Charles Huff will be the next head coach at Marshall, according to our sister site West Virginia Sports Now, making him the third former member of James Franklin’s Penn State staff to become a college head coach elsewhere.
Ricky Rahne is now the head coach at old Dominion, and Joe Moorhead left PSU to become head coach at Mississippi State. Now, Moorhead had already been a head coach at Fordham, so he’s viewed differently among all the members of Franklin’s coaching tree.
Huff, 37, was Penn State’s running backs coach and special teams coordinator from 2014-17. He previously served on Franklin’s staff at Vanderbilt in 2011 as offensive quality control coach.
Huff left Penn State in 2017 to join Moorhead’s staff as associate head coach and running backs coach at Mississippi State. He stayed there just one season before becoming associate head coach and running backs coach at Alabama the past two years.
Current PSU running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider also had been considered a potential candidate for the job at Marshall, but there was never any confirmation of him interviewing for the position.
The news of Huff getting a head coaching job capped a busy week for former Penn State coaches.
Former Nittany Lion head coach Bill O’Brien is expected to be named offensive coordinator at Alabama any day now. The move has been expected for several days but has not been finalized yet.
This is what Alabama coach Nick Saban had to say about O’Brien to ESPN earlier this week:
“(He) went to Penn State in probably the most trying times of any great program coming off a lot of crazy stuff and did an outstanding job of sort of rebuilding that program, getting players to stay there, having a real representative, positive program.
“I think he did a really good job in Houston when he was the head coach. I think when he became the general manager, maybe things didn’t go exactly like he would have liked trying to have both roles. But having been a head coach in that league, I know how difficult it is to do both of those things. Probably impossible.
“So, based on the body of work up until then, I think he’s an outstanding coach and really good person. He’s got a great family.”
Another former Penn State coach also was in the news this week, as longtime defensive coordinator Tom Bradley was let go by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He had been the team’s defensive backs coach the past three years after spending decades in the college game.
Bradley is still only 64 years old, so he could still try to find another coaching job.
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