‘Feels like a movie’: Lindsey Wilson’s Chris Oliver basking in national title glow
For almost two weeks now, Lindsey Wilson College football coach Chris Oliver has felt like he’s living as the fictional coach Eric Taylor from “Friday Night Lights.”
“It feels like when things were going well for (Taylor), not when they were putting ‘For Sale’ signs in his yard,” Oliver clarifies with a laugh. “It feels like when he was winning and would go around town and everybody would honk their horns and wave.”
On May 10, Oliver coached Lindsey Wilson to a 45-13 pasting of Northwestern College in the NAIA national championship game in Grambling, La. The Blue Raiders earned their first football national title by going undefeated (11-0).
When Oliver, 39, turned his cell phone on about an hour after his team won the championship, the coach says he had over 160 congratulatory text messages. Before the pace of celebratory messages slowed, Oliver says he had heard from “400 or 500 different people.”
For Oliver, who broke into college football coaching as a student assistant at Ohio State in 2001, one message of congrats was especially meaningful — from former OSU coach Jim Tressel, currently the Youngstown State University president.
Says Oliver: “That was pretty neat.”
Lindsey Wilson’s national title is the first for a Kentucky college football team since Western Kentucky won the 2002 championship in what is now known as the NCAA’s FCS.
It was the first NAIA national title for a Kentucky school since Georgetown College went back-to-back in 2000 and 2001.
Oliver joins Eastern Kentucky’s Roy Kidd (1979 and 1982 FCS titles), WKU’s Jack Harbaugh (see above) and Georgetown College coaches Bill Cronin (above) and Kevin Donley (1991 NAIA Division II) in having won a national title determined via playoffs at a college in the commonwealth.
In Oliver’s case, the Lindsey Wilson coach literally built a national championship-winning program from scratch.
Starting a program
After helping Ohio Dominican University start a successful NAIA football program as a 20-something assistant fresh out of Ohio State, Oliver was hired by Lindsey Wilson in 2009 to relaunch football after a 75-year hiatus.
Oliver was 27 when Lindsey Wilson, a small private school located in Columbia in Adair County, tapped him as its football coach.
“Other than his age, there was nothing to question about Chris,” Lindsey Wilson Athletics Director Willis Pooler says of the hire. “He had been part of starting a program. He knew the NAIA. And even then, he had a firm vision for what our program should look like. And I can tell you, over the years, he’s never wavered from that vision.”
Oliver led Lindsey Wilson to a winning record (7-3) in its second year of football (2011). By year five, the Blue Raiders won 10 games for the first time and reached the quarterfinals of the NAIA playoffs.
In 2019, Lindsey finished 12-1 after losing a heartbreaker to Marian University in the playoffs semifinals.
With a veteran nucleus in place, Oliver felt like Lindsey Wilson was well-positioned “to do something special” in 2020.
Then the coronavirus roiled everything.
Football out of season
When the Lindsey Wilson football players reported to campus last August, the pandemic made it uncertain whether they would even get to play.
Soon thereafter, the Mid-South Conference announced it would move its football season to the spring. The NAIA said it would crown its national champ then, too.
Through ample pandemic uncertainty, Oliver faced the task of keeping his very strong team on point through a fall without games.
“It was really tough on me mentally to see other (college teams) playing in the fall and have us not playing,” Oliver said. “It was very discouraging.”
With no games, Oliver tried to keep his team in a routine. When COVID-19 allowed, Lindsey Wilson would practice three times a week, then have its players engage in socially-distanced weight lifting two days.
“We’d have a really good two weeks — no (coronavirus) cases, no (one impacted by) contact tracing — then all of a sudden we’d have one contact-tracing issue and we’d have six, seven, eight guys who are out for multiple weeks in quarantine,” Oliver says. “It was just a really challenging fall.”
‘Like a movie scene’
Trying to play football out of season brought its own set of issues.
“Normally, early in your season, you are worried about hydration and playing in 90-degrees temperatures on a Saturday afternoon,” Oliver says. “This year, our first game was Feb. 12 — and we spent the days leading up to the game trying to find sideline heaters.”
Once the games did finally get going, Lindsey Wilson left zero doubt that it was the best team playing in the NAIA.
Over the course of their season, the Blue Raiders played teams ranked No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, No. 13, No. 17 and No. 19 in the country.
No team played Lindsey Wilson closer than 21 points the entire season.
When the Blue Raiders arrived home after winning it all, they received a police escort for a victory trek around the Columbia town square. Celebrating fans were waiting on campus to salute the players.
This past week, Oliver and his family were dining out when the coach’s son, Patrick, called his dad’s attention to a rotating sign at a bank across the street.
It read “Congrats, LWC, National Champions.”
Says Chris Oliver: “I told my wife the other night, ‘This all feels like a movie scene.’”
