Head Football Coach Chris Oliver

FRESH & FAMILIAR FACES

Head Football Coach, GC Tigers

In the world of athletics, they say to never follow a coaching legend: you cannot achieve the same level of success, you won’t do things the right way, and you’ll need lots of luck.

The king of the 100-yard domain at Georgetown College for the last two-and-ahalf decades was the legendary leader Bill Cronin, a venerated National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) hall-of-famer who paced the sidelines at Toyota Stadium for more than 30 years as an assistant, offensive coordinator, and head coach.

During his tenure, the Tigers achieved unprecedented success: 218 wins, 14 Mid-South Conference titles, and two NAIA national championships in 2000 and 2001 during an impressive run of appearances in four consecutive national championship games. That is legendary.

But someone had to follow the legend and become the Tiger’s 28th head coach. The next man up is Chris Oliver, former head coach at rival Lindsey Wilson College, and he doesn’t count on luck. He relies on intense preparation, smart strategy, unyielding discipline, and an impeccable attention to detail.

At first glance, his easy smile and approachable nature might cause you to think Coach Oliver is not so much the competitive type. Like many of his opponents who underestimated him, you’d be wrong. He has a cerebral kind of competitiveness that translates to his players’ physical competitiveness. He might be new, but he is already running his program with the sure confidence of a coach who has already reached the pinnacle of his profession, which he has, a national championship, in fact.

Like a chess grandmaster playing checkers on the porch of Cracker Barrel, Oliver is a tactician, a strategist who begins defeating his opponents long before game-week preparations. He out-strategizes, out-thinks, outmaneuvers, and out-works opponents with his impeccable attention to detail and ability to adapt when needed, whether that’s by changing some minor detail in how he recruits in the off-season, or by bringing decoy pressure from a 3-3-5 defense to rattle the opposing quarterback.

His calendar is full, but he knows what every day holds and what needs to happen. He leaves little to chance and nothing to luck, except maybe the margin of victory, if that. He is fully in the moment because he trusts his preparations, and he expects success. “I would like to think I’ve had more success than someone who is less detail-oriented, and I think that that's been a big part of our ability to achieve our goals over the years,” says Oliver. “Being more organized and prepared for success translates to winning games, and it’s keeps us all moving in the direction of our goals.”

In 2010, Oliver lost at Lindsey Wilson College to Georgetown by a 48-0 score. Since then, his coaching acumen has become evident as his teams beat the Tigers for eight consecutive years en route to a 2020 NAIA national championship. Along the way, he won five conference championships, seven playoff berths, and 105 wins, the most by any college in Kentucky during that span. To say he can build a program from scratch is an understatement. He built it, he grew it, he sustained it, and he elevated it.

“The football tradition here speaks for itself, and I'd like to think that some of my experience also speaks for itself. I'm confident that over time competing for championships will be a reality here again.”

While Oliver plans to compete to win, his first priorities are to support his players’ academic success and personal development. “Our first goal is to graduate young men with an outstanding education that's going to set them up for success,” says Oliver, who adds that the College’s academics, graduation rate, and “four straight years of the highest job placement rate in Kentucky” shows Georgetown’s commitment to reaching that goal. These accolades also give the program a distinct recruiting advantage and help achieve its second goal to compete for championships. “My wife and I put a lot of prayer and thought into this decision, and it was not easy, but we believed the Lord laid this in front of us. A lot of things came together that convinced us that this is where we should be,” says Oliver. “We made this move to a school at the same level, and we intend for this to be a long-term decision, not a steppingstone. Vice President of Athletics Brian Evans is excited for the future of football at Georgetown. “Coach Oliver’s been able to do some things over the last 12 years at Lindsey Wilson that are pretty remarkable, building that program so quickly and doing it the right way. That was important to me. That is something that had been a staple of our program, doing things the right way and getting results. I am very blessed that we get to replace a legend with a legend in the making. It’s not very often you get to do that.”

The results start on August 25 when GC plays at Kentucky Christian University.