FCS coach who last month called out a rival is at it once again

Tennessee Tech is riding an unprecedented run of success in college football, going 23-3 dating to the final month of the 2024 season.

And the Golden Eagles reinvented head coach, Bobby Wilder, can’t seem to stop talking about the opposition’s leaders.

Less than two months ago, an animated and irritated Wilder took aim at Chattanooga coach Rusty Wright, calling him an "under-the-bus guy."

This week, a much more jovial Wilder turned his attention to East Tennessee State coach Will Healy, whom he accused of doling out an overabundance of “rat poison.”

“Let me point out the prop I have this week. This is a bottle of rat poison,” said Wilder, holding a spray-bottle with a 'Rat Poison' logo affixed. “My good friend, Will Healy, had nothing but great things to say about us [at Healy’s news conference previewing the game]. So, as I learned from Nick Saban, you gotta be careful of that rat poison.

“I’m doing this jokingly, because Will and I have a relationship. I have a lot of respect for Will and the biggest reason is that we both got fired. He was at Austin Peay, took a terrible program and made them relevant, won coach of the year, moved on to Charlotte. Did a good job there, built that program back up. Went to a bowl game and then gets fired.”

Despite the two Volunteer State programs being separated by just 200 miles, Saturday’s Oct. 31 meeting will be their first in football since 1984.

Tech, ranked No. 10 in the AFCA FCS Top 25, is a first-year member of the Southern Conference. No. 18 ETSU will host just the third game featuring two ranked teams in program history, Healy said during his Monday, Oct. 26 news conference.

“Bobby is a guy that I've known for a long time,” Healy told reporters. “My first time playing against him was in 2019. The job that he did at Old Dominion with taking them from nothing to an FCS national title contender to winning 10 games his third year in the FBS and Conference USA and winning the conference is unbelievable.

“I think guys like him don't get enough credit for what they did to put Old Dominion on the map. And everybody thinks it's going to be better whenever they get rid of them and then they figure out how good of a job he did and how difficult it is to win at those places. Now, he's kind of reinvented himself. I think he's won a ton of football games. He's gotten (Tennessee Tech) invested and all behind their football program.”

Wilder also pointed to the parallel paths the two coaches took to get here. Wilder was fired at Old Dominion and spent time out of football. Healy was dismissed by Charlotte and later landed an off-the-field role working for Gus Malzahn at Central Florida before taking over East Tennessee after the 2024 season.

“You’re at the bottom and struggling to get a job. He had to go be a special assistant to the head coach/analyst,” Wilder said. “I was out of it. Now, we’ve both got that next opportunity.

“There’s not a lot of us that have been Division I head coaches, had success, got fired and got back to a place and had success again. So, there’s a lot of respect there for that.”

Still, Wilder couldn’t let all of Healy’s praise go unchecked. He deployed what he called a “fact-check.”

“When he talked about us being top of the league and top of the country in a lot of categories, I had to fact-check him,” said Wilder, who noted both ETSU and Tech score about 33 points per game and allow 21. “My fact-check of my guy Will Healy, who’s spreading a lot of rat poison right now, is that the teams are pretty evenly matched when you look through all of the metrics.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: FCS coach who last month called out a rival is at it once again