By the time Joe Osovet learned he wasn’t going to be retained as the tight ends coach at Tennessee under Josh Heupel in early February, it was so late in the assistant coaching churn that few comparable jobs were available.
“This carousel goes from now up until the (American Football Coaches Association) convention, and then all the spots are pretty much filled,” Osovet told USA TODAY Sports. “You’ll get some turnover because of the NFL but it’s not a lot. It’s hard the later this thing goes to find a quality gig at a level you want to be at.”
Osovet, who had bought a house in Knoxville shortly before Jeremy Pruitt got fired, wasn’t entirely in the lurch. With a year left on his contract at Tennessee that was set to pay him $250,000 for a year starting Feb. 1, he could stay patient while spending more time with his wife and two children after coaching continuously since 1995, largely at the junior college level.
“Talking to so many people in the industry, they were like, ‘Treat this as a blessing,’ ” Osovet said. “You want to give your family as much stability as you can.”
But unlike Football Bowl Subdivision head coaches, where getting fired often comes with a multimillion-dollar windfall, their assistants generally can’t afford to go sit on a beach for very long. For someone like Osovet, who was working on a two-year deal that is considered standard for assistant coaches these days, the buyout is merely a buffer to help them survive until the next job comes around.
“If you’re a head coach who has one of these multi-million dollar deals, those guys aren’t under any pressure to automatically coach again,” said Nick Meeker, an agent at Coaches Inc., which represents around two dozen FBS assistants. “But for 90-plus percent of the coaching world, especially assistants, even if they have…
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