The issue with the title of “youngest head coach in college football” is that, at some point, you are no longer the youngest coach. That’s the thing about age.
Yes, Division II Texas-Permian Basin’s Kris McCullough is the youngest head coach in the nation, at 28 years old. For seven months earlier this year, McCullough was the second youngest, behind NAIA Waldorf’s 26-year-old Chase Paramore, before Paramore took an assistant job elsewhere. So McCullough got the title back, as he first did when he became DII East Central’s head coach at 26 years old last year.
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“You make a five-year plan, and within three years, you accomplish it and now you have to redo it,” McCullough said.
It’s better to be known for accomplishments than age, and McCullough has very quickly made waves throughout DII and college football by winning big at two schools in two years.
In one season leading East Central last year, McCullough took the Tigers to a 9-3 record, their best since becoming an NCAA-level program. In his first season at Texas-Permian Basin, the Falcons are 9-1, their best record in the program’s short history. They made headlines with a 96-0 win over NAIA Texas College on Sept. 2.
On Saturday, UTPB faces Central Washington for the Lone Star Conference championship. The Falcons could make the DII playoff for the first time in school history.
“He’s an old soul,” UTPB athletic director Todd Dooley said. “He’s wiser than his years.”
The Falcons are fifth in Division II in yards per game and scoring, averaging 46.4 points per game. That’s up from 24.1 points (97th) a year ago. McCullough, who calls offensive plays, doesn’t run some newfangled version of the Air Raid. It’s a balanced, tempo attack with a vertical passing game and RPOs operated behind Wisconsin’s blocking schemes.
UTPB is 10th nationally in rushing and 13th in passing. He pulls from everywhere.
“Nothing is new nowadays,” McCullough said. “I’ll see something on TV and hey, that’ll work in our system. There’s a play called ‘Buckeye’ that we got from Ohio State. You see something, steal it, it works and you keep it forever.”
McCullough is one of the rare coaches who didn’t play college football. The Arkansas native went to Henderson State to be an accountant because he was always good with numbers. He worked at a local grocery store and cut meat at the deli to make money on the side. But a few months in, he didn’t enjoy the accounting classes. So he emailed Henderson State’s offensive coordinator and started working as a student assistant. He didn’t even know what a coaching career entailed, but by age 19, he was recruiting players.
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“That jump-started my career,” McCullough said. “It gets you a lot more experience than playing. That’s probably how I became a coordinator and head coach so young.”
After graduating, he spent a spring at Old Dominion and then one year as the running backs coach at Fairmont State in West Virginia. He arrived at East Central, in Ada, Okla., in 2018 as quarterbacks coach. He was promoted to offensive coordinator after two seasons and held that role until he was named interim head coach in spring 2022 when head coach Al Johnson returned to Wisconsin, where he’d played and previously coached. McCullough picked up the Wisconsin rushing attack working under Johnson.
McCullough lost his first two games at East Central but won the next six and earned the full-time head coaching job. When the UTPB job opened, McCullough wasn’t on Dooley’s radar at first. The program, which began play in 2016, had one winning season in its history. But it’s in a rich area for talent in West Texas, and the Falcons play at Ratliff Stadium, home of Odessa Permian High and the stadium where the “Friday Night Lights” movie was filmed.
Dooley felt UTPB wasn’t pushing hard enough to be competitive as a young program. When someone suggested McCullough’s name, the athletic director called around. He got good feedback, but he also had coaches asking why he was considering a 27-year-old and not them.
“I wasn’t looking at his age as much as I was looking at somebody who had actually called timeout before,” Dooley said. “He’d been a head coach and checked that box for us. Age never played into it.”
McCullough saw an opportunity to take a step up.
“At East Central, we’d kind of taken it as far as we could go,” he said. “Just because of resources and location. With this opportunity, the facilities are top-notch, probably the best in Division II. We have an airport 10 minutes away, allowing us to hit the transfer world and get a lot of talent that way. You have a lot of oil money out here that allows you to get some things done that you can’t everywhere.”
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McCullough found a donor to help create a nutrition center. He added player amenities in the locker room like a PlayStation, cornhole boards and massage chairs. That may not seem like much for an Alabama, but in Division II, that’s living the life.
“That made guys want to be in there together,” UTPB fifth-year linebacker Hayden Kelly said. “In fall camp, the locker room was full all day. That was different. The guys wanted to hang out with each other. That’s an important part of winning. Guys wanting to play for the dude next to them.”
The culture change clicked in as soon as the season started. Two weeks after the 96-0 win over Texas College, UTPB beat DII Southwest Baptist 86-7 — one year after the Falcons lost 41-17 to that same school. Quarterback Kenny Hrncir, who followed McCullough from East Central to UTPB, is 12th in Division II in passing yards per game and has thrown 28 touchdowns and five interceptions. McCullough says Hrncir will become the team’s quarterbacks coach when he’s done playing.
“We joke all the time, I’m about the age he was when he was recruiting me,” Hrncir said. “We’ve both grown up together.”
It’s been a quick rise for McCullough, who didn’t plan or imagine any of this. He now says he only wants to be a head coach, able to bring his son to the office all the time and set his own schedule. If he keeps winning, that won’t be much of a problem, no matter his age.
(Photos courtesy of Texas-Permian Basin Athletics)
