WKU Football: Taggart’s Failures Helped Him Land Tops, Seminoles Gigs
Today kicks off ACC Media Day in Charlotte, North Carolina and on Thursday, former Hilltopper great and head coach Willie Taggart will lead…
Today kicks off ACC Media Day in Charlotte, North Carolina and on Thursday, former Hilltopper great and head coach Willie Taggart will lead the Florida State Seminoles into facing the media in the preseason for the first time.
Ahead of ACCMD, the fine folks at Warchant.com, FSU’s Rivals site, penned a story about how Taggart was, originally, was not offered the position of WKU head coach.
Warchant.com - Learning from his mistakes: How Willie Taggart got it right the second time
As he walked out of that office in December of 2002, Willie Taggart was angry with himself. Furious even. He had just…floridastate.rivals.com
Corey Clark tells the story of Taggart interviewing for the job as a 25-year-old, with a raving review from Jack Harbaugh himself.
“…Jack Harbaugh gave him such glowing recommendations. He said that he was the smartest football player he had ever coached, had the most innate sense of the game and adjustments that needed to be made of anyone that he had ever coached or coached with. He just raved about Willie.”
- Former WKU athletic director Woody Selig on Jack Harbaugh’s recommendation of Willie Taggart to fill WKU’s head coaching vacancy
Long story short, Taggart didn’t do very well in his first interview; he was stuttery and seemingly unprepared (but, we’ve all been there, right?), but he declared he’d never let it happen again.
And, that’s the long and short of how Taggart catapulted from WKU to FSU in a decade, give or take.
If you’re able to, I highly recommend reading the whole article — it isn’t entirely long, but it is behind a paywall, and it’s awesome to see Taggart’s Topper past being read by hundreds of thousands (I’m not kidding — I have a buddy who used to work on their staff and they have a lot of readers) of Seminoles fans.
Post-script: While the quote is paywalled, and I won’t give any further context, it was awesome to see the quote “Willie’s DNA is all over the WKU program,” in Corey’s story. It quite nearly literally gave me goosebumps.