{"id":664284,"date":"2026-05-25T15:31:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T15:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/664284\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T15:31:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T15:31:12","slug":"coach-jason-candle-shares-vision-for-guiding-uconn-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/664284\/","title":{"rendered":"Coach Jason Candle shares vision for guiding UConn football"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORRS \u2014 The smell of wet paint was apparent as one walked through the halls of the UConn football headquarters this week. \u201cNotice anything?\u201d new coach Jason Candle<\/a> said. \u201cWhite. Brightens things up.\u201d<\/p>\n

His first season as coach is three months away, and while it is clear Candle, who came from a long, successful tenure at Toledo<\/a> to replace Jim Mora,<\/a> will apply his own shades to the Huskies\u2019 canvas, it\u2019s still too early for the outsider to imagine what that will look like. What we do know is that after losing the coach who dragged the program up from the depths of 1-11 in 2021 to back-to-back bowl games, UConn football does not seem to have lost momentum, a win in and of itself.<\/p>\n

The optimism of the last two seasons also wafts in the air at Shenkman Training Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look around here, what the visual part of this looks like is, it screams \u2018alignment,’\u201d Candle said, sipping a green smoothie during a 30-minute sit-down with The Courant. \u201cTo be successful in any collegiate program today, you have to have alignment from the top down. We are so successful in so many sports, and football has been so successful the last couple of years as well, it\u2019s a good, comfortable feeling to be around other people that expect success and expects to win. When I came here, what jumped out at me, the bricks and mortar are great, but if you have great campus alignment with the athletic department, then you have a chance to reach the potential of the program.\u201d<\/p>\n

UConn is going into its fifth season as an independent program, a path that seemed like a road to nowhere in 2021. Now that only UConn and Notre Dame are operating as FBS independents, it could be harder still to schedule opponents and sustain it. So the program\u2019s ultimate goal remains the same \u2014 to get into one of the four remaining power conferences and access the TV revenue only that level of FBS football offers. When UConn appeared close, but was jilted by the Big 12 in August of 2023, it had a deflating effect on the program. But the success of the last two football seasons, paired with continued success in basketball, figures to put UConn in conversations when the next round of shuffling begins.<\/p>\n

Dom Amore\u2019s Sunday Read: Meet the \u2018pod-father\u2019 of CT sports; a teen author and more<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And this may be the most complicated part of a UConn football coach\u2019s task, to focus on the schedule assembled while hoping and preparing for the possibility of the move that could change the trajectory of the program.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s not sugarcoat this thing, we want to be in a Power Four league,\u201d Candle said. \u201cThere\u2019s no dancing around that. But that\u2019s global thinking. You can think globally, but act locally. You have to understand in college athletics, you learn from the past, you prepare for what lies ahead in the future, but, damn, if you don\u2019t produce in the present, you have no shot. So if we don\u2019t continue to stack good days and turn them into good weeks, it doesn\u2019t matter where we end up, we\u2019re not going to be ready for it. So, yeah, we want to be there. Yes, we\u2019re preparing that way, yes, we recruit that way. We may even talk like that, but at the end of the day, whatever task is in front of us, big or small, we\u2019ve got to handle those things with the right attention to detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

When UConn was looking for a coach in 2021, the hierarchy did have a conversation with Candle, who was in the midst of a string of winning seasons and bowl appearances at Toledo. In the end, Mora, who had NFL and UCLA experience proved the perfect fit to kick-start UConn while rejuvenating his career. After doing both, he moved on to Colorado State last November, leaving behind a job that had become far more attractive than before in Storrs.<\/p>\n

Candle, 81-46 with eight bowl appearances, had spent nearly his entire life playing and coaching in the state of Ohio. At 46, he decided now was the time to move his wife, Nicole, and their three children to a new place. They are about to close on a new house in the area, the children to move when their school year ends in Ohio. Candle\u2019s wife, Nicole, has run the Boston Marathon several times and he has this in common with roughly half the UConn base: he\u2019s a Red Sox fan. Went to a game at Fenway years ago and hooked.<\/p>\n

At UConn, it was the \u201calignment\u201d to which he alluded, more than bricks and mortar, that resonated and he accepted the job, with a six-year, $15 million contract.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThere comes a point in time where you\u2019re looking for a new challenge,\u201d Candle said. \u201cWhere you would do something different. Toledo was very good to me, gave me an opportunity to be a head coach at a very young age. We had a lot of young men who reached their full potential in our program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building his way<\/p>\n

As Mora relied heavily on the transfer portal to bring in experienced players and turn UConn around quickly, Candle was sticking to his philosophy of recruiting high school players and developing them. Most of the additions he had made to the Huskies roster, during a whirlwind period, are players who followed him from Toledo.<\/p>\n

Dom Amore: Jason Candle\u2019s whirlwind rebuild yields a whole new UConn football team<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought we had done as good a job as anybody at the place I just come from of managing the portal,\u201d Candle said. \u201cThe approach of the portal is always going to be to supplement the roster. I felt like if we ever got into a situation where the portal had to save the roster, then \u2018man, oh, man, we are in trouble.\u2019 We were able to retain some great players, two draft picks this year, three years in a row where Toledo had a top 65 pick in the draft, so our good players stayed. Coming into a new environment where everyone is trying to their go separate way to \u2018see what\u2019s out there for me,\u2019 because that\u2019s a young person\u2019s thought process, that was a very difficult five, six weeks for us. You have to put together a coaching staff, take your time that way, hire great teachers, good character people themselves. From there, you want to build the locker room. The locker room is the most critical part of this thing, because if it\u2019s not the most critical part of it, then you will be using the portal to save your back side. So I know that formula works.\u201d<\/p>\n

With new rules creating one portal period, new coaches had to work fast. Within a few weeks, Candle hired 34 coaches and staffers and brought in over 70 transfers and recruits.<\/p>\n

In discussions of power conferences, the focus is on the things UConn does not have, At or near the top of that list is an on-campus stadium, with Rentschler Field<\/a> 23 miles away in East Hartford. Candle sighs, gives a little eye-roll at the mention of that. Unlike most of his predecessors, Candle does not come from a background of NFL or power conference experience, and he is more focused on what UConn has, than what others have.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes, it\u2019s human nature to try to find the warts, try to find what\u2019s wrong,\u201d Candle said. \u201cIt\u2019s low-hanging fruit for a conversation piece. There are so many good things to worry about and focus on. You\u2019re at the stadium this year, for the first time, seven times. Usually, it\u2019s six games. What is the day-to-day routine, what does the day-to-day operation look like for every kid? \u2018Well, coach, I want to go be a pro football player.\u2019 \u2026 Well, you don\u2019t sleep next to the stadium when you play for the Cleveland Browns. You GO to the stadium. When the game is over, you GO home. You don\u2019t go to the stadium to lift weights, you go to the facility.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, we\u2019re in a unique spot. The campus is not next to a metropolitan area. All the people live in a metropolitan area. Why wouldn\u2019t the stadium be where it is. To me, logistically, it makes a lot of sense. Now., can we create the best game-day environment there? \u2026 We are going to put a great product on the field.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mentors<\/p>\n

Candle is a student of football history. When asked what coaches he would most like to meet, he noted that most of them are long gone. His main inspiration came from his coach at Division III Mount Union, where Larry Kehres won 92.9 percent of his games across 27 seasons.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started coaching in 2002, made my mind up this was going to be a career, you start watching the Bob Stoops of the world, the Urban Meyers, the guys who had a ton of success at the college level at that time. For me, I had Larry Kehres<\/a> as a college coach (at Mount Union), more so as a man than a coach, a guy I could see, be around each and every day and be such a positive influence on me at that age, that was the motivation for me to get into coaching. It always goes back to your foundation, and Coach Kehres was the foundation for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"UConnUConn Athletic Director David Benedict, left, poses with his new football coach, Jason Candle, center, Candle’s wife, Nicole, and their children during his introductory\u00a0press conference on Monday. (Courtesy of UConn)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

From afar, Candle came to admire Jon Gruden\u2019s offensive designs and charismatic presence in the NFL and on ESPN. Now a media personality, Gruden has become a mentor and sounding board, he and Candle talk frequently.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you would say, \u2018hey, who\u2019s a coach you could pick up the phone and call and really value his opinion,\u201d Candle said. \u201cFrom a schematic standpoint and offensive perspective, when I was growing up, that was the guy.<\/a> He was doing it at the NFL level as good as anybody, the commitment to being great was always visible, infectious personality, the people gravitate toward him. He did it the right way, impact the player at the pro level. You hear guys talking about his impact today and they\u2019re very thankful for that. I don\u2019t know if you always get that from NFL coaches.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 So I reached out to him a few years ago to sit down with him and talk a little football, and I had very specific questions and he took the time to give me very specific answers. I really gravitated toward that and thought, \u2018this is a guy that maybe isn\u2019t doing what he wants to do, coaching football anymore, but man, oh, man he still feels like he has a lot to give to the game because he has a lot of respect for what the game has given him and uses his platform to do what he can for young coaches.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019re still kids\u2019<\/p>\n

Everything but the goalposts is ever-shifting in college football. With UConn bringing in a fraction of what power conference schools get in revenue, its national brand tied to men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball, the future is not clear, though that has been true for quite some time. More conference shifts are possible, expanded playoffs <\/a>that could give even an independent UConn program a chance to compete for a spot, are possible. Revenue sharing<\/a> is changing the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re at the mercy of how everything is going on the outside,\u201d Candle said. \u201cEverybody wants to play in the biggest league, everybody wants to have the biggest budget, everybody wants to have the best players. You put yourself in a position where you play the long game a little bit, where you can position yourself to be where you want to be. I don\u2019t know what conference championships look like in 24 months, what college football looks like in 18 to 24 months. It\u2019s hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coaching, however, is still coaching for Jason Candle, whatever the future of college football brings. And to the task of coaching college students and football players, he is anchored.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a parent, your children force you to adapt in a lot of ways,\u201d he said. \u201cSome things are non-negotiable, they\u2019re hard lines you will never give up on as a parent. But there are other things where the world does change, and as much resistance as you may want to put toward that, you have to change and mold to what\u2019s going on. If you\u2019re able and willing to do that as a parent, why would you not be able to do that in a career? Because these are still kids, people say, \u2018they\u2019re pros, they get paid.\u2019 They\u2019re not. They don\u2019t think like they\u2019re 35 or 27, they think like an 18 or 19 year old. So the human element of this, even though all the other things going around college athletics right now, this is still a very young influenced mind that has to be influenced the right way. You\u2019re here to get a college education, you\u2019re here to be an NFL draft pick, it\u2019s possible to do both those things at the same time, but it requires elite behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does he want players to remember their Candle experience?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat he was real,\u201d Candle said. \u201cThat he never asked us to do anything he wasn\u2019t willing to do himself, that he was in the fight with us and not fighting against us, he was a\u00a0 guy who fought for his players when it was time to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"STORRS \u2014 The smell of wet paint was apparent as one walked through the halls of the UConn…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[290450,46971,89877,2000,290451,33086,24882,399,37762,15862,211441,118143,70438,983,168221,398,396,397,97002,99,29516,15857,70437],"class_list":["post-664284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-bcs-playoffs","tag-bowl-games","tag-conference-realignment","tag-connecticut","tag-ctnews","tag-dan-hurley","tag-fbs","tag-football","tag-geno-auriemma","tag-hartford-courant","tag-jason-candle","tag-jim-calhoun","tag-jim-mora","tag-local-news","tag-max-image-preview","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-rentschler-field","tag-sports","tag-toledo","tag-uconn","tag-uconn-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}