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers. The Noles followed the next year with another 11-1 showing and a No. 3 final ranking in the AP.

Their only losses in both seasons were to Miami, which won the 1987 national title and finished runner-up in 1988. In 2022, Holtz hired another grad assistant from the ‘87 Miami staff to his Stallions staff in defensive line coach Bill Johnson.

After a year at Colorado State coaching wide receivers for Earle Bruce, Holtz accepted a job coaching the same position for his father, Lou, who proved to be a difficult man to impress. With Lou Holtz as coach, the Fighting Irish won the 1988 national title with an undefeated season in which they managed to become the only team to beat Johnson’s then-No. 1 Hurricanes. When Skip returned to South Bend, Notre Dame had finished No. 6 or better from 1987 to 1990.

However, following a 10-3 season with a final AP ranking of No. 12, Lou decided to make a change at offensive coordinator. He tried to elevate his legendary offensive line coach, Joe Moore, but Moore turned him down.

Skip, though, had an idea as to who should be the next offensive play-caller at Notre Dame.

"When the coordinator [position] opened," Skip said, "I went in to see my father, and I said I want to come in and put my name in the ring for the offensive coordinator spot at the time. I was 27 years old. And he said, ‘I can't hire you. I mean, you're 27 years old. You’re my son. No, I can't. Who would you hire?'

Father asked son to be serious. But Skip was serious.

"No, I’d hire me," Skip told his dad. "That's who I'd hire."

But Lou wouldn’t hear of it, so Skip decided not to push it. Instead, he recommended then-FSU offensive coordinator Mark Richt.

"I had the opportunity to work with Mark," Skip said of his time on staff at FSU. "Mark and I shared an office when I was in Tallahassee, and I just have an incredible amount of respect for him, the man, the person, the mannerisms, the way that he coaches. I just think Mark is really good at what he does. So, I told Dad that I'd hire Mark Richt."

Lou accepted Richt as a worthy recommendation. He called Bowden to ask permission to interview FSU’s quarterback’s coach about becoming ND’s offensive coordinator.

Bowden told Lou that was just fine — but he didn’t stop there.

"While I got you on the phone," Bowden told Lou, "if you hire him, I want permission to talk to Skip about replacing him."

Whether Bowden knew it or not, he’d put Lou in a bind. He was faced with hiring the man his son had recommended — and then perhaps losing his son — or simply hiring his son, whom Bowden thought enough of to want to add to his staff.

As it turned out, Bowden’s query about possibly hiring Skip turned out to be the nudge Lou needed to elevate his son.

"And so, that's really how I became the coordinator," Skip said.

In 1992, Skip’s first season as offensive coordinator, the Fighting Irish finished 10-1-1 with a No. 4 ranking and a win over Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl. The next year, ND finished 11-1 with a No. 2 ranking in AP and coaches poll, but Irish fans argued they deserved the national title.

I asked him during our chat in the FOX Sports 2022 USFL Coaches Series if he were willing to submit to the AP and coaches poll ranking for that 1993 team. He was definitive.

"No, I'm not willing," he said. "I'm not willing to give that up."

As far as he and many college football fans are concerned, ND won the ‘93 national title. The Fighting Irish were ranked No. 2 and undefeated at 10-0 when they hosted No. 1 Florida State in South Bend.

With Heisman winner Charlie Ward at quarterback, the Irish held on to win 31-24 in what was dubbed (another) "Game of the Century" to improve to 11-0. However, Notre Dame followed that the next week with a loss to Boston College in the final game of its regular season.

And so Florida State was named the No. 1 team in the AP and coaches polls and the consensus national champion, despite being 11-1 like ND with a loss to ND. 

Those teams, that season and that game were significant reasons for the creation of the Bowl Championship Series and, eventually, the College Football Playoff. And it's one reason Holtz, like me, believes championships should be decided on the scoreboard, not by voters or selection committees.

"We didn't have the BCS to be able to win it on the field," Skip said. "You had to win it in the polls, whether that was with the coaches [poll] or the AP. I know coach Bowden had not won a national championship at that point, for as long as he had coached, for as successful as he had been. 

"So, I certainly don't think that [the Seminoles] weren't deserving. I do think they were deserving. But I also think that Notre Dame was very deserving of a national championship that year."

That's one of two seminal moments in Holtz's career that are also important moments in the history of college football. The other came in September 2001.

Holt was coaching with his father again, but this time they were at South Carolina. Nine days after Sept. 11, 2001, the Holtzes’ Gamecocks and Jackie Sherrill’s Mississippi State Bulldogs were tasked with playing the first college football game following that horrific day.

The unranked Gamecocks managed to defeat No. 17 Mississippi State 16-14 in Starkville. But the score, the win, wasn’t so important to Holt on Sept. 20, 2001, at Scott Field.

"Turned out to be a heck of a football game," he said. "But I don't want to say it was eerie, but it was really a special moment, being there, listening to 70,000 people not make a sound and it being just church-pew quiet. It was really a pretty real experience to go through."

The Gamecocks finished the 2001 season 9-3 with a victory over Jim Tressel’s Ohio State Buckeyes in the Outback Bowl and a No. 13 ranking.

Over the next 20 years, Holtz became head coach at East Carolina, South Florida and Louisiana Tech, collected two Conference USA titles — with a win against Houston Gamblers coach Kevin Sumlin (Houston) in the 2008 C-USA title game — and won C-USA Coach of the Year in 2016. 

He’s also familiar with New Orleans Breakers coach Larry Fedora, whom he coached against in C-USA when Fedora was head coach at Southern Miss.

"When I came into this league," Holtz said, "Kevin Sumlin reached out to me, who was already announced as a head coach, and he was one of the selling forces that really got me excited about getting involved with it. And then I had the opportunity to play the same role with Larry Fedora when he got in after me and had the opportunity to get on the phone with him."

It’s important to Holtz that he’s getting his first chance to coach professionals as a head coach alongside friends and fellow first-time pro head coaches Fedora and Sumlin. Their friendship has buoyed him.

Holtz's Stallions take on the New Jersey Generals in the inaugural USFL season opener April 16 at 7:30 p.m. ET at Protective Stadium in Birmingham, Alabama.

"I think there's a lot of great things going on for the USFL right now," he said. "I just couldn't be more excited to be part of it and to have the opportunity to go through this experience. It's gonna be great."

He’s giddy and ready to giddy up.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.