Saints first-year defensive backs coach Terry Joseph used to love working in college football, having spent the last 19 years at some of the biggest brands in the game.
His stops included LSU, Notre Dame, Texas A&M, Tennessee and most recently, Texas.
Earlier this year, Joseph joined the ranks of new NFL coaches who’ve seized opportunities to leave the college game behind, disillusioned by the effects of recent rule changes liberalizing player movement and payments.
Recruiting, an area where Joseph once thrived, isn’t what it used to be. It’s become an almost 24-7 grind that is more centered around player finances and retention than mentorship and development, he said.
“The part of recruiting that I really enjoyed was connecting with players and their families, really kind of talking about how they were going to develop from being this young man in high school to a grown adult,” Joseph said, adding that he’d pledge to recruits to “be a coach for the rest of your life.”
But in recent years, Joseph noted, “I kind of felt personally that the relationship building on recruiting was fading away because you had all of these external factors — the transfer portal; name, image and likeness — that were becoming so much bigger.
“I wanted to be a recruiter and a coach, not necessarily a financial planner, a tax-information person, or answering questions about when is the check coming,” he said.
So, when Saints first-year coach Kellen Moore offered a spot on his staff to Joseph, who also is a New Orleans native, leaving the Longhorns for the NFL was a “no-brainer,” he said.
Joseph isn’t the only Saints position coach who crossed over to the NFL from college this year. Bo Davis, who coached defensive line at LSU in 2024, also is now with New Orleans.
Davis has coached in the NFL before, but spent most of the past three decades working for college programs, including Alabama, Texas and earlier stints at LSU, where he also played.
The work-life balance in the NFL is better, Davis said, because he doesn’t have to constantly keep tabs on the players in his position group, never mind their families and representatives. And he doesn’t have to worry unceasingly about the various forces pulling at his players and their associates, promising more money and better opportunities elsewhere.
While NFL agents must register with the NFL Players Association and receive standard commissions of around 3% of playing contracts, representatives for college players essentially make their own rules and commissions range widely.
The larger the commission, the more incentive agents have to seek out increasingly higher bidders for their players, regardless of whether a more lucrative opportunity is in fact a better fit.
Some college player agents “don’t (care) about the kid,” Davis said. “They’re looking at the next dollar. … They’re not actually saying, ‘Is this guy in a good spot that he’s going to be successful?'”
For Davis, seeing college players develop over three to five years “was always my reward,” he said. “That was always my goal as a position coach, to try to help that young man better his life.”
Now, “You don’t really have a real good bond with them because, it’s like, one-year-rental guys,” Davis said.
By the time Davis decided to leave college football, he felt like he was literally losing his religion. He couldn’t find time to attend church on Sundays because there always seemed to be a recruiting breakfast to attend.
He also felt he was missing out on important moments with his youngest child, who at age 15 is still at home, and his wife.
NFL coaches work long hours during the season and for significant stretches in the offseason. But when the calendar says they’re off, they’re off.
“Now I can spend time with my family. I can go to church” on those Sundays when there isn’t a Saints game, Davis said. “I can take my wife out to eat.”
LSU coach Brian Kelly said that while he understands why Davis went to the NFL, there’s still a lot of mentorship going on in college football.
“They’re still 18- to 21-year-olds,” Kelly said. “They still need coaches that are going to develop them in all areas.”
Those areas range from how they play to off-the-field associations, whom they trust for financial management and how their public persona affects their individual brands and endorsement opportunities.
“Many of them come from single-parent homes that never had this kind of wealth,” Kelly said. “That is a new part of college football that you have to decipher and manage, and if it’s not for you, I can see why you would go to the NFL.
“But, for me, the relationships are still what gets me up in the morning and developing these young men,” Kelly added. “There’ll be a couple (players) that you lose along the way because maybe he got offered more money, but you move on to the next kid.”
Meanwhile, the NFL is benefitting from a broader pool of coaching candidates, Moore said.
Long-time college coaches are “bringing an energy and different perspective which is really, really good,” said Moore, whose brother, Kirby, is a college offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Missouri.
“The college game is awesome,” Moore said. “But there’s a lot of uncertainty around it and the calendar is such that their season is really never over. There’s always something going on. So, I think the NFL calendar has a little bit more consistency.”
New NFL assistant coaches who’ve made similar moves include Joseph’s former fellow assistant at Texas, Tashard Choice, now the Detroit Lions’ running backs coach. Dallas Cowboys receivers coach Junior Adams and offensive line coach Conor Riley are in their first NFL seasons after two decades in the college ranks.
Buffalo Bills cornerbacks coach Jahmile Addae moved to the NFL in 2024 after 17 seasons as a college coach with West Virginia, Michigan, Cincinnati, Arizona, Minnesota, Georgia and Miami.
“I think I’m the start of a new wave,” Addae said. “Until recent years, I never really had the itch to coach pro ball.”
But college football “has changed so drastically from what it was when I got into it that it was almost” the same as the NFL, he said. If anything, he said, the NFL is more regulated than college now.
It was one thing to recruit high school players, Addae said. But “still having to re-recruit them consistently,” and “looking for the poachers” was an unsavory recipe for burnout.
“There probably wasn’t a whole bunch of thought put into what the universities, the coaches and so forth would have to deal with behind all of the new rule changes,” Addae said. “It’s forcing some guys to say, `You know what? If I’m going to deal with this here. Why not go to the highest level.”
That’s what first-year Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley decided to do after spending his previous five seasons at the college level, including four as head coach at Boston College. Hafley left an NFL job to become Ohio State’s co-defensive coordinator in 2019, just a couple years before the NIL era began. By 2024, he was ready to come back to purely professional football.
“Certainly college football has changed and I do think that — I’m not gonna get on a soap box here today — but what I will say is I that do think there needs some things to change,” he said. “But it’s still a great game.”