Dawson Odums is on the verge of being back in the head coach’s chair.

The longtime head coach at multiple HBCU programs, most recently Norfolk State, and a former Southwestern Athletic Conference champion and coach of the year, Odums is poised to be hired as the head coach at NCAA Division II program Bowie State in Bowie, Maryland, several sources tell FootballScoop. Multiple sources told FootballScoop that Odums has been offered the job and is expected to accept the position. 

The Bulldogs, who moved on from Kyle Jackson after a 3-7 2025 campaign in Jackson’s fourth season at the helm, are on the verge of finalizing a deal with Odums, a 79-game winner and four-time SWAC division champion during Odums’ decorated nine-year run atop the Southern Jaguars program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

After posting a 63-32 ledger during that tenure atop the Southern program, Odums could not replicate that level of success in his four-year, 15-win stint running the Norfolk State program.

A former North Carolina Central player who’s coached at various levels of college football, including an early-career stop at then-Football Championship Subdivision Georgia Southern, Odums first got a crack at head coaching during the 2004 season as interim head coach at Clark-Atlanta.

But it was in 2012 that he landed the top job at tradition-rich Southern, a program with 110 years’ history, almost 20 total conference championships and nine SWAC West Division titles since 2000 — four of them under Odums’ purview.

Bowie State posted consecutive losing seasons in 2024-25, the first of which was the Bulldogs’ first losing season since 2011.

Earier this decade, Bowie State posted a 12-win season in 2021 and advanced into the NCAA Division II Playoffs quarterfinals round.

Jackson also found success early in his tenure, with a 6-4 campaign during the 2022 season — when Jackson was interim head coach — that helped him secure the job on a full-time basis. He added another six-win season in 2023.

Now, the Bulldogs turn to Odums in seeking to regain those winning ways and return to competing for Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) championships.