
Photographer: Doug Murray/Icon Sportswire
There was a segment of the UVA Football community that wanted Anthony Poindexter to be the head coach back when the job came open in 2021.
Poindexter, four years later, still can’t get the full-go defensive coordinator job at Penn State, which has given him the title co-defensive coordinator since 2021, but keeps passing him by for the full gig every time it comes open.
ICYMI
The latest diss to AP came over the weekend, when head coach James Franklin hired Jim Knowles away from Ohio State, at an absurd salary – $3.1 million a year, which is in the vicinity of what UVA is paying Tony Elliott to be the head coach.
The PR around the Knowles hire is trying to make it that Poindexter, an All-American at UVA in the late 1990s, is totally on board with the move, and that, in fact, Poindexter is signing an extension to continue as the safeties coach, and with a raise, though details there are lacking.
Remember that ‘Dex was the co-DC at Penn State alongside Brent Pry, now the head coach at Virginia Tech, in his first year in Happy Valley, in 2021, though Pry was the defensive play-caller.
When Pry left for the job in Blacksburg, Franklin decided to hire former Miami coach Manny Diaz to be Poindexter’s boss.
Diaz left after the 2023 season to take the head coach job at Duke, and Franklin again hired another former head coach, Tom Allen, who had just been relieved of his duties at Indiana.
And now, after Allen left Penn State for Clemson to be the DC there, we see ‘Dex bypassed again.
And the PR machine in State College is telling us that Poindexter is happy as a clam that he’s the bridesmaid, and not the bride, yet again.
If that’s the case, we know why Poindexter wasn’t a serious candidate for the UVA job in 2021.