Texas Football: Jeff Choate, Jeff Banks candidates for Wazzu HC

There are now some very high-profile job openings around the country, and the Texas football program looks to have some candidates in the mix. New Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian put together a solid coaching staff with a group of assistants that had very polished resumes before they were hired to join this football program.

There are now two of the Longhorns first-year assistant coaches under Sark that are getting rumored to be head coaching candidates elsewhere this fall. The job that these two Texas assistants are getting mentioned in connection with around the college football media landscape this week is with the Washington State Cougars in the PAC-12.

Washington State parted ways with now-former head coach Nick Rolovich after he didn’t comply with the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in that state. Considering some of the west coast connections that proven assistants on Sark’s coaching staff have, it makes sense that there are some names mentioned in connection with this job in the media.

Texas football assistants Jeff Banks and Jeff Choate reportedly mentioned as candidates for the Washington State job

The two Texas assistant coaches that were mentioned in connection with the new Wazzu head coach job opening this week with the “Cover 3” podcast, as part of the 247Sports and CBS Sports network, were special teams coordinator/tight ends coach Jeff Banks and co-defensive coordinator/linebackers coach Jeff Choate. The west coast connections seemed to be the key in both of these names getting brought up with the Wazzu job this week.

Banks played his college ball at Wazzu as a punter back in the mid-to-late 1990s. His first major FBS job on any staff was also as a graduate assistant with Wazzu from 1998-1999. Banks clearly has the connections here to recruit back at Wazzu.

Moreover, the connections back to Wazzu (and the west coast as a whole) are apparent for Choate too. The former Montana State Bobcats head coach was a linebackers coach with Wazzu in 2012 and 2013. And he was a positional coach with the likes of the Boise State Broncos and Washington Huskies for multiple years in the last 15 seasons.

It will be interesting to see if there is bona fide interest from the Wazzu administration and Texas assistants like Banks and Choate. If there is some interest in those two, you would think that another Texas assistant like fellow co-defensive coordinator/linebackers coach Pete Kwiatkowski could be a consideration too.

Even the Seattle Times, Athlon Sports, and On3 mentioned either Banks, Choate, or both, as potential candidates for Wazzu to consider to replace Rolovich as the next head coach.

Wazzu is definitely one of the more notable head coach job openings around halfway through this season, along with the LSU Tigers and USC Trojans. The Georgia Southern Eagles and UConn Huskies also have head coaching job openings at this point of the fall.