Adam Ponzio

In 2013 Jason Eck was changing the oil on lawnmowers and golf carts. He was a Division I offensive line coach. Western Illinois had fired the head coach, and rather than pay out what it owed the assistants, the school kept them on payroll and sent them to work other jobs on campus. Eck got the golf course. Then they moved him to a cubicle at the public transit center in Macomb, Illinois. Here is how he describes it. "I got transferred to the guy who ran the bookstore and the campus bus system." Saturday night his New Mexico team is 5 and 1 with the best scoring defense in the country. He has five kids. Here is what he says about those years. "We've been in bad debt, bad financial shape. I've got five kids so it was nuts." The man who ran that bookstore and bus system, Jude Kiah, is the one who talked him out of quitting. Kiah asked him whether he really wanted to walk away from everything he had put in. Eck started hunting jobs instead. By that July he was the offensive coordinator at Minnesota State. He walked on at Wisconsin as an offensive lineman. He thought about law school and never took the test. After the Rose Bowl he asked to coach instead. His own dad coached college basketball. Toledo fired Jay Eck in 1991, less than a week after a one point loss with an NCAA tournament bid on it. Jason took job after job after that. His wife Kimberly found out he had lost the Ball State job while she was going into labor with their third son. Then South Dakota State, where John Stiegelmeier told him he would make a really good head coach. Idaho hired him in December of 2021 and he went 26 and 13 there. New Mexico hired him two years ago. Last season the Lobos won nine games, beat UCLA, made their first bowl since 2016 and sold out a home game for the first time since 2007. He was Mountain West coach of the year. And one of his linebackers is his son. Jaxton Eck came out of Brookings, South Dakota with offers from Sioux Falls and Northern State. Division II. He played for his dad at Idaho, and when his dad took the New Mexico job he had North Carolina State, Michigan State and Stanford asking for him. He went to New Mexico. Last season he had 115 tackles and shared Mountain West defensive player of the year. Father and son won conference awards in the same season. Now the part that complicates it. One good year is not a program. New Mexico has been bad for most of the last fifty years, and the hard truth about coaches who win there is that somebody bigger calls. But here is what Jason Eck says now. He does not know whether he would ever have become a head coach if his son had not played football. Thirteen years ago he was changing oil on a lawnmower. What were you doing right before the job that changed everything for you?