With Kiffin gone, the pressure is now on Golding to lift Ole Miss in the CFP. What can Rebels fans expect? "He’s a lot different than his predecessor."
Pete Golding did something interesting at the beginning of the first week of the rest of his coaching life.
He got a haircut.
That may not seem like a big deal. A lot of people get haircuts. But for those who’ve followed Golding’s journey to Ole Miss, where he’ll make his head coaching debut Saturday in the College Football Playoff, turning in his trademark shaggy locks for a more mature, close-cropped look is perhaps a subtle but meaningful signal of the weight he’s now carrying.
“Pete knows what the position demands,” Rick Rhoades, Golding’s former college coach at Delta State, told Yahoo Sports this week. “When you’re the defensive coordinator and you operate from the press box and you’re in a situation where your head coach is very, very visible, you can probably present yourself one way. When you’re the face of the program, you’ve got to present yourself another. And I think Pete is very aware of that.”
After weeks of drama surrounding Lane Kiffin’s future, culminating with his departure to LSU after Ole Miss’ regular season finale, Golding was elevated to permanent head coach almost by default. With Kiffin gone, the playoff looming and no real opportunity to conduct a thorough coaching search — most of the logical Ole Miss candidates were already off the board by that point — it took athletic director Keith Carter a matter of hours to decide the best shot for the CFP now and continuity into the future rested with Kiffin’s defensive coordinator.
For Golding, that could cut both ways. Is there pressure to deliver a deep playoff run beginning this weekend with the No. 6 Rebels’ home game against American conference champion Tulane? Or perhaps this a bit of a free roll, given the chaos Ole Miss has been through over the last month, with several assistant coaches trying to do two jobs at once and Golding himself having to transition from focusing only on the defense to leading the entire team.
It’s hard to say because nobody in the history of college football has ever had to make their head coaching debut with so much on the line. And when you consider where Golding started, the odds of a 41-year-old from Hammond, Louisiana, being in this unique, almost surreal position are probably too big to ever be calculated.
“Never dreamed it, you know?” said Frankie DeBusk, who hired Golding to his first full-time coaching job in 2007 at D-II Tusculum University. “There’s several guys I hired that I probably envisioned would be fighting for that head job more than Pete. But it just goes to show you what can happen if you’re willing to take what you know and use it to the best of your advantage and not try to be someone you’re not.”
But who is Pete Golding?
For someone who has been at high-profile SEC programs since 2018, when Nick Saban plucked him out of UT-San Antonio and made him Alabama’s defensive coordinator, he has been both ubiquitous and somewhat unknown.
Unlike his predecessor, whose social media life almost seemed like a reality show, Golding’s only activity on Twitter/X is the occasional posting of a shark emoji, an apparent nod to the “landshark defense” that became associated with Ole Miss a decade ago. He doesn’t have a lengthy catalog of interviews that go much deeper than football philosophy. He hasn’t been groomed, the way many top assistants are, to be a front-facing personality that catches the attention of athletic directors.
Until now, Golding has probably existed for many fans more as meme or an idea than a three-dimensional person; a defensive savant whose unkempt beard and wild, graying hair — combined with a DUI arrest after National Signing Day wrapped up in 2022 — might have given the impression of a fratboy who never grew up.
And at various points, that may not be entirely wrong.
“Oh, I can’t tell those stories,” David Duggan, who was Southern Miss’ defensive coordinator when Golding came on as defensive backs coach in 2014, said with a laugh.
But the wild-man aesthetic betrays both his seriousness and his talent, according to those who have known him from the beginning.
“He’s one of the most focused individuals I’ve ever been around,” said Rhoades, who essentially signed Golding at Delta State as a throw-in with two other players he was recruiting from Hammond, a town that bisects the path between New Orleans’ northern suburbs and Baton Rouge. “We always measured people inside-out rather than height, weight and all that. So we knew Pete had something special. He was one of those guys that always seemed to be a step ahead.”
Unsure what he would do after his playing career, Rhoades talked Golding into sticking around as a graduate assistant. Around the same time, Rhoades had reached out to Ron Roberts, who is well-known now as a former defensive coordinator at Baylor, Auburn and Florida, and who just took that job on Ryan Silverfield’s new staff at Arkansas.
But back then, Roberts was coaching at a high school near Fresno, California, after a stint at Tusculum where he worked under DeBusk. Rhoades, whose son was also on staff at Tusculum, convinced Roberts to leave California and be the defensive coordinator at Delta State.
That's where Golding’s fledgling career began to take shape.
“Ron really taught Pete how to be a defensive coach,” Rhoades said.
Roberts had learned the 3-3-5 defense from Joe Lee Dunn, the legendary defensive coordinator who spent time at both Ole Miss and Mississippi State, and in turn Roberts imparted it to Golding. When Golding’s internship was up and it was time to get a full-time job, DeBusk hired him at Tusculum for $27,000 to be the defensive backs coach.
By the next year, Golding was elevated to defensive coordinator running his variation of the 3-3 stack as Tusculum made the second round of the D-II playoffs.
“We played that defense and blitzed and played a lot of man behind it, and you’ve got to have a lot of courage to be the defensive coordinator doing that,” DeBusk said. “But Pete was very confident in what he was doing and had our kids believing in it. You see coaches come and go, but Pete just had it. I mean, he’s got it today. You can’t put your finger on it, you know? Sometimes you coach great players and can’t really tell you why they’re a great player, they’ve just got it. And Pete’s that guy that when it comes to coaching. He’s just got it.”
Still, it didn’t seem like Golding was on a glide path to stardom. From Tusculum back to Delta State for a couple years to Southeastern Louisiana and then Southern Miss, it would have been hard to imagine constructing a career that culminated with a head coaching job in the SEC.
At the time, in fact, Golding didn’t even have an agent.
“He didn’t think he needed one,” Duggan said.
That changed after Golding went to UTSA, where he constructed a defense that ranked among the top 10 in yards allowed in 2017. At that point, the agents were recruiting him — including Jimmy Sexton, who represented many of the heaviest hitters in college football.
That connection helped Golding make the huge leap from UTSA to Alabama, even though Nick Saban had never spoken to him before a whirlwind courtship that ended with Golding and Tosh Lupoi sharing defensive coordinator duties for the 2018 team that got torched by Clemson in the national championship game.
Immediately and almost every day thereafter, Golding became the target of Alabama fans’ criticism any time something went wrong. It got so intense, in fact, that Golding’s father Skip — a former coach himself — called into “The Paul Finebaum Show” on a couple occasions to defend his son.
At one point in the fall of 2022, Skip Golding even threatened the longtime Finebaum caller “Legend,” in one of those only-in-the-SEC scenarios.
“Give me his address,” Skip Golding said. “I’ll meet his ass because I ain’t scared. I’m from south Miami.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Skip hasn’t been heard from since. In fact, nobody in Pete Golding’s family, including his father, mother and brother, responded to interview requests from Yahoo Sports.
When he left to join Kiffin’s Ole Miss staff after the 2022 season, there was a sense around the SEC that Alabama wasn’t particularly disappointed to see him go after a couple years where the defensive numbers were fairly pedestrian. It’s unclear how true that is; Saban has never acknowledged any break in the relationship, and Golding has maintained that family reasons (particularly his wife’s roots in Mississippi) played a role in what seemed like a lateral move at best.
“He’s done such a good job of recruiting the state,” said Duggan, now the head coach at Jackson Academy. “If you’re Lane Kiffin, you come into the high schools with Pete because he had been on the ground, laying the foundation. Lane did a good job, but he doesn’t have the relationship component like that. Pete established all those relationships personally. He’s a really good guy, he’s really smart and the high school coaches all really, really like him. He’s going to have the support from all the high school coaches in the state, I promise you that.”
Already, it feels like a different era in Oxford. At his first media appearance since becoming head coach, Golding vowed that even though his job responsibilities and salary might be changing, “I’m not changing who I am, I’m not changing what the hell I wear. Going to yoga, playing pickleball, I ain’t doing any of that [expletive]. I am who I am.”
Those who know him well believe it.
“He’s just so grounded,” DeBusk said. “He’s a special person because he won’t let any of the other stuff get to him. Never has. Loves to coach ball, loves to be around players, loves to make a difference in their lives. You put him on the board, he’s as good as it gets. He’s just a special person when it comes to relating to 18- to 22-year-old kids. At the same time, he’ll be able to talk to the biggest donor Ole Miss has or the lady that works in the cafeteria. He has that knack about him and he doesn’t put on a façade.”
As everything was swirling in Oxford with Kiffin’s impending departure, Golding texted DeBusk, reminiscing about the days at Tusculum when they went to the Moose Lodge in Greeneville, Tennessee, to celebrate after a big win.
“He said, ‘Coach, it’s enjoyable and I’m doing a lot of great things, but I had just as much fun back then,’” DeBusk said. “But that’s him. He’s probably walking around with a wrinkled T-shirt on right now. He’s not trying to be something he’s not.”
The reality is, Golding’s lack of varnish will either play extremely well or horribly depending on how Ole Miss performs in this CFP and over the next couple years. Though the clean-looking haircut may signal the first hint of image consciousness, injecting Golding into the SEC head coaching ranks should be a breath of fresh air for a sport that always needs more characters on the sideline.
“He’s a lot different than his predecessor, and I don’t mean that positively or negatively, but he won’t try to be anybody other than Pete,” Rhoades said. “I would be shocked beyond belief if he’s not his own man.”
Category: General Sports
