Marcus Satterfield was destined to coach. His rise to SEC coordinator not a surprise

Back on Jan. 7, when it emerged that South Carolina football coach Shane Beamer was hiring the Carolina Panthers’ assistant offensive line coach to become the Gamecocks’ new offensive coordinator, one question popped into the mind of many a casual fan.

An assistant offensive line coach? Really?

Truth be told, Bill Satterfield had a similar question when his son Marcus first told him in January 2020 that he would be following head coach Matt Rhule to the NFL from Baylor.

The younger Satterfield had already been a head coach and offensive coordinator on the collegiate level. He had never spent time in the pros. And he had never coached offensive line before.

So why was he doing it? And why was he so excited about the move to the Panthers?

“He said, ‘It’s what I need,’” Bill Satterfield told The State. “He said, ‘That’s the one thing on my resume that I don’t have,’ and he told me that his desire was to be a coordinator in the SEC. So seems like the plan’s worked out for him.”

XS AND OS FROM THE VERY START

At a moment’s notice, Marcus Satterfield can still recall the schemes his team used.

“We played a 52 monster defense, and I was the monster backer, and we played like a single-wing offense, and I was the wing back and when we threw the ball, they handed me the ball and I got to throw it,” Satterfield remarked at a recent news conference, just a few minutes removed from overseeing practice.

He wasn’t speaking of his college playing days at East Tennessee State, or even his high school career at Greenback High School in Tennessee. No, Satterfield was remembering the Loudon Grasshoppers, the youth football team he played on when he was 5 or 6 years old.

Remembering details like that from roughly four decades ago is just how Satterfield is wired, say those who know him. And while his name might not have been familiar to South Carolina fans when he was hired, there are many at the highest levels of the coaching profession who know him — and his deep reservoir of football knowledge and insatiable desire to work at it. To them, his rise to SEC coordinator isn’t surprising. It was just a matter of time.

“I told him, I said, ‘If you put this amount of time (studying football) into studying when you were in school, you could have got an academic scholarship,’” Bill Satterfield, a veteran of the profession in his own right who spent more than 40 years coaching high school football in the state of Tennessee, recalled of a joking conversation with his son. “But if it’s something that he loves, there’s no such thing as having to put in too much time.”

Bill admits that Marcus passed him “years ago” in terms of offensive football knowledge. And he’s already impressed his new colleagues at USC. Wide receivers coach Justin Stepp, described him as a “mad scientist” on offense, concocting plays and schemes for the Gamecocks.

Given Bill Satterfield’s long history of coaching, it seems obvious now that Marcus would turn out that way after a childhood spent on sidelines and in coaches’ offices. But back in the early 1980s when Marcus was young, Bill actually planned on keeping his son off the field, at least for a while.

“I wasn’t gonna let him play until he was maybe in the fifth or sixth grade. But he absolutely wore me and his mom out wanting to play, so he started playing when he was 5,” Satterfield said.

“... He wanted to play, wanted to play, wanted to play. I said, ‘How about waiting?’ He said, ‘Nope, want to play.’ So we gave in and let him. I wasn’t a big fan of starting him that early, but he enjoyed it, and it all turned out to be a good experience for him.”

FROM PLAYER TO COACH

From there, football was an integral part of Marcus’ life, even as he realized at a young age that his long-term future wouldn’t be playing the sport.

“Whenever you become cognizant enough of your ability to know that, OK, I’m probably not going to play at South Carolina, Tennessee or Florida or anywhere like that,” Satterfield said. “I probably need to go play some football, go to the FCS level. I knew I wanted to be a coach when I was in fifth grade, probably.”

Still, that didn’t stop him from excelling in high school as a two-sport star, getting named all-state in both basketball and football. And just like he had a knack for gathering football knowledge, he also had an innate drive to work, Bill Satterfield said. It wasn’t something that he had to hammer into his son — just as he wasn’t keen on rushing him into football, he says he wasn’t interested in pushing Marcus too hard.

“I’ve had enough parents over the years that made their kids suffer. ... I even had kids who used to go home, their parents would turn the lights on when they got home at night and make them go outside and practice if they didn’t do well,” Bill Satterfield said. “But he loved it, loved everything about it. I never once had to worry about him putting forth any effort.”

Indeed, Marcus would go above and beyond even his own coach and father’s expectations. Midway through his high school career, the team’s kicker went down with an injury, and Bill asked his son to take over those duties in addition to playing wide receiver and defensive back. Marcus immediately seized on the challenge, enlisting the help of a friend.

“They’d get the keys and they’d go out to school on Sunday and get every football they had and he’d go kick them and (his friend) would run them down for him. And I asked him, ‘Why are you doing that?’ He said, ‘If I’m gonna do it, I want to be able to do a good job.’”

Coming out of high school, Satterfield got a scholarship to go to Chattanooga State Community College and play basketball. Bill knew his son’s first love was football, however. Sure enough, after a year, Marcus had left Chattanooga State.

He was thinking of trying to walk on at Tennessee, the dream for many high-schoolers in the Volunteer State. But this time, Bill put his foot down.

“I wouldn’t let him do that. I knew he wanted to play. Running through the T would only be fine up to a point, standing on the sideline or not even getting dressed out,” Bill Satterfield said.

Instead, Marcus went to East Tennessee State, walking on at first but quickly earning a scholarship by the end of fall camp. He played wide receiver and punter, catching 124 passes and 11 touchdowns in his career.

‘100 MILES PER HOUR’

Knowing he wanted to be a coach, Satterfield wasted no time in shifting roles when his collegiate career came to an end. His final season at ETSU was in 1998, and by 1999 he was a volunteer assistant at Chattanooga. After three years there, he finally got his shot in Knoxville, landing a grad assistant job with Tennessee.

It was there that he would meet a fellow GA named Shane Beamer. Over the course of two years together on staff, the two 20-something coaches bonded quickly.

“We probably did things a little bit in a crazier way at that time, but we’d go out and we’d have fun and enjoy each other’s company on the golf course and concerts and lakes, and things of that nature,” Satterfield recalled recently in a video put out by South Carolina’s athletics department.

When each man got married, the other was in their wedding party — and they talked about working together again, they have said in interviews. While Beamer moved on to a litany of assistant coaching jobs at Power 5 programs, Satterfield’s path to the SEC was far more winding.

Right after Tennessee, Satterfield landed at Richmond, where he coached wide receivers for a year. In that short amount of time, though, he managed to leave a strong impression on another coach on staff, Russ Huesman.

“I remember him being extremely energetic, you know, 100 miles an hour in everything he did, whether it was recruiting or coaching,” Huesman said. “So, I just remember him being a young guy that I really liked a lot.”

From there, Satterfield landed a position coaching receivers at Western Carolina in 2005, on a staff with a couple names college football fans now know wellL Matt Rhule, Geoff Collins and Clayton White.

“One of the first things I remember is, we had a job opening,” Collins, now the head coach at Georgia Tech, told The State. “And I guess Marcus and I got connected somehow, I can’t remember what the connection was.

“But we had a job open on offense — and I don’t even know where he was at the time, coaching or whatever he was doing — but I still remember him showing up to campus instead of what most people do: send resumes or make phone calls or whatever the case may be. Marcus Satterfield drove over and made sure he put a face to a name and was able to be impressive to the head coach Kent Briggs, and he got the job and did a great job for us while he was there.”

THE RHULE CONNECTION

After one season at Western Carolina, Satterfield was on the move again, this time to UT Martin, where he landed his first offensive coordinator job. Three years later, he was still there when Huesman became a head coach for the first time, at Chattanooga. Primarily a defensive-minded coach, he needed an OC, and he thought of the young assistant he had worked with for a season five years earlier at Richmond.

“I liked the way he coached,” Huesman said. “I thought he was very, very knowledgeable. Got along with the players extremely well, was innovative in the things he wanted to do. So it was ... just kind of knowing and feeling good about somebody, and he had done a nice job at UT Martin, so I thought he’d be a good fit.”

Taking over a program that had gone 6-28 in the previous three seasons, Huesman and Satterfield were able to bring the Mocs back to respectability, going 23-21 in their first four years. It was then that another coach from one of Satterfield’s previous stops approached with an offer.

Like Satterfield, Rhule had left Western Carolina after that 2005 season, going to Temple. There, he had slowly worked his way up the ranks and, after a brief one-year sojourn in the NFL, been named the Owls’ head coach.

It had nearly been a decade since Rhule and Satterfield had worked together. But the newly appointed head coach decided he wanted to bring Satterfield in, giving him his first-ever FBS job.

“Going to a place like Temple, that was gonna be a tough job. I needed tough coaches, and I knew Marcus was a tough-minded coach. So he was a perfect fit for me,” Rhule told The State.

“... To me, a lot of coaches operate in, they don’t do what they should do because they’re afraid of repercussions. I knew Marcus was not like that. He’s not afraid to take chances. He was not afraid to do what he thought was right. He’s not afraid of what people thought about him. I knew he was gonna do whatever it took, so I had real conviction that he was gonna be a really good coordinator.”

Like Chattanooga, Satterfield was joining a program with an underwhelming recent track record: Temple had gone 4-7 in 2012, the year before he and Rhule arrived, and their first season was even worse, with a 2-10 mark.

But once more, things turned around. The Owls didn’t smash records offensively, but they did win, especially in Year 3. With a 10-4 record, they advanced to the American Athletic Conference championship game and tied the program record for victories.

From that success, Satterfield was able to land his first chance leading a program on his own. He was named the 11th coach in the history of Tennessee Tech football, an FCS program, in 2016.

It didn’t go well.

Satterfield’s first season was solid enough at 5-6, but the following spring he was briefly placed on paid administrative leave while school officials conducted an investigation of possible violations of the school’s discrimination and harassment policy. Details of what exactly was being investigated were never made public, and Satterfield was reinstated as coach. His second season at Tennessee Tech finished with a miserable 1-10 record. He was fired shortly thereafter.

Once more, though, Rhule came calling. This time, he was one year into his tenure at Baylor, once more facing a massive challenge with a program reeling from scandal. He needed tough coaches, and Satterfield fit the bill. He came on as tight ends coach and stayed in that role for two years, right as the Bears experienced a massive turnaround, going 11-3 and making the Big 12 championship.

“Matt invested in me in 2013 as his offensive coordinator at Temple, and to watch what he’s done at Temple, when we win one game, six games, and then won 10 games back to back, to what we did at Baylor, where we won two games and we won six games, and then to go on and play in the Big 12 Championship, where we lost three games that year ... just watching him, how he invests in his guys and how 24/7 he’s there for them, the players know he’s there for them, I think that’s something that I’ll always take with me,” Satterfield said of Rhule’s influence on him.

ASSISTANT OFFENSIVE LINE COACH

That brings us to 2020, when Rhule was hired by the Panthers. He wanted Satterfield to come with him to the pros, and he wanted him to take on a job that, on the surface, seemed like a lateral move at best.

But there was more to it than that.

“I felt like I bought him here hoping that he eventually would be an offensive coordinator for me at some point,” Rhule told The State. “And I knew he knew the quarterback game, I knew he knew the receiver game, I knew he knew the tight ends and running backs. ... He’s done a lot for me. So I wanted him to have an experience on the offensive line and really be unbelievably well-rounded in preparation for his time as a coordinator.”

Rhule had the experience to show that that career path works. After six years at Temple, where he rose to become the team’s offensive coordinator, he spent a season with the New York Giants where he was the ... assistant offensive line coach. After one year, he landed the Temple head coaching gig.

“I had never really been an offensive line coach. That wasn’t my history. And I felt like it taught me the most about the entire game. When you’re working with the offensive line, obviously you learn the run game, you learn the protection game. But you also really have to learn defense in the NFL. And so, to me, that’s what I think is one of the main keys that has allowed me to go on and have success as a head coach,” Rhule said.

Satterfield echoed those same points when he was introduced as South Carolina’s new offensive coordinator.

“All the things I learned, that in 20 years of coaching I’d never even thought of before, just ... really progressed me, I mean, light years from where I was just a year ago,” Satterfield said of his time in the NFL. “As an offensive coordinator, it’s going to be a tool that I can use. I mean, there’s not a position group on the field that I could not coach.”

Of course, Rhule thought Satterfield would be his coordinator one day, not at USC. But when Beamer’s initial hire for the job, Mike Bobo, left for Auburn, he needed to hire someone he could trust, just like Rhule did at Temple. At the same time, he had always known he wanted Satterfield to join him in some capacity at Columbia.

“That was an easy phone call to make. It wasn’t a backup plan by any stretch of the imagination. I know him, know what I’m getting from him. He’s no ego, a football coach, and extremely knowledgeable about every position on offense,” Beamer said.

On the other end of the line, Satterfield said he had talked with Beamer to congratulate him on being hired but had stressed he wasn’t calling in hopes of scoring a job. But when the offer came, he was ready. After nearly two decades traversing football, his dream job and a chance to reunite with a good friend came together.

“We didn’t think it would take this long to get back together,” Satterfield said at his introductory press conference. “(But) I’m excited to be back in what I really love, the SEC, and at great university like South Carolina.”