G.J. Kinne may want to keep his bags packed.
Just looking at the coaching resume of the Texas State first-year head coach is a dizzying endeavor.
Football coaches usually have to sacrifice to reach their desired goal. At least Kinne’s brief playing career helped get him accustomed to the nomadic life of a football coach.
An accomplished college quarterback at Tulsa, here are the professional organizations he was with in his five seasons as a player – the NY Jets, Omaha Nighthawks, Philadelphia Eagles, NY Giants, and his final team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
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Then Kinne decided to become a college coach and made sure his suitcase was always nearby.
Since beginning his college coaching career in 2017, he has been at a new place each year. This is courtesy of his Texas State bio.
2017: Graduate Assistant, SMU
2018: Offensive Analyst, Arkansas
2019: Offensive Special Projects, Philadelphia Eagles
2020: Offensive Coordinator & Quarterbacks Coach, Hawaii
2021: Co-Offensive Coordinator & Quarterbacks Coach, UCF
2022: Head Coach, Incarnate Word (Record: 12-2; Southland Conference Champions; FCS Playoffs Semifinals)
2023: Head Coach, Texas State
2024: Head coach Power Five School to be named?
The 34-year-old Kinne didn’t hurt his standing as one of the bright young head coaches when his Texas State team traveled to Waco to open its season and beat Baylor, 42-31.
This is a Texas State program that has enjoyed one winning season since joining the FBS ranks in 2012. There was one .500 season, 6-6 in 2013 and 7-5 in 2014.
Since that winning season, the Bobcats have posted eight consecutive losing campaigns, with a record of 23-73.
Whether this was one good game or the beginning of a turnaround remains to be seen, but the Bobcats were only picked to finish fifth in the Sun Belt West Division in the conference’s preseason poll.
Again, it’s not time to overreact after the first full week of the college football season.
But…
Even though Baylor was picked to finish just sixth in the Big 12 preseason poll, the reason the Bears and other Power Five schools schedule teams like Texas State is to get an automatic W.
It’s also perfectly reasonable that Texas State was so lightly regarded in the Sun Belt preseason poll, based on its recent history and the unknown of the transfer portal.
Texas State reports that Kinne brought in 52 new scholarship players.
Most notable in the opening win was the play of quarterback TJ Finley, who knows a little something about having one’s bags packed. Finley has played for two SEC schools, first LSU and then Auburn.
While he didn’t set the world on fire, the 6-7, 255-pound Finley did much more than carry a clipboard at both schools. In 2020 he started five games for LSU as a true freshman. In 2021 he appeared in nine games, with three starts for LSU. Last year for Auburn, he appeared in four games with three starts.
Starting 12 games in the SEC isn’t bad to put on the old resume. And Finley might add his first start for Texas State when he threw for 298 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions and ran for another score in engineering the upset over Baylor.
The only negative is the Finley and Kinne show can’t sneak up on any future opponents.
And that brings us to this week.
The Bobcats visit USTA, a team that is smarting from a 17-14 loss to Houston in a game in which seventh-year quarterback Frank Harris threw three interceptions.
One more note of intrigue. Kinne attended Gilmer High School in Texas during his senior year. His high school coach was Jeff Traylor, the current coach at UTSA.
Traylor’s current team is a major contender in its first season in the American Athletic Conference after winning consecutive Conference USA titles. After that turnover-filled loss, UTSA won’t be coming into the game in a good mood.
The key for Kinne will be making sure his team comes off the high of its upset win and is ready to tackle another tough Texas team on the road.
No matter what happens, he couldn’t have asked for a better debut, one that will no doubt put Kinne on the radar of Power Five schools if he hadn’t been there already.
