Former Kentucky play-caller Eddie Gran leans on faith as he seeks new opportunities
.JPG "Eddie Gran was UK’s offensive coordinator and running backs coach from 2016 through the end of the 2020 regular season. He was part of five teams that qualified for bowl games.")
From his home in Lexington, former University of Kentucky offensive coordinator Eddie Gran spends the morning hours doing something to which many can relate: job-hunting.
Searching for work as a football coach doesn’t look the way it does for a typical nine-to-fiver — Gran spends more time making phone calls and working alongside his agent than he does submitting dozens of applications through the NCAA’s equivalent of Indeed — but the results can be equally frustrating. The winding down of college football’s coaching carousel is near.
When he’s not actively pursuing work, Gran is making film cut-ups from his own offenses at UK and also others around the country from which he hopes to draw inspiration at his next stop. Alabama and Mississippi, whom he got front-row seats to see last fall, are among the wells he’s been visiting in the offseason. He likes some of the stuff he’s seen the Baltimore Ravens do with Lamar Jackson, and how the Kansas City Chiefs use Patrick Mahomes, too. He’s also watched a lot of Liberty University, which punched above its weight most of last season with Hugh Freeze at the helm.
Gran, 55, took some time for himself in the aftermath of his firing, but he’s eager to get back on the field.
“It’s interesting when you get fired, or you get let go, however you want to call it,” Gran told the Herald-Leader last week. “You really find out who your friends are in this profession when you can get a call back, and, when you don’t get calls back. I’ve got my core guys and we keep in touch. So that’s kind of how it happens. It’s really who you know, and you get lucky and somebody gets a job. And, gosh, if you don’t know him, you’re really almost crud out of luck. But if there’s a relationship there, then you have a chance.”
Second firing
UK was only the second program from which Gran was let go in 36 years of coaching. His first pink slip also came from a Southeastern Conference school: He was the running backs coach on Tommy Tuberville’s staff when the now-U.S. senator was fired from Auburn in 2008. That stint was even more successful than the one he was part of at UK; the Tigers played in eight straight bowl games, went undefeated in 2004 and beat Alabama six years in a row, the longest streak in that rivalry since 1982.
Gran was part of five straight teams that made bowls at UK, matching the longest streak in program history, and its first 10-win team since 1977. It’d be easy to get worked up about his latest firing, particularly when things were going relatively well, but Gran’s faith helps him stay focused on what lies ahead rather than dwelling on what’s behind.
“It’s the only way I survive,” Gran said. “The only way. I can’t imagine not having that faith. There’s no doubt everything’s about timing and God’s got a plan. I’m not making it about me. For all these years, He’s taken care of me. I’m getting tested in a bunch of ways right now, especially my faith, and I could be sitting here asking, ‘Why this? Why this?’ and I’m trying not to.
“I’m more into, ‘Where are You going to lead me next?’ Where can I go be the biggest impact for You?”
Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops on multiple occasions has talked about how difficult it was to part with Gran, as well as quarterbacks coach Darin Hinshaw, who came to UK with Gran from Cincinnati and who was also fired the day after a win over South Carolina to cap the 2020 regular season. He stayed with that refrain in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader.
“Since Eddie’s been here, this is arguably one of the best runs we’ve had since, when? I don’t, you look at all that history and everything, right?” Stoops said. “ … We’ve gone to five straight bowl games and won an awful lot of football games. I also understand that there’s a lot of things we need to do better.”
Gran and Stoops toward the end of last season came to a mutual agreement that a change was best for the program going forward. While UK excelled for the better part of Gran’s tenure as a run-first football team, it failed in any of his five seasons to deliver a passing game that consistently complemented its gains elsewhere. The Wildcats each of the last three seasons ranked last in the Southeastern Conference in total passing and were no better than 10th under Gran (2017, 188.2 yards).
Possible “whys” to explain those struggles are numerous: injuries to starting quarterbacks over the years disrupted continuity in the offense; in addition to continuity concerns, development at the wide receiver position was further stunted in 2019 by the move to Lynn Bowden at quarterback; play-calling at times was more conservative than situations called for or necessitated (Gran says, if he could do it over again, he’d want to have “a little bit more of a mentality of attacking”); SEC defensive coordinators and players are good at their jobs, too, and sometimes if you’re not on your A-game, your B-game might as well be a “did not participate.”
Stoops doesn’t pin the successes or failures of the offense on any one party or reason. Gran differed.
“To be great on offense is about execution. And at times we didn’t do that,” Gran said. “That always was on me. When we did something well and we had success, it was always about our players. It’s not Eddie Gran, it’s those guys that executed. They took the game plan and they did what they were supposed to do and that’s all offense. When you’re not successful, then that’s on me.
“Because you can always go back and say, ‘Man, we should have done this better,’ and as a coach that’s what you should have done. You learn from that. Hopefully our players always knew that about me. That this program and people out there always understood it was about the players first and me second, and when things don’t go right, it was on me and nobody else.”
This story was originally published February 17, 2021 at 7:41 AM.
