With the regular season over and bowl season approaching, the college football coaching carousel is spinning fast. However below the radar every other hire is, as former NFL head coach (and son of former Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin) Lane Kiffin gets most of the headlines with his move from Ole Miss to LSU, the University of Arkansas has hired former University of Memphis head coach Ryan Silverfield to be its new head coach.
Silverfield went 50-24 over six seasons as the head coach at Memphis, with four wins in five bowl appearances. Now he's going from the Group of 5 to trying to rebuild a reeling Razorbacks' program in a tough SEC. He spent the four seasons prior to becoming the head coach at Memphis there as an assistant under now-Florida State coach Mike Norvell.
Most of the 45-year-old Silverfield's coaching experience is at the collegiate level. But he spent one year as assistant offensive line coach for the Detroit Lions in 2015, and before he landed at Memphis, the longest time he had coached in one spot was with another NFL team.
Former Minnesota Vikings assistant lands major college coaching job
From 2008-2013, under Brad Childress and then Leslie Frazier, Silverfield was on the Minnesota Vikings' coaching staff. He spent one season as an offensive quality control coach (2008), then two seasons as an assistant to the defensive line staff (2009-2010) before three seasons (2011-2013) as the assistant offensive line coach.
You're forgiven if you forgot, or never actually knew, that Silverfield worked for the Vikings years (and a few head coaches) ago.
As is typical with a coaching change, Mike Zimmer did not retain Silverfield on his staff when he replaced Frazier as the Vikings' head coach in 2014. After one-year stops at Toledo, at Arizona State, and with the Lions, Silverfield was hired by Norvell at Memphis in 2016.
Childress and Frazier combined to be just below .500 in the regular season (60-67-1), with three combined playoff appearances, over eight total seasons as head coach of the Vikings. As expected, then, there aren't very many branches to their coaching trees (such as they even truly exist).
So Silverfield, having the success he had at Memphis, and now making the jump to the SEC at Arkansas, stands out as the most notable branch of both Childress and Frazier's coaching trees.