Chris and Sarah Young. (Photo courtesy of the Youngs).
THIS IS THE TABLE FORTY PODCAST
WITH MATT AND LESLEE HOLLIDAY
Chris Young is the director of tennis and the head women’s tennis coach at Oklahoma State University. In 11 years leading the women’s program, he’s turned it into a national power, highlighted by a national runner-up finish in 2016. He was unanimously chosen as the Big 12 Coach of the Year that same season.
He and his wife, Sarah, join Matt and Leslee Holliday on today’s podcast to talk about building a culture that lasts in an athletic program, prioritizing character over winning at all costs, navigating marriage through tough seasons, and how they coach their children and the players in the program to fight against comparison.
Dallas Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer, Sept. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
The Dallas Cowboys have a new word to describe their mindset on and off the field each week: “Godfidence.” It’s a word head coach Brian Schottenheimer brought into the team’s vocabulary as he looks to build a culture of faith, purpose and brotherhood.
For Schottenheimer, his faith in Jesus isn’t merely a motivational tool that he pulls out when things are going well. It’s at the center of how he views his life and his work, and it’s something he’s made clear is the most important thing to him since he took over as head coach in January 2025.
“That’s who he is,” quarterback Dak Prescott said during his press conference after Sunday’s 34-30 win over Houston. “That’s who I am, and that’s who a lot of our guys on our team are. Just trying to be contagious, understanding that we’re all here because of God and we’re all here to serve a greater purpose.”
Prescott has been with the Cowboys for 11 seasons and played under three different head coaches. He said there’s a noticeable difference in the culture under Schottenheimer, especially as it pertains to players feeling more comfortable in expressing and being vocal about their faith.
There usually aren’t many empty seats at team chapels, which Prescott said is also a credit to team chaplain Jonathan Evans and his father, Dr. Tony Evans.
“I’ve been through so much in my life. God’s always been the reason and Who I fall back on and my refuge,” Prescott said. “I can’t thank Him enough and never will be able to thank Him enough. So just to see that transcend throughout our team, starting with our head coach, is special. It’s something we take pride in, but at the end of the day, it’s about giving Him the glory.”
The Cowboys are 2-2 and enter a primetime game on “Thursday Night Football” against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Dallas is averaging 30.5 points per game, which is tied for second in the NFL, with Schottenheimer in his second year as head coach and primary playcaller after serving as the offensive coordinator under Mike McCarthy from 2023 to 2024.
Schottenheimer’s message on the field so far this season has been about consistency and finishing. And connecting it all is the idea that they’re one family. Schottenheimer makes no apologies for what fuels him.
“God is the center of everything that I do — as a husband, father, football coach, whatever,” he said in his press conference Monday. “I think it’s very strong among our team.”
He displays that faith with his action, but also publicly on his body. He has five tattoos that he says remind him of his “whys.” On his left forearm is “Jireh” which is Hebrew for “The Lord will provide.” Near that one are three nails in the form of a cross.
When McCarthy and the Cowboys agreed to part ways, there was always a risk that coordinators like Schottenheimer would also be left out of a job if the new head coach wanted to bring in their own hires. At 51 years old, Schottenheimer had put together a lengthy resume as a position coach and coordinator, so he’d likely be able to find work on another staff. But the thought of having to move and start over again elsewhere crossed his and his wife Gemmi’s minds.
Their faith kept them grounded, she recently said.
“If we didn’t have our faith, I think we could’ve crumbled many times,” Gemmi said this summer on the “Twins Take Podcast.” “This is such an unstable life that we live and you never know what’s next. It’s really year-to-year and it’s a lot of uncertainty. But I think we’ve always had this solid foundation of knowing that the Lord’s never going to leave us and He’s never going to guide us in the wrong direction. We may not like it, but I think we know that what we’re doing is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Whatever his next path looked like, Schottenheimer still hoped that being a head coach would be part of his resume one day. And as it turned out, he didn’t have to move, and his chance to become a head coach also came. Instead of hiring an external candidate, owner and general manager Jerry Jones elevated Schottenheimer to head coach ahead of the 2025 season.
“We were really just obedient in that regard and we were just like, ‘Whatever You have in store for us is what’s meant to be,’ and then it happened,” Gemmi said. “You have to just trust that whatever path you’re on, that’s exactly where God has you and you’re supposed to be there. You never know when something is going to happen.”
Among his many stops, Schottenheimer recalled being a quarterbacks coach under his father, longtime NFL coach Marty Schottenheimer, for the San Diego Chargers in 2003. Team chaplain Shawn Mitchell made a profound impact on him and his faith, and the younger Schottenheimer felt led to start a coach’s Bible study. He was just 28 years old and it was about six months before he found out he had thyroid cancer. Meanwhile, Gemmi was three months pregnant with their son, Sutton.
Brian credits that season of life to helping him get much more connected with God personally, and it also helped strengthen his and Gemmi’s marriage and faith walks.
“Some of the things that we’ve been through are bigger than football,” he said on the podcast. “Football is our job. It’s not our life. We love it. It’s what we do, but it all starts with God.”
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney looks on in a game against North Carolina, Sept. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacob Kupferman)
Dabo Swinney heard the noise last season. After a 1-3 start, fans and media pundits questioned whether his time as the Clemson head coach had run its course.
The Tigers made the College Football Playoff the year prior but lost in the first round to Texas. That’s the only taste Clemson has had of the CFP since the 2020-21 season, when it lost to Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl semifinal. That loss came on the tail end of a dominant run by Swinney-coached teams at Clemson, including going to the national championship game four times in five years (2015-16 to 2019-20) and winning it all twice.
That 2024-25 CFP loss came in the first year the tournament expanded to 12 teams. A fanbase that was used to their team being a mainstay in the four-team CFP has found little patience as the team seeks to return in the expanded format.
The Tigers finished 7-6 last season — the most losses for a Swinney-coached team since 2010 — and a loss to Penn State in the Pinstripe Bowl didn’t help quell the frustration. Neither did a 51-10 loss to LSU to start this 2026-27 season. But Clemson has since won two straight, including a 22-7 win over Georgia Southern and a 28-20 win over North Carolina on Saturday.
Swinney was asked about how he handles that pressure week to week when the expectations from fans are still so high. Never one to shy away from speaking about his faith, he pointed to God.
“God’s on the throne,” Swinney said in his postgame press conference Saturday. “Football don’t define me. Scoreboards don’t define me. God’s on the throne whether we win or lose. Even if I never win another game, God is still good. That’s where my peace comes from. Period, the end.”
Last year’s record could’ve looked different had Clemson been truer to its identity over the years, Swinney pointed out. With an assist from a sports information staffer, Swinney noted that Clemson has the nation’s highest winning percentage in one-score games dating back to 2011. The Tigers went 1-3 in one-score games last season, including a 46-45 home loss to Duke.
“Obviously we screwed that up last year. That’s on me. That my job to win the close games,” he said in his press conference. “That’s a pretty big stat to lead the nation in one-score wins, but that’s how we’ve won. We’ve won close games. If you’re going to have a great season, you’ve got to win close games. Everybody’s got good players. Everybody’s got good coaches. You’re not just going to walk out there and blow everybody out. You have to win some four-quarter, down-to-the-last-play games.”
Several of his undefeated or one-loss teams could’ve had several more losses if not for winning close games. Those types of wins tend to compound and help a team build momentum, Swinney said. He feels like Saturday’s 28-20 win over UNC can be one of those wins.
“It just puts wind in your sails,” he said in his press conference. “It just creates that confidence, and you have to have that because we’ll have some more tough games along the way. We didn’t win the ACC today, but we’re 1-0, and you can’t win two until you win one. So that’s all we’ve got. We’ve just got to keep moving forward.”
"My purpose as a man is to glorify God in all that I do. To be a great husband and father. And then to use that platform of football and education to build great men."@ClemsonFB coach Dabo Swinney is our guest on a brand new Sports Spectrum podcast with @MattForte22. pic.twitter.com/Y8HG5wFUHz
After taking over as head coach mid-season in October 2008, Swinney is now in his 19th season as Clemson’s head coach. He’s 189-54 over that span and is Clemson’s all-time winningest coach. At 56 years old, he still feels like he has plenty of tread left. Last season, he made it clear that if Clemson decides to move on from him at any point, he plans to keep coaching somewhere else.
But whatever this next leg of his career looks like, he knows his peace comes from the Lord.
“I know where I came from and God has shown so much favor on my life,” he said in Saturday’s press conference. “I’d just have to be an idiot to lose my peace now because something ain’t going right. Listen, God never says, ‘Oops.’ It’s what I believe. Just keep going. Just keep going, man. Don’t ever quit. I don’t ever quit, I just keep going. I love what I do. Love who I do it with. But my peace comes from knowing that God’s on the throne. That’s where my peace comes from, and no football game can change that. So I don’t care what happens.”
Swinney has long strived to be genuine and authentic, and he makes it well known to recruits and their families that’s he’s a Christian. He lets them know his job is to coach football, but his purpose is to glorify God.
“My purpose as a man is to glorify God in all that I do,” he said on the Sports Spectrum Podcast in August 2025, “to be a great husband and father, and then to use this platform of football and education to build great men, to build transformational leaders. That’s my purpose in life.”
Swinney and Clemson continue ACC play at Cal on Friday, with kickoff set for 10:30 p.m. ET
Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen, Nov. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/David Becker)
Despite going 13-4 and winning the AFC South a season ago under first-year head coach Liam Coen, the Jacksonville Jaguars have largely flown under the radar in offseason talks about potential Super Bowl contenders. Many experts predict the Jaguars to take a significant step back in 2026-27.
But as Coen enters his second year at the helm, with quarterback Trevor Lawrence returning, he believes his team can not only replicate last season’s success but continue to improve on it. If they do, it will mark the Jaguars’ first back-to-back postseason appearances this century.
“In everything that we do, we are training to say, ‘Anyone, any time, any way,'” Coen said as he addressed his team during the first week of training camp. “We built the standard and the foundation and the way that we want to play the game.”
At 40 years old, Coen is one of the younger head coaches in the NFL, and he’s also a member of the famed Sean McVay coaching tree; Coen learned under the Los Angeles Rams head coach as a position coach for three years (2018-20) and the offensive coordinator for another (2022). In 2024, Coen was the offensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and helped fuel the career renaissance of QB Baker Mayfield. In his first year in Jacksonville last season, he became the NFL’s first rookie head coach to win 13 or more games after his team won four or fewer games the prior season.
During Coen’s coaching journey, he’s established himself as an offensive mastermind and a skilled quarterback developer. He’s also made it known during his time in the spotlight that he’s a follower of Christ.
Coen was a guest on the “Built 4 More” podcast last week with pastor Joby Martin and Denny Thompson, where the coach discussed one of the most difficult experiences of his life and how Christ formed his faith through the trial.
Coen grew up as an only child in Rhode Island, where he was a football fanatic and very close with his mother, Beth. But when Liam was in high school, Beth felt something was off. After numerous appointments, the doctors concluded that she’d contracted Lyme disease. The former marathon runner now struggled to get out of bed each morning. The physical pain was excruciating, and there was little improvement. But the emotional toll grew unbearable.
Four years later, in 2006, Coen was chasing his gridiron dream in college at UMass. He returned home during a school break, and his dad was in the hospital with congestive heart failure. While Coen was at the hospital with him, his mother took her own life.
Coen needed to care for his dad in the immediate aftermath, and then he rushed to return to school and join his team. Suddenly, he was back on a college campus, going to classes and practices like nothing had changed.
“I didn’t probably deal with it right, or well, in that short term,” Coen admitted on the podcast.
But this was different than anything he’d experienced before. The pain of losing his mother in the way he did wasn’t going away.
“Come to find out, 10 years down the road, it creeps up on you when you don’t deal with it,” he said on the podcast. “You don’t process it, you don’t forgive, you don’t have grace. It started to eat at me, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was really happening. I wasn’t feeling right.”
He found people to talk through his traumatic past, and amidst those sessions, Jesus became a frequent topic of conversation. Coen had attended a private Catholic high school and learned many of the rituals, but he had never truly discovered the essence of Christianity.
“I actually began to have a relationship with Jesus Christ,” he said of that time. “And oh my gosh, I started to have more grace, and I started to forgive, and I started to have a little bit more understanding of what she went through and why.”
He had been given new life in Christ.
That new life was only strengthened during his time as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Kentucky (2021, 2023) through the ministry of the school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) chapter. There, Coen was introduced to a man who handed him a small but extremely helpful packet about the Bible.
“I didn’t know what Jesus did,” Coen said on the podcast. “I didn’t know what He sacrificed. I didn’t know why He was truly put on this earth.”
Coen’s story of unthinkable pain followed by the power of healing found in Christ is a testimony of God’s goodness that he’s shared with his team and those close to him.
“Once I understood [true faith] and learned and was educated, I felt a different vibe,” he concluded. “I felt a different way of wanting to represent God — Jesus Christ, myself, my family, the way that I carry myself, the grace or honesty that you live life with.
“Perfect? Absolutely not. No question. But I know that it helped me when I actually built a relationship with a Power greater than myself in Jesus Christ.”
find someone who looks at you the way Liam Coen looks at Parker Washington
Now, in the hyper-competitive world of NFL football, with a nation’s eyes soon falling again on his sport, Coen has an opportunity to point others to Christ — the Fountain of true life — both in the 2026-27 season and beyond. Jacksonville’s first preseason game is Aug. 15 in New Orleans.
THIS IS THE SPORTS SPECTRUM PODCAST HOSTED BY JASON ROMANO, FEATURING MIKE MACDONALD
Mike Macdonald was named the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks in 2024 and immediately made a big impact, leading the Seahawks to a Super Bowl championship in 2025-26. Prior to becoming the Seahawks head coach, he was a longtime assistant coach with the Baltimore Ravens, Georgia Bulldogs and Michigan Wolverines.
Today on the podcast, Mike Macdonald shares about winning the Super Bowl, developing a culture in Seattle, being outspoken about his faith, and what it means to “run it forward” in 2026.
