Eric Bieniemy’s alma mater is hiring for a head coach

After being passed over once again for an NFL head coaching opportunity, would Eric Bieniemy be tempted to take the head coaching job at Colorado?

The moment Mel Tucker was announced as the new head coach of Michigan State’s football team, the ensuing questions focused on the resulting domino effect. Coming from Colorado, the move to replace Mark Dantonio at MSU meant Tucker would create a new opening. And one obvious candidate for the Colorado Buffaloes job is in a bit of a quandary.

For the second consecutive year, Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy was passed over for head coaching opportunities. This year, four teams were open and reportedly interested and every single one of them went with another candidate. Last year, four teams were interested out of eight total openings and, again, four teams went another direction.

This year, Bieniemy was the O.C. for the eventual Super Bowl champion Chiefs, once again helping to head up a dynamic offense known for its breadth and depth, a wide-ranging playbook in need of intelligent play callers and play makers alike. With confusing fronts and use of motion to frustrate a defense, Bieniemy has been learning from an offensive genius since 2013 as an assistant to Andy Reid.

Reid openly campaigned for Bieniemy to get his shot this year and was quite vocal about Bieniemy’s readiness as head coach. It’s possible that Bieniemy doesn’t interview well or has something else about him that, behind the scenes, seems to disqualify him. However, even that seems far-fetched given just how personable and passionate he can be in media interviews. His players swear by him. His boss says he’s ready. Yet somehow, he gets passed by again and again.

Back to the present. Bieniemy is ready to serve as OC for Reid for a third consecutive season and hope that an eventual opportunity becomes available for him one year from now to be a head coach. That much is possible, but it’s also true that most of us thought Bieniemy would be hired by now already. If another year goes by, is he going to miss a good opportunity to be a head coach somewhere.

Even more, Colorado is not just a place to be a head coach for the first time for Bieniemy. It’s his alma mater. He remains the school’s all-time leading rusher with over 3,900 yards. He finished third in Heisman voting in 1990 with 17 rushing touchdowns, and he was an All-American that year as part of a team that won the national championship.

Bieniemy also began his coaching career there as a running backs coach in 2001. He returned for his first coordinator role ten years later, in 2011, to be the team’s O.C. before Reid hired him to make the leap to the NFL as his running backs coach in 2013. Could it also be the place he becomes a first-time head coach?

In some ways, it sounds like a major step down and a third season as a now-Super Bowl winner makes the most sense for Bieniemy’s pro coaching hopes moving forward. That said, if you have an alma mater of your own, then you likely understand the sort of emotional ties that can come from having such an opening presented to you.

It will be interesting to see if Colorado comes calling to a man who has deserved a head coaching opportunity for some time and how Bieniemy will respond. It’s hard to fault Bieniemy if he thinks about it, but at the same time, he’s in a rare perch already that seems ready-made for an NFL head coaching job. Then again, we thought the same thing only a few weeks ago.

Either way, Bieniemy deserves anything and everything coming to him.