Feb. 15—Perhaps more than any other career, coaching takes you to unexpected places. And perhaps more than any other coach, Jason Eck didn’t need another reminder.
Reporting to work at a public transit center in Macomb, Illinois did the trick, though.
“Kind of a time where (I thought), ‘hey man,'” he laughed, “‘is there something better to be doing?'”
It was 2012. Western Illinois had just fired head coach Mark Hendrickson after finishing 3-8 in his fourth season. That left Eck, the Leathernecks’ first-year offensive line coach, looking for his fourth school in as many seasons, fifth in 10 years. Everything — leaving coaching, leaving football — was on the table.
The one saving grace? He was still getting paid. “Which helped me out,” Eck said.
But there was a catch. Where most schools would buy out the staff and let bygones be bygones, Western Illinois kept them on the payroll and reassigned them to different departments until their contracts ran out. At first Eck was sent to the school’s golf course for offseason maintenance. He changed oil on lawnmowers. Golf carts. Menial stuff.
It wasn’t long before he put in a call to Hendrickson’s agent.
“I said, ‘hey, I think there’s gotta be something different,'” he remembered.
Jude Kiah caught wind of what was going on. As the director of Western Illinois’ bookstore and transit department, he volunteered to supervise two of the departing coaches, giving them each a cubicle at the school’s transit center.
Eck ended up being one of them. At first, it was a little awkward. But Kiah, a former Division III basketball coach in Georgia and longtime high school official, could sympathize with him. Besides, he liked Eck’s personality.
Day by day, they started talking.
“It wasn’t like he was sitting in my office and saying, ‘I’m going to be a Division I head coach,'” Kiah remembered. “He never said that. It was just, ‘I love (coaching), I can make a difference in a program.'”
It’s January 2025. Eck, 47, sits on a black leather couch in an office overlooking University Stadium, another unexpected — but welcome — place. He’s a little over a month into his tenure as New Mexico’s head coach, hired away from Idaho after turning the Vandals’ fortunes in short order.
It is a literal world away from a transit center tucked away in a Midwestern town of 15,000.
Another bad break that could’ve spiraled, the end of his coaching career in relative obscurity.
Of course, it didn’t.
Those that saw him on the way up aren’t surprised.
“I was kidding him that he’s a 25-year overnight success,” Kiah laughed. “He’s really, really paid his dues.”
* * *
In 1979, Jay Eck made the jump.
After three years coaching basketball and teaching social studies at Aquinas High School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the 28-year-old former Xavier guard was hired as an assistant coach at Bradley. His wife, Mary Beth, and 2-year-old son, Jason, were moving for the first time as a family.
“In the back of my mind, I’ve always wanted to get into a Division I school,” Jay told The La Crosse Tribune in June 1979. “The timing was a little off, but that’s okay with this opportunity. When the chance came, I took it.”
With Jay on staff, the Braves went 83-42 with an NCAA Tournament appearance over the next four seasons, winning the NIT in 1982.
Pittsburgh called and he spent two seasons with the Panthers as an assistant, notably recruiting Jerome Lane (of SEND IT IN JEROME! fame) and coaching in the Big East at its most boisterous. By the time he was 35, Jay was back in his home state, a first-time head coach at D-III Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
The ascent continued. In 1987, Jay was named the head coach at Toledo, the face of a D-I program less than a decade after coaching in the prep ranks. A neat, linear rise.
Jason Eck saw it all. The good: If other sons grew up knowing their dads dreaded work, he never got that from Jay. Going to gyms, putting up shots and passing the time chatting with equipment managers didn’t hurt either. “Fun days,” he said.
The bad: If other sons didn’t know how fickle coaching was, Eck did. He was already planning on going to high school in Toledo when the seventh-seeded Rockets made a run in the 1991 MAC Tournament, knocking off No. 2 Miami (Ohio) and No. 3 Ball State in the semis.
All that stood between Toledo and its first NCAA Tournament appearance under Jay was top-seed Eastern Michigan in the final. Jay had a year left on his contract, but there was already some noise that 1991 could be his last. Going dancing would almost assuredly change that.
Toledo lost by one point.
Jay parted ways with the school less than a week later.
“One basket determined where I went to high school,” Eck laughed.
Jay later took a job coaching minor league basketball in Albany, Georgia but kept the family in Atlanta, where his oldest son blossomed into a 6-foot-4, 250-pound offensive lineman at St. Pius X Catholic High School.
Despite D-II offers on the table, Eck decided to walk-on at Wisconsin, returning to his native state and majoring in psychology.
Even while playing, Jason still remembered the good from Jay’s career. “I think in the back of my head I wanted to (coach),” Eck admitted.
One summer, the program set him up with a job at a local freezer company’s warehouse. Eck went to workouts in the morning, clocked in at 10 a.m. and made $13 an hour until 5 p.m.
Days at the gym, it was not.
“I literally, probably six times an hour looked at the clock — when do I get to go home?” he said. “Because it was so boring and monotonous. That stuck with me. You don’t want a job like that, where you’re looking like that.”
Coaching was still a hard sell to Mary Beth Eck, though. Helping steer the family through moves over the years and the fallout from Toledo stayed with Eck’s mom as much as anybody. If she wasn’t outright discouraging Eck from going into the family business, she was pushing him for something else. Law school, maybe becoming a sports agent.
And for a while, that was the plan. With spring of his senior year looming, Eck was scheduled to take the LSAT on a Saturday between the end of the regular season and the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1. The Friday before, his roommates came back from a night out in Madison.
“I think I ended up coming outside and hanging out with them, and then I slept through,” he laughed. “Didn’t take the LSAT. I don’t think I wanted to take it.”
Wisconsin beat UCLA in the Rose Bowl weeks later, and that sealed it — being part of a team, staying part of a team was worth it. In the days after, Eck approached head coach Barry Alvarez and offensive line coach Jim Hueber.
I want to coach.
For Eck, the jump meant spending the next three seasons as an offensive graduate assistant at Wisconsin, solidifying the foundation of his football beliefs. Spence Nowinsky, a first-year defensive graduate assistant, remembered Eck coming in first, leaving the office last. “Tireless worker,” he said. Eck moved on to the same position at Colorado before Idaho hired him as its offensive line coach in 2004.
After two years, then-Idaho head coach Nick Holt left. Dennis Erickson came on for his second run with the Vandals, promoting Eck to tight ends coach and run-game coordinator. When Erickson left a year later, Eck was out of a job for the first time. In an interview years later, he compared the feeling to walking through a “haunted house,” not knowing where anything is.
Two good years coaching at D-II Winona State followed. Eck parlayed that into a stint coaching the offensive line at Ball State under Stan Parrish; the latter was fired in 2010 and Eck wasn’t retained. Eck’s wife, Kimberly, remembered they got the news while she was going into labor with their third son.
Eck landed at FCS Hampton University, but left after a year. Western Illinois picked him up, the Leathernecks went 3-8 and Hendrickson got fired with a year left on his contract.
Eck was reassigned to the golf course. Then the transit center.
Haunted house all over again.
“I did entertain it at that point,” Eck said, “like, should I get out of coaching?”
* * *
There are unsung heroes in every coaching career. For Eck, Kiah is one. He did not make him drive a bus. Or change oil. Whatever Eck needed to do to get a new job, that time was his; if that meant “pounding the pavement” and driving out for interviews, so be it.
But it wasn’t a hands-off deal: Where Kiah counseled, he also challenged. Kiah could see the passion Eck had. And he could relate. Kiah got out of coaching long before he crossed paths with Eck. He knew the sacrifices that had already been made, and the ones that were still to come.
If there was a time for a gut check, it was now.
“If I’m honest, I was trying to talk him out of it,” Kiah said. “Because it was so high of a cost. Where do you want your kids to (be)? Where do you want your kids to root and grow?
“Do you really want to do this?”
Eck’s answer? “Constantly hustling,” Kiah said, always a phone to his ear and pacing around the office, working every lead.
“I could sense, like, this guy is all-in,” Kiah added. “He knows this sucks, but he’s willing to pay the price.”
It needed to be at the right place, though.
“That was the first year I ever really turned down jobs when I didn’t have a job,” Eck said.
A junior college in Mississippi was a no-go. As was a private D-III, where recruiting felt more akin to a “pyramid scheme” than actual roster-building.
Eck was intrigued by an opportunity to work for Lance Leipold during his uber-successful run at D-III Wisconsin-Whitewater — but he would’ve had to coach and teach. At Winona State, he taught two courses: Weightlifting and bowling.
“I just kinda turned the kids loose in the weight room or told them to bowl two games and I’d watch film on my computer,” he laughed. Whitewater, also a no-go.
Then he got a break — sort of. After putting his name in the hat for the offensive line job at FCS North Dakota, he found out they were hiring a coach away from the same position at D-II Minnesota State-Mankato. He reached out to the Mankato head coach, only to get a cursory call back.
Thanks, but we don’t have a job open.
“I was like, ‘yeah, you might,'” Eck laughed. “‘Just keep me in mind if you do.’ I’m like, breaking news to the head coach that guys are leaving.”
By July 2013, Eck was out of Macomb and back in the game as Minnesota State’s offensive coordinator and line coach. Within a year, he was joined by Jake Dickert, the program’s new defensive coordinator plucked from D-II Augustana (South Dakota) College.
To Dickert, there were clear signs Eck was different. For one, offensive coordinator and line coach — “How many people do you see do that?” he said. And where Dickert was stern, Eck called a “frustrating” offense in his image — fundamental, physical, thoughtful — while finding ways to keep it light.
“He operates in organized chaos,” said Dickert, now the head coach at Wake Forest. “The way he thinks and how he calls plays and what he sees — he’s not afraid to take chances.
“It’s a fun kind of style and mentality to be around.”
It also boasted results. In 2014, Minnesota State scored a then-school-record 40 points per game and rolled undefeated to its first national championship appearance before falling to Colorado State-Pueblo. Eck says he probably should’ve stayed with the Mavericks for a little longer. But back then, he opted to move on and coach FCS Montana State’s offensive line under Rob Ash.
After one season, Ash was fired. Eck wasn’t retained.
If it was the same story, it didn’t feel like it.
“I knew he had head coaching in his future,” Ash said.
* * *
John Stiegelmeier saw it for years. All of a sudden, Eck’s visor would go flying. His shirt would come untucked. And like that, he was on the move, a wave of spit and sound crashing across the practice field.
“Him running as fast as he could — which is not very fast — up to the guy and getting real close to him and just, you know,” the former South Dakota State head coach laughed, “getting after him.”
In 2016, Stiegelmeier hired Eck as the Jackrabbits’ offensive line coach, a burst of energy added to a perennial FCS contender. Over time, Eck continued to stand out in “democratic” staff meetings, Stiegelmeier seeing what Ash did.
“You can tell a guy’s growth and his depth of thinking and his ability to analyze all the different moving parts — whether it’s a play or travel or camp or recruiting — and come up with a really solid answer,” Stiegelmeier said. “Because normally with 10 assistants, you might get 10 different answers. Jason’s answers were really, really good to the extent that, I mean, he was like a head coach the way he thought.”
After a year with the Jackrabbits, Stiegelmeier made a comment to Eck in passing.
You’re gonna be a really good head coach.
No head coach had ever said that to Eck before. And he admits there might’ve been a motivational play behind Steigelmeier’s comments. “If you set kind of high expectations and show that you believe in people, a lot of times, they will reach those expectations,” Eck said.
But what if? In 2019, Eck was promoted to offensive coordinator, winning AFCA FCS Assistant Coach of the Year honors after his first season.
A pause gave him reason to revisit Stiegelmeier’s comments. In August 2020, the Missouri Valley Football Conference moved South Dakota State and the rest of its members’ schedules to the spring.Eck was able to watch his oldest son, Jaxton, play linebacker at Brookings (South Dakota) High School on Friday nights.
How much Eck would be involved was a question. In the most pragmatic sense, he didn’t think South Dakota State linebackers coach Jimmy Rogers would recruit Jaxton; Rogers wanted speed above all and Eck passed down “slow O-lineman genes.”
“That kinda had me thinking, ‘I should look at some things,'” Eck said.
* * *
In 2021, Tom Sawyer — Eck’s old boss at Winona State — announced he was retiring at the end of the season. Eck was interested, even going as far as reaching out to Sawyer to express as much.
Nothing could be done, however, until the job was officially posted. By that time, South Dakota State was kicking off a playoff run and Eck had been contacted by a search committee on Idaho State’s behalf, later taking an interview.
The Bengals’ in-state rival — Idaho — was also looking for a new head coach.
“That (interview) probably gave me the confidence, too — ‘well, heck, if a team in the Big Sky is reaching out to me about their head job, I probably should look into this Idaho job,'” he remembered.
In December 2021, he was announced as a first-time head coach for the Vandals, notably calling a program decimated by the drop down to FCS a “sleeping giant” at his introductory press conference.
He didn’t wake it so much as drag it out of bed and back to relevancy.
In 2022, the Vandals opened the Eck era as 30-point underdogs against Washington State and Dickert, the Cougars’ head coach, losing 24-17 in a game that went down to the final minute.
“In true Jason fashion, he comes up to me and says, ‘hey, I just helped you beat Wisconsin,'” Dickert remembered, “‘because now they’re not going to take you seriously.'”
Washington State beat Wisconsin 17-14 one week later.
“That’s just his personality, his competitive nature” Dickert laughed.
At Idaho, moral victories shifted to real ones. Quickly. The Vandals finished 7-5 that first year, upsetting No. 3 Montana on the road and improving by three wins. They went 9-4 in 2023, smashing Nevada 33-6 and finishing second in the Big Sky. The turnaround was in full effect.
Then quarterback Gevani McCoy, an All-Big Sky honoree the latter season, transferred to Oregon State. The Vandals were losing a foundational piece, victimized by their own success.
Or not. Idaho won 10 games the next season, beating Wyoming and playing No. 3 Oregon tight.
“You don’t recruit a program. Maybe you do now with some of the schools and NIL, but you build football programs,” Steigelmeier said. “It takes a lot of guys and a lot of hard work to keep putting (together) those layers of the foundation of a program.
“Jason’s like that.”
That Eck has been tasked with the same mission at New Mexico is a point of pride among those that saw him as a fresh-faced graduate assistant, a temporary transit center employee, an assistant at the height of his powers. Nothing was ever linear.
Or easy.
None of it quite mattered. An office overlooking University Stadium, a new program to rebuild, might be the simplest reminder.
“I thought it would have taken a little longer,” Kiah said, “but I should have known Jason better than that.”
