Logan • Troy Morrell built a football dynasty.
Then he just walked away.
For the next decade, it didn’t matter who came calling — from the handful of universities looking for a head coach to one of the sport’s biggest names offering a place on his staff — Morrell turned them down.
It might shock some of those callers now to see Morrell back on the sidelines. Utah State, meanwhile, hopes the man with three junior college championship rings can help quell the chaos in Cache Valley.
“I did everything I could to make sure we got this guy in the building,” USU interim head coach Nate Dreiling said.
In a past life, Morrell was the head coach at Butler Community College in Kansas. There, he went 154-22 over 14 seasons, winning three National Junior College Athletic Association titles, accolades that would earn him a place in the Kansas Hall of Fame.
Then, in 2014, Morrell called it quits.
He traded in football for a job in the real world, becoming an operations manager for Southwind, a home services conglomerate that started as a 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business in Kansas City.
From his post-retirement home near Boston, Morrell started his day driving up to Maine to visit one of his businesses. After he checked in, he’d shoot over to Salem, N.H., to make sure everything was running smoothly there. Then it was a ferry ride over to the cape to check on two more franchises.
Morrell dove headfirst trying to turn the 42 franchises across the northeast into a billion-dollar endeavor, more than happy to vanish from his former post.
“Every day it was an adventure. Just get in the vehicle. Drive somewhere,” he said. “I knew nothing about business. It’s just like, ‘Hey, go out there and take care of people. Find out what’s going on with them.’ It was a ton of fun.”
Morell loved it so much that when former Kansas coach Les Miles came calling asking if he wanted back in the game as his offensive line coach, he flatly declined. He declined every other offer that came his way for a decade.
What he had was more stable, more private.
That was until Dreiling, the youngest head coach in the FBS, and Utah State called with the offer that caused Morrell to leave the private sector and return to football.
“I had to work my rear end off to [get him to take it]. Not that he didn’t want to get back in, but he was in an unbelievable situation at his current job,” Dreiling said.
Morrell will be the Aggies’ associate head coach and senior offensive analyst.
USU is gambling that a man 10 years out of the game can calm one of the more chaotic situations in college football and help the Aggies ready for a season that will start just weeks after head coach Blake Anderson was fired for violating a Title IX reporting policy.
Morrell is certain this job is worth the risk.
“There’s a lot of good things that can come out of this,” he said.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Associate head coach,Troy Morrell, is interviewed on media day at the Jim and Carol Laub Athletics-Academics Complex, at Utah State University, on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024.
To some, Morrell’s return might not make much sense. Not when he could have come back to the game so many times yet chose not to.
But you have to know the backstory to understand.
Morrell didn’t leave football in 2014 because he was tired. Instead, he was at the top of the profession. Butler College won titles in 2003, ‘07 and ‘08. He had the donor base humming. They built facilities that would rival FBS schools. On any given year, his roster had 22 Power Four players on it.
He left because of his family. He was missing too many of his kids’ games as they got older. He thought maybe staying at Butler — located in El Dorado, Kan. — would help give his family stability while he stayed in coaching. He turned down jobs to leave over his 14-year head coaching run. But even then, the time commitment was too much. So he went to work for his father-in-law running a business.
“Absolutely zero regrets or anything walking away from it,” he said.
When Milles called — intriguing Morrell with his Kansas ties and football pedigree — the timing couldn’t have been worse. Morrell was only three years into his hiatus and his kids were still in the house. Plus, he didn’t want to uproot his family for a job that might not be there in a few years. Miles was fired in 2020.
Other head coaching jobs presented themselves. Youngstown State was interested. A few more Division II opportunities came up including Missouri Southern.
“Those were the [offers] that stick to me,” Morrell said. " Honestly, like, I never looked back. I never really ever pursued something, either.”
Nothing spoke to him until Utah State years later. The program desperately needed some head coaching savvy in the room. The Aggies had done the unimaginable, firing their head coach in July. They proceeded to promote Dreiling to the interim head coach — a 33-year-old who had never sat in the top chair before. The Aggies needed someone to give him the answers to the test, or at least guide him there.
For Morrell, the offer started to make sense. His kids were out of the house — one in law school and the other about to graduate from the University of Kansas.
Dreiling reached out because he had his own Kansas connections.
Morrell had a strong relationship with Dreiling’s father, Randy, who had been a head coach at Hutchinson High School, a powerhouse in the state that was a fertile recruiting ground. Morrell toured through the school often, meeting Nate Dreiling when he was a middle schooler.
“I could tell from the first phone call with him that this was our guy for sure,” Dreiling said of trying to lure Morrell to Logan.
It took Morrell a few more calls than that.
When Dreilling called to offer the job, Morrell was on his ferry ride and didn’t answer at first.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah State Interim head coach Nate Dreiling is interviewed on media day at the Jim and Carol Laub Athletics-Academics Complex, at Utah State University, on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024.
Morrell understands this job might only last a few months. It is possible, even probable, that Utah State will not make Dreiling the permanent coach at the end of the year and Morrell will be gone, too. It’s everything he didn’t want — an unstable job where he didn’t know where he’d be year to year.
But now, Morrell feels he can take that risk.
And he’s having fun being back in the game.
The other day, Morrell saw Dreiling’s father in the facility. Morrell and Randy Dreilling haven’t spoken much over the years. So when they spotted each other in the Aggies’ offices, they looked at each other with expressions of disbelief.
Who would have thought their paths would have led them to Logan?
“I can’t believe this. Look at us, man,” Morrell said. “It is a gamble. But on the other end, I play to win. I have confidence. If it works out, ... I should strike that. When it works, it will be great.”
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