New Cincinnati coach Scott Satterfield is laid-back, but theres a fire burning in there

May 31, 2024

Appalachian State’s dream season was dangling. It was Nov. 24, 2007. The Mountaineers, winners of the past two FCS championships under long-time head coach Jerry Moore, faced James Madison in the first round of the FCS playoffs. At 10-2, App State topped the Southern Conference once again after opening its season with an axis-altering road upset of No. 5-ranked Michigan, but the program’s three-peat effort stared down a sudden collapse.

Trailing James Madison 27-22 with 1:35 remaining, App State had a fourth-and-4 on the edge of the red zone inside a white-knuckled Kidd Brewer Stadium. Moore called timeout as the offense sauntered to the sideline, waiting for direction from Scott Satterfield, the quarterbacks coach and de facto offensive coordinator. A baby-faced 34-year-old, Satterfield was the Mountaineers’ primary play caller during those back-to-back title runs and helped devise the team’s spread-option offense. And with the season on the line, he dialed up the purest of audibles.

Satterfield knew the Dukes would crowd the line of scrimmage on fourth down, keyed in on the running ability of quarterback Armanti Edwards and ready to jump any immediate throwing lanes. So he quickly sketched out a play that bluffed a bubble screen to a wide receiver, meant to pull in the defense as running back and blocking decoy Devon Moore slipped into the secondary.

“We take a timeout and Scott Satterfield literally draws up a play in the dirt,” said Mark Speir, another App State assistant at the time. “It was a formation we had never run, so we didn’t even know how to call it in.”

Nearly two decades later, that same poised yet placid persona has followed Satterfield throughout his coaching career, from wunderkind assistant to the eventual head coach at App State, then Louisville, and now Cincinnati, taking over a Bearcats program one season removed from a historic run to the College Football Playoff and set to join the Big 12 this summer.

The play worked, too. Moore was wide open for a first down at the 5-yard line, no defenders within five yards; Edwards ran in the go-ahead touchdown on the next play. App State won 28-27, and went on to claim its third straight FCS championship a few weeks later.

“Even-keeled,” said Speir, now Satterfield’s chief of staff at Cincinnati. “He’s that way 24/7. You’re going to get the same guy every day, on and off the field. He controls what he can control. He lives in the moment. That’s what makes him good.”

While the win over Michigan and trio of championship trophies put a young Satterfield on the college-coaching map in 2007, that on-the-fly fourth-down call against James Madison best epitomized his two defining qualities: a savvy offensive mind and unruffled temperament. The former has consistently elevated Satterfield throughout his career, but it’s the latter that makes him an outlier in a sport synonymous with hard-wired, hot-tempered head coaches.

“Laid-back, never gets too high, never gets too low,” said Pete Thomas, a former college quarterback who worked under Satterfield at Louisville and is quarterbacks coach for the Bearcats. “I’ve played for a lot of different coaches. Satt is not like any other head coach in the country that I’ve met. In a very, very good way.”

Combined with a down-home North Carolina accent, the contrast has earned Satterfield his easy-going reputation. It’s often mentioned by colleagues as a term of endearment. It can, though, occasionally cut the opposite direction as well. On the heels of a sterling six-season run at the helm for App State, Satterfield’s four seasons at Louisville featured more tepid results. There were reasons, including a pandemic and an athletic department in a seemingly perpetual state of disarray. But that didn’t stop Cardinals fans from wielding Satterfield’s attitude as a criticism, even after he was tabbed as the man to replace Luke Fickell at Cincinnati.

GO DEEPER

What’s next for the Bearcats with new coach Scott Satterfield?

Either way, it’s obvious that Satterfield’s Mayberry demeanor is genuine, and one Bearcats football has chosen to embrace as it embarks on a new power conference era. It’s also not exhaustive. Much like a dummy bubble screen on fourth down, there is more to him than his carefree smile and breezy Southern drawl.

“He’s ultra-competitive. He wants to win at everything: football, cards, arcade games, bowling,” said Speir. “Don’t take his laid-back soft-spokenness to mean he’s not competitive.”

“There’s a fire burning in there,” said Moore, the legendary App State coach. “No doubt about it.”

To truly know Satterfield, one has to feel the summer heat radiating off the streets of Hillsborough, N.C., a tiny, tobacco-glazed town on the Eno River, just outside of Durham. That’s where Satterfield spent his teenage summers shoveling asphalt and pouring concrete for his father’s paving company.

“My dad always said I would be in better shape for football practice because I’m out in the heat every day and it’s not going to faze me. And he was right,” said Satterfield. “Football is so much a mental game. But growing up in that environment, working hard, it calloused me and made me tougher mentally.”

Satterfield started playing football at 7, spending one season at tight end before moving to quarterback. Everything was a competition for him as a kid, including racing his younger brother to see who could clean their plate the fastest at dinner each night. As a grade schooler, Satterfield and his youth league teammates would sell programs outside of football games at nearby Duke on Saturday mornings to raise money for their team. If they sold 10 programs, they were allowed into the stadium for free.

“I got into every one,” said Satterfield. “We would just run around. No one really watched Duke football games back then, but I think Steve Spurrier was the offensive coordinator.”

Scott Satterfield left Louisville, where he went 25-24, for the Cincinnati job in December. (Jordan Prather / USA Today)

Satterfield played for Orange High School in Hillsborough. He tore his ACL the first game of his junior year, missing the rest of the season. It hampered his college recruitment, although in retrospect, probably not as much as Satterfield thought.

“Looking back, I probably wasn’t good enough, really,” said Satterfield. ”I was just a try-hard guy.”

During the spring of his senior year in 1991, Appalachian State — in its third season under Moore — invited Satterfield to travel the roughly 150 miles from Hillsborough to Boone to watch a spring practice, and later offered him a walk-on position. Satterfield redshirted as a true freshman, playing scout-team quarterback. Defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeil still remembers him giving the first-team defense fits every week.

“He had an air of confidence about him, but it was a quiet confidence. He was very coachable,” said McNeil. “On scout team, your job changes every week. You have to prepare and run a new offense each time.”

It served as a crash-course in quarterbacking, helping Satterfield better understand how to read and attack various defenses, all things that would have long-term impacts on him as a coach and play caller. And as a player, it gave him an opportunity to show the App State coaching staff what he could do. Satterfield was put on scholarship as a redshirt freshman, and by the start of his sophomore season in 1992, he earned the first-team quarterback job. Briefly.

“I started the first game. Played awful. Had about five turnovers. Got benched,” said Satterfield. “Went from first string to last string, all the way to the bottom. They sent me back to the scout team.”

He battled up the depth chart again, eventually getting thrown into a game later that season while trailing Tennessee State 16-0. Satterfield led the Mountaineers all the way back for a 20-16 win to reclaim the starting job.

“He had a really good work ethic, became a good leader, and was really an overachiever. He wasn’t a gifted thrower or anything like that, but he was a gutsy quarterback. He had this ability to make plays and lead a group,” said Shawn Elliott, who played and coached alongside Satterfield at App State and is now the head coach at Georgia State. “Those are the stories of successful men: They weren’t given anything, they work hard, go through the pains of scout-team life, and then come out on top and be successful.”

Satterfield went on to finish his career at App State with 27 starts. As a senior in 1995, he threw for 1,461 yards and ran for another 649, honored as first-team all-conference while leading the Mountaineers to an undefeated Southern Conference championship and 12-1 final record.

“Some trials and errors, some bad things, but I got through it all. That’s what I tell our players now: ‘You just have to keep fighting. I’ve been there,’” said Satterfield. “When you’re scarred a little bit, you learn from it, and you become better after that. Once I got my opportunity again, I never looked back.”

Satterfield turned 50 this past December. Since he was 7, there has only been one autumn when he wasn’t playing or coaching football in some capacity. It was the fall of 1996, the year after he graduated from App State. He spent it selling insurance with his father-in-law in Spruce Pine, N.C.

“Property and casualty, life and health,” Satterfield rattled off. “And I hated it.”

He spent the next year teaching K-through-3rd grade PE and coaching football at Mitchell County High School before getting a restricted earnings assistant position at App State in 1998. Satterfield made $7,000 a year coaching the wide receivers. He even worked the night shift at Appalachian Ski Mountain resort to earn extra cash, making snow for the slopes into the wee hours.

“The weather had to be a certain temperature, so we made most of the snow at night,” said Satterfield. “I would work for a few hours then go home, try to get a couple hours sleep.”

By 2003, he was coaching quarterbacks and calling plays for App State’s back-to-back-to-back FCS title runs. Satterfield briefly left Boone for a season at Toledo and a couple at FIU before returning to the Mountaineers in 2012 as essentially the head-coach-in-waiting.

“I was a Satterfield guy. I always had great respect for him,” said Moore, who bowed out after the 2012 season. “There wasn’t anything flashy about him, but he made good decisions and was always accountable.”

Scott Satterfield took over for his former coach at Appalachian State in 2013. (Brian Blanco / Getty Images)

Satterfield went 4-8 in his first year in 2013 just as the program was gearing up for a jump to FBS and the Sun Belt Conference in 2014. It was a trying experience for the favorite son, taking over for a legend and struggling. Yet even in a new role, under increased stresses, he displayed that familiar steady presence. Bryan Brown, a cornerbacks coach under Satterfield, still remembers keeping a skeptical eye on the head coach in those early days, waiting for the weight of it to push him over the edge.

“There was one practice early on when we were giving it to the offense a little bit,” said Brown, who went on to become Satterfield’s defensive coordinator at App State, Louisville and now Cincinnati. “I kept watching and thinking, ‘He’s gonna snap at some point.’ And he never did.”

The Mountaineers improved to 7-5 their first season in FBS, then ripped off a combined 40-11 record over the next four seasons, including 28-4 in the Sun Belt and three conference championships.

Taylor Lamb started 49 games at quarterback for App State from 2014-17, finishing his career as the program’s and Sun Belt’s all-time leader in touchdown passes with 90. During his redshirt sophomore season, the Mountaineers were facing Georgia Southern at home in a big rivalry matchup. Lamb was running inside zone — a variation of the same inside zone Satterfield ran in 2005, and the same one he runs today — and the cornerback kept cheating off the tight end and tackling Lamb for a short gain. At some point, Lamb told Satterfield that instead of running the tight end to the flat, they should send him up the field and force the corner to choose.

On a key drive late in the fourth quarter, Satterfield dialed it up in the red zone.

“I attack the corner, the corner bites, and I loft it over the top to the tight end for a score,” said Lamb. “We hadn’t worked on it at all, and I’m a sophomore. But he went with it. That’s how unique he is.

“His mentality allowed me to go in there without feeling like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders,” Lamb added. “It was there, but he wasn’t putting it on me. That helps you play free.”

Brown has worked alongside and under Satterfield for a dozen years at three different programs.

“Satt has never cussed at me,” said Brown. “Not once.”

In fact, Satterfield prefers not to cuss at anyone. Or at all.

“I try not to,” he said. “Now, if we’re mic’d up in a game, it might be a little different. But I grew up in the paving and construction world where it was every other word from a lot of guys I worked with. I thought it lost its meaning.”

In a sport and profession often depicted as relentlessly and ruthlessly cutthroat, lorded over by hard-headed and domineering drill sergeants, Satterfield takes a different tact. Assistant coaches and support staffers rarely if ever walk on eggshells and openly state they get to see their families more than any other staff in the country. Spouses and kids are always welcome in the office. Time is made in the offseason for baseball games and dance recitals. Brown relishes that he’s able to take his kids to school before coming to the office.

“I’ve seen staffs that burn both ends of the candle. That’s not the balance you need in order to be the best coach you can be,” said Satterfield. “Part of what we do is live life while we’re coaching football. And I believe we should be living life to its fullest. It’s not just all ball.”

“Nothing given. Earn 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴.”

Coach Satterfield meets with the #Bearcats for the first time. pic.twitter.com/65tDZWWXSs

— Cincinnati Football (@GoBearcatsFB) December 5, 2022

Hang around the Cincinnati football offices for a bit, and it won’t take long to hear some variation of this phrase: Everything doesn’t have to be fourth-and-1. That’s Satterfield’s dogma. At Louisville, one veteran assistant and first-time Satterfield hire remarked to another assistant, “this m—–f—-r is gonna add 10 years to my life.”

“He’s the type of coach who you don’t want to let down,” said Thomas. “And it’s not because I don’t want to screw up and get yelled at. It’s because of the type of person he is, how he treats you, the culture he sets for the entire building.”

To be fair, the results have varied. Satterfield’s approach clearly worked at Appalachian State, amassing an overall record of 51-24 across six seasons, the last five at the FBS level. At Louisville, however, Satterfield went 25-24 over four seasons, including 15-18 in the ACC. His first year with the Cardinals was his best, finishing 8-5 (5-3 ACC) in 2019 after the team went 2-10 and fired Bobby Petrino. Satterfield followed that with two sub-.500 seasons and started the 2022 campaign 2-3 before winning five of the last seven.

The lack of staff and roster stability before Satterfield’s arrival didn’t help, nor did the pandemic-shortened 2020 season that shut down spring ball after just four practices, halting all the momentum the team had built in Year 1. It took until midway through the 2022 schedule for some on staff to feel like they finally had it rolling again.

“We got back to where we felt like we were going to turn the corner in 2022,” said Brown. “We lost a couple games early on, but once we hit our stride, we felt we were pretty good.”

By then, many within the Louisville fan base had already soured on Satterfield, perhaps factoring into his decision to move on and accept the Cincinnati job. That is not to suggest this new challenge will be any easier. Satterfield takes the reins at a time of great interest and expectations and a significant upgrade in competition. His experience at the power conference level and leading App State through the transition to FBS will undoubtedly help as the Bearcats enter the Big 12, but it can’t change the fact that he’s succeeding a coach who revitalized the program, leading a Group of 5 team on an unprecedented climb to the four-team Playoff and the most successful five-year run in school history. Whomever got hired was set to inherit an increasingly difficult task with a near-impossible standard to live up to.

Satterfield knows this. He knew it when he took the job, and knows he will ultimately be judged on how he performs within that shadow. But this is the same guy who went from college walk-on to starting quarterback, from insurance salesman to head coach, from FCS to FBS to Power 5, winning a lot of games in the process, all while doing it with his own distinct style. The Cincinnati Bearcats are next on that list. It won’t be immediate or easy, though it’s safe to assume that come what may, you won’t even see him sweat.

“Give it a little bit of time. We’re so quick to give up on people, we don’t give them a chance to see who they are going to be,” said Satterfield. “People say perception is reality. Well, sometimes it’s not. For me, I may look like one thing, but there is a lot going on inside. There is a burning desire to be successful and to win. I’ll always be that way.”

(Top photo courtesy of Cincinnati Athletics)

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