Click here to subscribe today or Login.
For football coaches, even ones at major colleges, the life-changing moments aren’t as glamorous as one might expect.
Ricky Rahne’s came in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Rahne was driving to visit a recruit for Penn State on Monday, when he was still the Nittany Lions offensive coordinator.
Then Old Dominion’s athletic director called him and offered him the Monarchs head coaching job.
“You get the call that, quite frankly, you’re not sure you’re ever gonna get,” Rahne said in an interview with Old Dominion’s website after being formally introduced as the new coach on Wednesday morning in Norfolk.
“I was actually recruiting. So I turned the car around, parked in a Dunkin’ Donuts lot, and accepted the job, which is a surreal moment for me. Then started driving and just calling everybody I could to make sure that we could get this place going in the right direction.”
And so, for the third time in four years, Lions coach James Franklin is looking for a new offensive coordinator.
For Franklin, it’s certainly more pleasant this way, as he and Rahne have traded glowing remarks about each other this week — just as it was when Joe Moorhead took the Mississippi State head job in December 2017, with both cases coming after a 10-2 regular season and a New Year’s Six bowl bid. In November 2015, he fired John Donovan from the position less than 24 hours after going 7-5.
Franklin did call this move “bittersweet,” as he and Rahne were both on staff at Kansas State starting in 2006. And when Franklin landed his own first head coaching job at Vanderbilt in 2011, he hired Rahne to coach his quarterbacks. Rahne followed Franklin to Penn State in 2014 and spent nine total seasons working for him.
“Coach Franklin has been a professional mentor and a personal friend,” Rahne said. “The last nine years has been an incredible ride. His faith and confidence in me is something that I’ll never be able to repay. I can only hope that I will be able to pass that spirit on to the next generation of coaches.”
Indeed, Franklin’s recommendation played a major role in Rahne landing the Monarchs job. FootballScoop.com had reported on Sunday that three candidates had emerged for the job in Rahne, South Carolina defensive coordinator Travaris Robinson and Cincinnati defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman.
Old Dominion athletic director Wood Selig emphasized at Wednesday’s press conference that a conversation with Franklin helped put Rahne over the top.
“He was telling us how ready (Rahne) was, how supportive he would be,” Selig said. “He would have the coaching staffs do professional development together. They would do camps together. If anything, we might become a Penn State South with the relationship that he intends to maintain with coach Rahne.
“That gave us some comfort, too, because personally, I think James Franklin is one of the best in the business and coach Rahne spent a lot of years with James Franklin.”
Since being promoted to Lions coordinator, Rahne had said repeatedly he couldn’t see himself as a head coach, where his focus would have to extend well beyond just the football.
But he said Wednesday his thinking began to change this past offseason as he gave it some more thought. In an interview with The Athletic, Rahne said his annual family summer trip to see as many different MLB stadiums as possible, he found himself thinking about his future on the long drives from city to city.
“I started to reflect on all the lessons I learned from coach Franklin, all the lessons I learned from (former Kansas State coach) Bill Snyder,” Rahne told The Athletic.” And I thought to myself, you know, I would be pretty good at this job. And so that’s where it started to change.
“I also, quite frankly, was looking for a new challenge. I was looking for something that I thought would challenge me in some different areas. And I just feel, even since I’ve started this process of even having this opportunity, I felt reinvigorated and it’s been energizing on a number of different fronts.”
The next week will be a frantic one for Rahne, as he tries to secure Old Dominion’s handful of verbal commitments before the early signing period, which opens Wednesday, while putting together a staff.
At least one name will be following him from Happy Valley. Lions graduate assistant Mark Dupuis, who helped work with the wide receivers, announced Wednesday he had joined the Monarchs as a full assistant coach.
For Rahne, it’s a start. Now the real work begins.
“I had one of the best jobs in the country,” Rahne said. “And in order to leave that and leave people that I’ve known and worked with — some of those people I’ve worked with for nine years in a row — this place had to be somewhere where we could win.
“Obviously there’s an unbelievable recruiting base here, the infrastructure is already here and so is the stadium and the facility. And then just the people here were unbelievable. I felt like everybody was going to be on the same page, aligned in order to win games.”