BLACKSBURG, Va. — In a windowless, spartan office only recently spruced up by the addition of some family pictures, Bud Foster settles in for a day of work on the third floor of Virginia Tech’s Jamerson Athletic Center.
The iconic former defensive coordinator, who’s now a special assistant to Hokies athletic director Whit Babcock, sits a floor above the football coaches offices that reside in a corridor named in his honor. As such, he attracts frequent visitors, whether it’s first-year head coach Brent Pry, a former graduate assistant of his, bending his ear about something or linebacker Dax Hollifield, one of his last major recruits, stopping by to talk about his future.
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The 63-year-old’s days are shorter now and far less stressful, especially without the three-hour stomach aches that games had become, a burden that wore on him during his 25 years as coordinator to the point that it affected his health. When he retired, he was done — physically and emotionally drained.
Nearly three years later, that’s not this Foster, who looks rested, relaxed and happy to be a part of the conversation again, eager to dispense advice when he can while also hitting the road for eight to 10 consulting gigs a year.
This setup is unusual in college football. With constant ladder-climbing in the industry often required for advancement, it can be a nomadic profession. Assistant coaches don’t stay in one place for long. Few, if any, rise to the level of legend that Foster has.
Sure, there are longtime assistants in the sport. Mickey Andrews was Bobby Bowden’s right-hand man at Florida State for 26 years. Gary Campbell spent 34 years as an Oregon assistant. Odell Haggins has been at FSU since 1994, twice serving as the Seminoles’ interim head coach. And, in a partnership similar to that of Foster and Frank Beamer, Phil Parker has been on Kirk Ferentz’s Iowa staff since 1999, the past decade as defensive coordinator.
But not many lifetime assistants are as beloved as Foster.
“I never envisioned whatsoever that I would be here in Year 36 at this place,” Foster said. “And then coaching 33 at one place — that just doesn’t happen.”
‘Easy to stay and hard to leave’
Foster had no plan to stay in one place for three and a half decades. As a young coach, however, he didn’t want to up and move every couple of years, hoping in a best-case scenario that he’d be able to set up roots at one school for a decade.
When he started at Virginia Tech in 1987 after following Beamer from his alma mater Murray State, his starting salary was just $24,000.
“You didn’t get into coaching for money,” Foster said. “You got into it because you could make an impact maybe on some young people or push them to limits to what they didn’t think they could reach.”
Any thoughts of upward mobility took a back seat anyway. There was plenty of work to be done at Virginia Tech, where Beamer and his staff inherited, in Foster’s words, “a s—show” from Bill Dooley, whose awarding of too many scholarships led to NCAA sanctions. It took seven seasons for the Hokies to reach a bowl game. Once they did, however, the program got rolling, which made Foster want to stay.
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“Part of it was we were winning at the highest level, and we did things that nobody else had done here before,” Foster said. “We were a top-10, top-15 football program. We were playing in BCS games and on Thursday night maybe one or two times a year. I didn’t have to go anywhere else to achieve what we were doing. I could go somewhere else, but why? We worked so hard to get this program to a certain point. Let’s take it to the next level then.”
Foster, who was promoted to defensive coordinator in 1995, started to draw interest from plenty of other places. A big reason he stayed so long was the man in charge, Beamer.
“Could I have gone for maybe more money at some places? Yeah,” Foster said. “But that’s not what drove me. Winning drove me and the quality of kids that we were able to get and who I worked for. And his loyalty to me, I wanted to give that back. But he also took care of me and many others. … He made it easy to stay and hard to leave.”
How? The way Beamer treated assistants was ahead of the curve and second to none. It’s a big reason why Tech had some of the longest-tenured staff around, be it Foster, Billy Hite, Bryan Stinespring, Charley Wiles or director of operations John Ballein, all of whom stayed with him in Blacksburg for more than two decades. Foster appreciated that he never had to look over his shoulder and be second-guessed.
“He just knew that in order for him to be successful, he needed to surround himself with good people, with competent people,” Foster said. “And he’d be the first one to tell you, he became a better football coach when he trusted the people he hired and let them do their work.”
Beamer planned out staff trips to help build camaraderie, facilitating friendships. And whenever he got a contract enhancement, he looked out for his assistants, getting raises for them based on bowl appearances or allowing them to make guest spots on the radio show for some extra cash.
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“Just different ways of rewarding you and compensating you for your hard work and commitment and your loyalty,” Foster said. “And I don’t know how many other people would do that, to be honest with you, particularly in this day and age.”
Coordinator opportunities aplenty
Job offers inevitably rolled in for Foster as the Hokies took off. Steve Spurrier was one of the first to kick the tires on him as a defensive coordinator, doing so on two occasions — in 1998 while at Florida and in 2008 at South Carolina.
The Head Ball Coach first gauged Foster’s interest late in ’98 as a replacement for Bob Stoops, who’d taken Oklahoma’s head job. It was right after the Hokies’ Music City Bowl win against Alabama. The two met at the coaches convention in Nashville, though Foster saw what was coming at Virginia Tech.
“I knew we had a chance to be pretty special the next year too,” he said. “We had Mike Vick, who we had redshirted. We had everybody back on defense and then we played for a national championship.”
He said Spurrier wasn’t arrogant or anything but down to earth, hammering home the idea that Foster was one of the best in the business. Foster was a little apprehensive about working for the famously outspoken Spurrier, however.
“I did my research. I talked to some guys, and they said he’s a great guy to work for, but at the end of the day he’s also the Head Ball Coach,” Foster said. “Sometimes you heard how you were performing from the media rather than him coming down and talking to you.”
Foster declined the job and recommended someone he would have brought with him for his staff, Jon Hoke, who Spurrier ended up hiring for the coordinator position.
“I remember Jon calling me, saying, ‘You S.O.B.’” Foster said. “Steve’s a great guy to work for, but it’ll be at the end of practice and it’s kind of on his time. You think you have 20 more minutes of team time to work on, and Steve will call everybody up, ‘Hey, we’re done.’ Offensively they’re done, so they’re just kind of done. He was just a unique guy.”
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Foster had gotten to know Mark Richt over the years through various professional growth trips and was offered the Georgia defensive coordinator job late in 2009. The idea intrigued him, given the level of athletes Georgia recruits and Richt’s sterling reputation as a human being, which reminded him of Beamer. Instead, Foster re-upped with Tech, agreeing to an annuity on top of a lucrative contract that would pay him $800,000 if he stayed five years. He recommended Todd Grantham, a former player and D-line coach of his at Virginia Tech, who got the job.
That annuity was set to be paid Jan. 1, 2015, a date that Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin knew by heart. Sumlin, who had the Aggies rolling early in his run, aggressively pursued Foster as a replacement for Mark Snyder after the 2014 season.
“He was really one of the hot guys and really dynamic offensively, doing some really good things,” Foster said. “And I knew the kind of kids they could recruit at Texas A&M. And that’s what was always intriguing about some of these other places.”
In the end, he declined (Sumlin hired John Chavis, who was practically a mercenary at that stage of his career). Foster agreed to a five-year contract extension and showed some emotion after the Hokies’ Military Bowl win against Cincinnati that December, coining the now oft-used Virginia Tech motto: “This is home.”
He drew interest from one more notable place late in his career when Brian Kelly called him after the 2017 season to gauge his interest in going to Notre Dame in what would have been a fascinating cultural experiment.
“That would have been cool, but also, I was kind of toward the end here,” Foster said. “I’d made a commitment here.”
The elusive head coach offer
Foster had several tangible coordinator offers elsewhere. Head coaching opportunities were harder to come by. Part of that had to do with his selectivity. He had enough autonomy and comfort at Virginia Tech to be that way.
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“We were doing special things here,” he said. “And I was very select in what jobs I wanted. I wanted a Power 5 job. I didn’t feel like I needed to take a step backward, even though it was a head coaching position, but in pay and in conference affiliation, all those things, it would have been taking a step back to prove already what I was doing. You know what I mean?
“And I know this: In my era there, why wouldn’t somebody want to hire somebody from Virginia Tech, with what we did and how we did it? And that was to me the disappointing thing, that there weren’t more people — and I say people, more consulting firms or whatever it may be — who would say like, ‘That guy helped change that program. Look what he could do for us.’”
Foster summed up his job-hunting philosophy like this: “I didn’t need to be a head coach to be a head coach.”
That ruled out some MAC or FCS jobs, though a few Power 5 jobs piqued his interest along the way. Several he was interested in fizzled out for various reasons. Illinois seemed dead-set in 2005 on hiring Ron Zook, Foster’s former position coach at Murray State. He pursued the NC State job at one point. And though it was a great cultural fit and would have been a seamless transition for the lunch pail, the timing wasn’t right with his family when Pitt made the short-sighted Todd Graham hire in 2011.
But he was a finalist twice: at Virginia late in 2000 when Al Groh got the job succeeding George Welsh and Clemson in 2008 when it promoted Dabo Swinney from within.
The Virginia opportunity came on the heels of the Hokies’ apex as a program, when Foster’s stock couldn’t have been higher. Foster liked then-athletic director Terry Holland, who reciprocated those feelings, with one big reservation.
“Terry was like, ‘Bud, you’d be a great fit here, but I’d probably get a lot of heat if I hired a Hokie,’” Foster said. “And I said, ‘Well Coach, my diploma doesn’t say Virginia Tech. So just keep that in mind right there.’”
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Foster joined recently fired Oakland Raiders coach Lane Kiffin as people who interviewed with athletic director Terry Don Phillips for the Clemson job in 2008. Phillips told Foster, who was two years removed from winning the Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant, that he reminded him of Hall of Fame Tigers coach Danny Ford.
“Danny was a hell of a football coach but a good ol’ boy,” Foster said. “And I really thought I had a shot at that job. Very similar communities. Clemson to me was a sleeping giant, and they’ve proven that.”
The biggest disappointment was that he didn’t get an opportunity in Blacksburg to succeed his mentor. After Beamer announced in November 2015 that he planned to retire at the end of the season, Babcock spoke to Foster and told him the Hokies were going in a different direction for a replacement.
Justin Fuente, then an up-and-comer at Memphis whose offenses were putting up big numbers, would get the job. Virginia Tech famously arranged a secret meeting between Fuente and Foster, flying Foster to a location even he didn’t know about until he was airborne, to see if they could work together. Foster stayed on as defensive coordinator until retiring in 2019.
Foster felt being a defensive coach was a hindrance to getting a head job. For a good stretch, athletic directors almost always seemed to hire the next hot-shot offensive mind. Another concern was how insular he’d been at one place, though Foster insists he didn’t live in a bubble. He had a network of coaches he’d met over the years at various functions he had in mind to build out a staff and, specifically to the Hokies, modernize their offensive approach.
“I think they probably thought I’d be a good head coach, but I wonder if they thought I’d be status quo with what we were doing offensively,” Foster said. “Which, I would have changed that. Now, there’s a couple guys that I wouldn’t have let go, but maybe their role would have been a little bit different if they would have stayed.”
Though he ended up staying on as defensive coordinator, creating a bridge to the previous era that served Tech well those first few seasons under Fuente, his disappointment was palpable.
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“Whit was at least transparent enough and came and talked to me about it, even though I felt, I told him: I can be your guy and you’ll be happy you hired me,” Foster said. “And maybe now in hindsight, he wished he did. And maybe that’s why I’m still here. Who knows? But he’s taken care of me that way. I have no regrets.”
On a pedestal
Foster never got his shot as a head coach. Still, he got something else at Virginia Tech: immortality.
In addition to the corridor in the football building named in his honor, the lunch pail made famous as a symbol of his hard-nosed defenses remains a part of Virginia Tech’s culture. Pry brought it back upon taking the head coaching job, and an image of it, along with Foster’s name, adorns one of the handful of banners flying over Lane Stadium’s north end zone.
How many non-head coaches get treated like that? And sure, he wasn’t the highest-paid coordinator in the game by the end of his run, but would he have created such a legacy and become such an icon if he’d bounced around as a hired gun?
“Sheesh, I walk around the parking lot, people love me,” Foster said. “It takes me two hours to go from one side of the parking lot to the other. And that’s pretty cool. And if I’d left, I don’t know if I’d still be embraced that way.
“I was very fortunate to be here as long as I was, to raise a family here. That’s pretty special to do at one place. And this place is a people-friendly place. When you’re rolling, football is king here. When you’re rolling, they’ll put you on a pedestal, and they did.”
Editor’s note: This story is part of the 2022 edition of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.
(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Michael Shroyer / Getty Images)