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| Defiance athletics photo |
Defiance will have its fifth head football coach in seven seasons after it was announced this week that Earnest Wilson is moving on from the Ohio school.
Wilson, who took over as interim head coach late in the summer of 2021 after the sudden departure of Manny Matsakis, is leaving for a minor league football head coaching job in a league which has yet to start up.
Defiance was 1-9 last season.
The Yellow Jackets were coached by Casey Goff in 2016, who took the team to a 5-5 mark in his only season. Goff departed for TCNJ that offseason, where he is still the head coach. Goff was replaced by Aaron Mershman, who compiled a 2-8 mark in his only season as head coach before leaving to take an assistant coaching position at Misericordia. Following Mershman's season, Manny Matsakis, a former Division I FCS head coach at Texas State and recent assistant at Widener took over. Matsakis had been fired at Texas State in 2004 after NCAA violations and he left Defiance suddenly, late in the offseason as well. Matsakis's teams went 4-23 in three seasons, including a high-water mark of 2-5 during the COVID spring season of 2021.
Defiance has gone 7-40 since Goff's departure.
Wilson is heading to take a job in Major League Football, a professional minor league that was announced as starting up this fall.
The school says it will perform a national search. The job has not yet been posted to Defiance's website, but previous football head coaching positions have been listed as 10-month positions, instead of full-time year-round, and the school's current head women's basketball coaching position is listed that way currently.