STORRS — The smell of wet paint was apparent as one walked through the halls of the UConn football headquarters this week. “Notice anything?” new coach Jason Candle said. “White. Brightens things up.”
His first season as coach is three months away, and while it is clear Candle, who came from a long, successful tenure at Toledo to replace Jim Mora, will apply his own shades to the Huskies’ canvas, it’s still too early for the outsider to imagine what that will look like. What we do know is that after losing the coach who dragged the program up from the depths of 1-11 in 2021 to back-to-back bowl games, UConn football does not seem to have lost momentum, a win in and of itself.
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The optimism of the last two seasons also wafts in the air at Shenkman Training Center.
“When you look around here, what the visual part of this looks like is, it screams ‘alignment,’” Candle said, sipping a green smoothie during a 30-minute sit-down with The Courant. “To be successful in any collegiate program today, you have to have alignment from the top down. We are so successful in so many sports, and football has been so successful the last couple of years as well, it’s a good, comfortable feeling to be around other people that expect success and expects to win. When I came here, what jumped out at me, the bricks and mortar are great, but if you have great campus alignment with the athletic department, then you have a chance to reach the potential of the program.”
UConn is going into its fifth season as an independent program, a path that seemed like a road to nowhere in 2021. Now that only UConn and Notre Dame are operating as FBS independents, it could be harder still to schedule opponents and sustain it. So the program’s ultimate goal remains the same — to get into one of the four remaining power conferences and access the TV revenue only that level of FBS football offers. When UConn appeared close, but was jilted by the Big 12 in August of 2023, it had a deflating effect on the program. But the success of the last two football seasons, paired with continued success in basketball, figures to put UConn in conversations when the next round of shuffling begins.
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And this may be the most complicated part of a UConn football coach’s task, to focus on the schedule assembled while hoping and preparing for the possibility of the move that could change the trajectory of the program.
“Let’s not sugarcoat this thing, we want to be in a Power Four league,” Candle said. “There’s no dancing around that. But that’s global thinking. You can think globally, but act locally. You have to understand in college athletics, you learn from the past, you prepare for what lies ahead in the future, but, damn, if you don’t produce in the present, you have no shot. So if we don’t continue to stack good days and turn them into good weeks, it doesn’t matter where we end up, we’re not going to be ready for it. So, yeah, we want to be there. Yes, we’re preparing that way, yes, we recruit that way. We may even talk like that, but at the end of the day, whatever task is in front of us, big or small, we’ve got to handle those things with the right attention to detail.”
When UConn was looking for a coach in 2021, the hierarchy did have a conversation with Candle, who was in the midst of a string of winning seasons and bowl appearances at Toledo. In the end, Mora, who had NFL and UCLA experience proved the perfect fit to kick-start UConn while rejuvenating his career. After doing both, he moved on to Colorado State last November, leaving behind a job that had become far more attractive than before in Storrs.
Candle, 81-46 with eight bowl appearances, had spent nearly his entire life playing and coaching in the state of Ohio. At 46, he decided now was the time to move his wife, Nicole, and their three children to a new place. They are about to close on a new house in the area, the children to move when their school year ends in Ohio. Candle’s wife, Nicole, has run the Boston Marathon several times and he has this in common with roughly half the UConn base: he’s a Red Sox fan. Went to a game at Fenway years ago and hooked.
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At UConn, it was the “alignment” to which he alluded, more than bricks and mortar, that resonated and he accepted the job, with a six-year, $15 million contract.
“There comes a point in time where you’re looking for a new challenge,” Candle said. “Where you would do something different. Toledo was very good to me, gave me an opportunity to be a head coach at a very young age. We had a lot of young men who reached their full potential in our program.”
Building his way
As Mora relied heavily on the transfer portal to bring in experienced players and turn UConn around quickly, Candle was sticking to his philosophy of recruiting high school players and developing them. Most of the additions he had made to the Huskies roster, during a whirlwind period, are players who followed him from Toledo.
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“I thought we had done as good a job as anybody at the place I just come from of managing the portal,” Candle said. “The approach of the portal is always going to be to supplement the roster. I felt like if we ever got into a situation where the portal had to save the roster, then ‘man, oh, man, we are in trouble.’ We were able to retain some great players, two draft picks this year, three years in a row where Toledo had a top 65 pick in the draft, so our good players stayed. Coming into a new environment where everyone is trying to their go separate way to ‘see what’s out there for me,’ because that’s a young person’s thought process, that was a very difficult five, six weeks for us. You have to put together a coaching staff, take your time that way, hire great teachers, good character people themselves. From there, you want to build the locker room. The locker room is the most critical part of this thing, because if it’s not the most critical part of it, then you will be using the portal to save your back side. So I know that formula works.”
With new rules creating one portal period, new coaches had to work fast. Within a few weeks, Candle hired 34 coaches and staffers and brought in over 70 transfers and recruits.
In discussions of power conferences, the focus is on the things UConn does not have, At or near the top of that list is an on-campus stadium, with Rentschler Field 23 miles away in East Hartford. Candle sighs, gives a little eye-roll at the mention of that. Unlike most of his predecessors, Candle does not come from a background of NFL or power conference experience, and he is more focused on what UConn has, than what others have.
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“Sometimes, it’s human nature to try to find the warts, try to find what’s wrong,” Candle said. “It’s low-hanging fruit for a conversation piece. There are so many good things to worry about and focus on. You’re at the stadium this year, for the first time, seven times. Usually, it’s six games. What is the day-to-day routine, what does the day-to-day operation look like for every kid? ‘Well, coach, I want to go be a pro football player.’ … Well, you don’t sleep next to the stadium when you play for the Cleveland Browns. You GO to the stadium. When the game is over, you GO home. You don’t go to the stadium to lift weights, you go to the facility.
“Look, we’re in a unique spot. The campus is not next to a metropolitan area. All the people live in a metropolitan area. Why wouldn’t the stadium be where it is. To me, logistically, it makes a lot of sense. Now., can we create the best game-day environment there? … We are going to put a great product on the field.”
Mentors
Candle is a student of football history. When asked what coaches he would most like to meet, he noted that most of them are long gone. His main inspiration came from his coach at Division III Mount Union, where Larry Kehres won 92.9 percent of his games across 27 seasons.
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“I started coaching in 2002, made my mind up this was going to be a career, you start watching the Bob Stoops of the world, the Urban Meyers, the guys who had a ton of success at the college level at that time. For me, I had Larry Kehres as a college coach (at Mount Union), more so as a man than a coach, a guy I could see, be around each and every day and be such a positive influence on me at that age, that was the motivation for me to get into coaching. It always goes back to your foundation, and Coach Kehres was the foundation for me.”
From afar, Candle came to admire Jon Gruden’s offensive designs and charismatic presence in the NFL and on ESPN. Now a media personality, Gruden has become a mentor and sounding board, he and Candle talk frequently.
“If you would say, ‘hey, who’s a coach you could pick up the phone and call and really value his opinion,” Candle said. “From a schematic standpoint and offensive perspective, when I was growing up, that was the guy. He was doing it at the NFL level as good as anybody, the commitment to being great was always visible, infectious personality, the people gravitate toward him. He did it the right way, impact the player at the pro level. You hear guys talking about his impact today and they’re very thankful for that. I don’t know if you always get that from NFL coaches.
“… So I reached out to him a few years ago to sit down with him and talk a little football, and I had very specific questions and he took the time to give me very specific answers. I really gravitated toward that and thought, ‘this is a guy that maybe isn’t doing what he wants to do, coaching football anymore, but man, oh, man he still feels like he has a lot to give to the game because he has a lot of respect for what the game has given him and uses his platform to do what he can for young coaches.”
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‘They’re still kids’
Everything but the goalposts is ever-shifting in college football. With UConn bringing in a fraction of what power conference schools get in revenue, its national brand tied to men’s and women’s basketball, the future is not clear, though that has been true for quite some time. More conference shifts are possible, expanded playoffs that could give even an independent UConn program a chance to compete for a spot, are possible. Revenue sharing is changing the game.
“You’re at the mercy of how everything is going on the outside,” Candle said. “Everybody wants to play in the biggest league, everybody wants to have the biggest budget, everybody wants to have the best players. You put yourself in a position where you play the long game a little bit, where you can position yourself to be where you want to be. I don’t know what conference championships look like in 24 months, what college football looks like in 18 to 24 months. It’s hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
Coaching, however, is still coaching for Jason Candle, whatever the future of college football brings. And to the task of coaching college students and football players, he is anchored.
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“As a parent, your children force you to adapt in a lot of ways,” he said. “Some things are non-negotiable, they’re hard lines you will never give up on as a parent. But there are other things where the world does change, and as much resistance as you may want to put toward that, you have to change and mold to what’s going on. If you’re able and willing to do that as a parent, why would you not be able to do that in a career? Because these are still kids, people say, ‘they’re pros, they get paid.’ They’re not. They don’t think like they’re 35 or 27, they think like an 18 or 19 year old. So the human element of this, even though all the other things going around college athletics right now, this is still a very young influenced mind that has to be influenced the right way. You’re here to get a college education, you’re here to be an NFL draft pick, it’s possible to do both those things at the same time, but it requires elite behavior.”
How does he want players to remember their Candle experience?
“That he was real,” Candle said. “That he never asked us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself, that he was in the fight with us and not fighting against us, he was a guy who fought for his players when it was time to do that.”
