Georgia State Is Latest CFB Team Left Scrambling After Shawn Elliott Departure

The former Georgia State Panthers football coach is the latest to leave the head coaching ranks for an assistant job elsewhere.

Shawn Elliott rejoined the South Carolina coaching staff on Thursday, taking over as tight ends coach according to ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg. The move is a welcome one for the Gamecocks program. The 50-year-old was a popular assistant under Steve Spurrier and served as interim head coach in 2015 after the Hall of Famer’s midseason retirement.

However, Elliott’s decision leaves his now-former program at Georgia State in a very tough spot.

With Elliott’s resignation this late in the offseason, the Panthers must bump back spring football practice, which was already underway, and their spring game. The program announced the scheduling change on Thursday, as it must now find a new head coach extremely late in the cycle.

Georgia State’s 2023 Famous Idaho Potato Bowl victory proved to be Shawn Elliott’s final game with the program :: Brian Losness/USA TODAY Sports

Elliott joins the growing list of coaches who have departed college head coaching jobs for assistant roles, whether in the NFL or at more prominent college programs. While not unprecedented previously, such decisions have become a definite trend this offseason, including moves such as Jeff Hafley’s leaving Boston College for the Green Bay Packers and Chip Kelly’s jumping from UCLA to be Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.

After Hafley’s departure from BC, it was reported that he wanted to focus more on football and less on “fundraising, NIL and recruiting.” Shortly after the Elliott news broke Thursday morning, ESPN’s Matt Barrie shared a similar story about this situation.

“Spoke with Coach Elliott at the Senior Bowl in Mobile. He told me NIL challenges and player retention at Georgia St was going to get worse in this new era,” Barrie posted to X (formerly Twitter). “Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.”

NIL and the transfer portal certainly have changed the sport in a significant way, and the ongoing shifts seem likely to hurt Group of 5 programs such as Georgia State the most. However, it should be noted that some of these coaches—including Hafley, Kelly and Elliott—made moves a year before they might have found themselves on very hot seats.

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Elliott was 41–44 in seven years at Georgia State, including a sub-.500 record in Sun Belt Conference play, and he’s obviously very comfortable at South Carolina. Hafley was 22–26 at Boston College and never finished above .500 in ACC play. Kelly was the subject of serious hot seat rumors at UCLA late in the ’23 season and may have saved his job with a late-season blowout of rival USC. He reportedly was looking at NFL assistant jobs before Hafley’s departure from BC opened up the job for Bill O’Brien and consequently gave him a spot at Ohio State.

There may very well be something to the NIL argument, but Elliott still will have to deal with it as South Carolina competes with bigger SEC programs. And as the trend of coaches’ taking a step back to open up new opportunities grows, a parallel trend of coaches getting out of town a year early may be opening up right beside it.

Of course, it’s often the programs at the bottom of Division I college football left scrambling to keep up.