6-2, won 5 straight, on track for 9-3 in the regular season.
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-0
2025Salute to Veterans BowlW 17-13
This week Wed Nov 4
- Last gameW 24-0 at New Mexico State Wed Oct 28
- This season6-2 won 5 straight
- On track for9-3 regular season
- Nextvs. Sam Houston Sat Nov 7
- Stature96th of 138 FBS programs
What the result changed
- Playoff odds 0.3% → 0.5% CFB Zeitgeist forecast, before and after
Saturday: vs. Sam Houston
Sat Nov 7, 7 pm ET CBS Sports Network · Sam Houston is 1-7 · First meeting between Kelly and Freddie Aughtry-Lindsay as head coaches · Jacksonville State’s chance to win: 90% (the site’s model)
No headlines named him in the last 7 days
Offense: 51st of 138 per play. Defense: 86th.
4 games left
- Sat Nov 7vs. Sam Houston (1-7)CBS Sports Network90%
- Sat Nov 14at Western Kentucky (3-5)
66% - Sat Nov 21vs. Missouri State (3-5)84%
- Sat Nov 28at Delaware (4-4)CBS Sports Network48%
Percent: Jacksonville State’s chance to win, from the site’s model. Records are through today. Networks as announced; the rest are set closer to kickoff.
How the season got here
Where Jacksonville State stood among 138 FBS programs by stature after each game (1st is the highest; the CFB Zeitgeist ledger).
- Oct 26–Nov 1W 24-0 at New Mexico State0 headlines
- Oct 19–25No game1 headline · 81st of 138Charles Kelly on ESPN docuseries about Saban: 'I lived it' The Anniston Star
- Oct 12–18W 27-24 vs. Florida International0 headlines
- Oct 5–11W 27-26 at Kennesaw State1 headline · 83rd of 138“it doesn't matter what team they're on”Jax State's Kelly on concern for Kennesaw player's injury, Oct 9
- Sep 28–Oct 4No game0 headlines
- Sep 21–27 · rebuiltW 23-13 vs. Middle Tennessee1 headline · 83rd of 138Charles Kelly gives injury update on Jax State football LB Walker O'Steen
Gadsden Times
Each week as this page showed it at the time. Weeks marked rebuilt came before this page existed: they were built afterward from only what was known by the end of that week.
Watch the biggest plays from Jacksonville State’s games, ranked by how much each moved the chance to win.
Poach watch
This winter
Our poach model, on his record so far, the win chances for every game he has left, his program, his pay and his background. Ranked against the 132 FBS head coaches this season. The zone words describe the market’s interest; none of them says he is leaving.
What drives his number
The biggest factors in his profile, each against the typical FBS head coach today. The games he has left are priced into the number, not listed here.
- ▼ LowerAge 59 · in the state he was born in
- ▲ HigherHis team is 6-2, outscoring opponents by 7.0 points a game
- ▲ HigherPaid $1 million in 2025, the 25th percentile of published FBS head-coach pay
How good is this number? It ranks a head coach who leaves for another head-coaching job ahead of one who stays 78 to 82% of the time, and its average came within a point of the share who actually left. What it can’t do
Tested on every FBS head coach from 2012 through 2025, each season scored by a model fit only on the seasons before it. From three games on, given one coach who left for a head-coaching job elsewhere or an NFL coordinator job and one who stayed, it ranked the one who left ahead 79 to 82% of the time; in a season’s first two games, 78%. Its average chance came within a point of the share who actually left. It counts a move a coach makes while he still holds the job; when his school ends it, that doesn’t count, even if another school then hires him.
- The live number prices the games he has left with the power model’s ratings from this season. The test priced them with each team’s rating from the season before, because ratings made during past seasons were not kept, so this live version could not be replayed.
- Programs new to FBS have no FBS record before this season in the data it reads, so their coaches are scored without one.
- It is frozen: it learns nothing from 2026 until a deliberate refit.
- A coach hired in December needs his background (age, alma mater, the state he was born in) added before his first game, or he shows as not rated.
Fans
A few stories about him in the last 30 days
Sat Nov 7: Sam Houston
from a few outlets
Charles Kelly on ESPN docuseries about Saban: 'I lived it'
The Anniston Star Oct 23 · one outlet
Several stories about him this season
from several outlets
Charles Kelly on ESPN docuseries about Saban: 'I lived it'
The Anniston Star Oct 23 · one outlet
What they’re talking about
The headlines for each topic are on the News tab.
Could another school hire him? What has he said?
Across his career
8 stories about him across 2 seasons
Stories are headlines grouped by what they are about, counted through Nov 4.
Stats
Big games
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
Nobody he faced three or more times has a winning record against him.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Ran more than the situation called for under Trickett.
944 run and pass snaps at Jacksonville State, 2025–2025, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Building the roster
Three numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His one ranked Jacksonville State class of his own finished #86 nationally.
His class — he had the full signing cycleTransition — he was hired mid-cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his; inherited and mid-transition classes still show here, faded, but stay out of the average.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2026 roster arrived on his watch — 104 of 132 players. The other 28 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 18% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2025–2026Counting players who have since left: 24% of the 127 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 25 of 53 signees (47%) across his 2025–2026 tenure, drawn from 7 states in all. Next: FL (15).
92% of his signees come from AL and its 4 border states (FL 15, GA 9).
Off this map: 3 signees to the north (MD, NJ, others) and 1 to the south (FL).
- median hometown distance
- 171 mi
- within 100 mi
- 37%
- within 500 mi
- 85%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 1%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
News
Stories about him
Headlines, grouped by what they are about. Each is the outlet’s own.
This season
Press conference and quotes
- Gadsden Times +1'Anywhere, anytime' Charles Kelly talks Jax State football's matchup with Indiana in 2027Oct 7
- Birmingham WJOXCharles Kelly, head coach of Jacksonville State, tells McElroy & Cubelic how they've been preparing to take on North Dakota State, what he likes most about his team, and what excites him most about this seasonAug 27
- The Anniston StarHappy birthday, Charles Kelly — now, get back to workSep 8
In his own words
Awaiting signal — no quotes collected from this staff yet this cycle.
Career
Hires into jobs like this
Hired into programs rated 17 to 17 (Regional Program III tier). Rough match, not calibrated yet — ranked on what the job inherited alone. Coaches hired into this same job aren’t used as comps.
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Followed Rich Rodriguez (2023–2024).
| Season | 2025 | 2026 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 9-5 | 6-2 | |
| Postseason | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||
| OC | Clint Trickett | Taylor Housewright | |
| DC | Brian Williams | Brian Williams | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 61 | 73 | |
| Defense | 52 | 55 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 29.6 | 44.5 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 28.6 | 35.5 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 33.3 | 46.2 | |
Outperforms his recruiting talent on offense and performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on defense.
Brings in smaller-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits younger transfers than most — more of a development bet.
How good is he so far?
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 4 programs, 4 stints, before and after wearing the head-coach hat — every season measured on the same axis, whether he personally ran the unit or someone else did.
How to read this. Coordinator seasons come from our coordinator career records; head-coaching-era seasons are the same unit's FBS-relative percentile for those years, regardless of who coached it, read directly from the staff assignments record. A role change (a “hinge”) is a fact, never a performance verdict — only the season-by-season data itself is colored by outcome.