Delaware entering first FBS season unafraid with Ryan Carty in charge: ‘We didn’t make this jump to float around’

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Delaware football has won six national championships in a rich but relatively unexplored history that began in the late 1800s.

The program has had only six head coaches since 1966. That’s the year the late, great Tubby Raymond first took the reins in Newark. He won 300 games and three of those national titles en route to the College Football Hall of Fame.

Delaware has had five quarterbacks drafted since 1979. That’s as many as Clemson, one fewer than Texas and two fewer than Texas A&M in that span.

The most recent Blue Hen signal-caller to hear his name called on draft day was Joe Flacco, a Super Bowl MVP in 2013 who won NFL Comeback Player of the Year two seasons ago and is still a viable starter in the league at 40 years old. Before him came Rich Gannon, a four-time Pro Bowler who earned NFL MVP honors, broke league passing records and reached the Super Bowl during the 2002 season at 37 years old. Matt Nagy, who coordinated a Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs offense in 2023 and previously coached the Chicago Bears, is the program’s all-time leading passer.

Their alma mater is led by one of their own. Actually, he backed up Flacco at Delaware. Prior to that, he was part of the Blue Hens’ 2003 FCS national championship team. He was all but hand-picked to coach by Chip Kelly before starting his career with the same first job Ryan Day once held at the University of New Hampshire.

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His name is Ryan Carty, originally a member of the final Raymond recruiting class and now the head coach of a Delaware program embarking on its first season of FBS competition.

Delaware is one of two schools making the transition from the FCS to the FBS this season, the other being Missouri State. Both joined a shapeshifting Conference USA.

“We didn’t make this jump to float around,” Carty said of his Blue Hens in an interview with Yahoo Sports.

“There was a certain intention to what we were doing, and hopefully we can continue to literally put our money where our mouth is and grow because that’s what this program’s been built on, is being a program that has continually stayed at the top of whatever they attempted to be at the top of.”

Conference USA commissioner Judy MacLeod was struck by how prepared Delaware was for the transition process, citing the school’s budget, facilities and willingness to improve both.

“If they didn’t believe they were ready to compete in Conference USA, I don’t think they would do this,” she said of the university.

Carty, 42, is in his fourth season at the helm. Under his guidance, Delaware has won at least eight games three seasons in a row for the first time since 1995-97, and at least nine games in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 2003-04. His Blue Hens teams have compiled a 26-11 record, reached the FCS playoffs the two years they were eligible, scored 40-plus points on 14 occasions and produced 34 All-CAA player accolades.

When Carty accepted the job in 2021, his goal was to return Delaware to its perennial national title contender status and then transform the program into an FCS dynasty.

“Obviously, plans have changed,” Carty said.

He’s a former New Jersey high school phenom who used to change his father’s play calls at the line of scrimmage, scramble 25 yards back and make something happen. He has a gift for adjusting on the fly. He’s fearless, just like the program he stewards.

Calling the shots

Carty was facing a third-and-goal and a four-point deficit from the South Dakota State 10-yard line in Frisco, Texas. It was May 2021, but the 2020 FCS, pandemic-delayed season was on the line. His offense had 21 seconds and no timeouts left in the national title game.

Carty was in the booth as offensive coordinator calling the most important plays in Sam Houston football’s then-109-year history: one for third down and another for a hypothetical fourth down.

“I remember him calling a ‘four verticals,’” recalled K.C. Keeler, at the time Sam Houston’s head coach.

“Now I’m talking to him. I’m like, ‘Hey, get your next play. Because if they tackle us in bounds, we’re going to have enough time to get a play off, but we can’t change personnel. You have to have a play called right now because we’re not going to have time to waste.’”

This variation of four verticals featured a trips-left formation with a running back angle route attached, along with a delayed tight end release. Carty, who threw for a New Jersey-record 43 touchdowns as a Somerville High senior in 2001, gave his Bearkats quarterback options against a SDSU defense sitting back in a zone that was daring Sam Houston to earn all 10 yards for paydirt.

Sam Houston’s Eric Schmid picked his spot, and not a millisecond late. He rifled a pass over the middle to wide receiver Ife Adeyi. The laser hit Adeyi in the chest, right at the goal line and in between a pair of Jackrabbits linebackers.

Moments later, the Bearkats were first-time FCS national champs after back-to-back runner-up finishes the previous decade. Keeler and Carty were at the top of the FCS for the second time, this time together as coaches.

Turns out, Carty needed only one play — not two.

“I asked him,” Keeler told Yahoo Sports with a chuckle. “I said, ‘So what were you going to go with?’ He goes, ‘I wasn’t really inventive. I was going back with four verticals.’”

That’s who Carty is, a man grounded in his convictions and the youngest yet most competitive of three boys in a family of football players-turned-coaches. That’s coming from his oldest brother, Kevin Carty Jr.

“He’s not afraid of doing something that people might look at and say it’s a bad decision if he thinks that’s going to be the right play,” said Kevin, the longtime head coach at New Jersey’s Hillsborough High School.

Sometimes the “right play” has a creative flair that Ryan Carty adopted while climbing the coaching ladder under storied New Hampshire coach Sean McDonnell.

McDonnell retired from his post at UNH in 2021 after 23 seasons of leading a program known for its explosive and innovative offenses. He mentored Kelly and Day, the latter of whom McDonnell first started at quarterback before hiring to his staff.

Carty’s on that branchy coaching tree, too. In the quarterfinals of the 2014 FCS playoffs, he made a play call that still gets McDonnell excited.

In his third season as UNH’s offensive coordinator, Carty opened his navy blue and gray bag of tricks. Leading Chattanooga 28-24 with more than 11 minutes remaining, UNH quarterback Sean Goldrich — now Carty’s pass game coordinator at Delaware — sent star receiver R.J. Harris in motion from the slot, right to left. When Goldrich received the snap, he handed it off to Harris, who, still running left, flipped the ball in the backfield to fellow wideout Jimmy Giansante, who was coming in for a reverse from the left hash.

Rather than making a break for the right edge, Giansante pitched the rock back to Goldrich and immediately turned into a blocker to afford Goldrich the time for a throwback screen to the left side of the field. Harris caught the ball and, with five linemen and one tight end escorting him down the sideline, raced for a 61-yard touchdown that gave the Wildcats an 11-point cushion, which proved big enough in a 35-30 victory.

“The thing that I really thought Ryan did so well was that he involved everybody in the offense and got everybody touches in the game,” McDonnell told Yahoo Sports. “But he also had this unbelievable knack for getting the ball to the right person at the right time, and especially going to your best players.”

McDonnell added: “He found a way to get them the ball in different spaces and places.”

Carty appreciates talent others might overlook. He finds diamonds in the rough, according to McDonnell, who believes his former assistant’s eye for evaluation was sharpened by his own humble experience as a player.

Long before the portal era, Carty was stuck behind successive transfer quarterbacks during his five years at Delaware. He knows what it’s like to feel capable but sidelined and replaced by the new kid at school. Gone are the days of coaches being able to bank on underclassmen waiting in the wings to see things through. Carty, though, can make those players feel seen.

“I think that’s why he found so many hidden gems at UNH as an offensive coordinator spreading the ball around to people,” McDonnell said, “’cause he had faith they would make plays.”

He had faith in himself all those years ago, after all.

QB2 and kind of blue

The “We Want Carty!” chants in Delaware Stadium were real.

After Georgia Tech transfer Andy Hall quarterbacked Delaware to a national title in 2003, Missouri transfer Sonny Riccio took his place as QB1, sliding in front of Carty on a depth chart he had inhabited for two years.

Riccio’s name is littered across passing leaderboards in the program record book. He followed Hall’s national championship season with a nine-win, FCS quarterfinals campaign despite an uneven 16:14 touchdown-to-interception ratio. The next year, however, the Blue Hens missed the playoffs and posted a 3-5 record in A10 play, and Riccio’s completion percentage slipped to 55.4%.

“It’s a strong fan base here, and they’re opinionated,” a reflective Carty said. “There’s no doubt that there was that contingent that did want some change, I suppose, here and there.”

Most of Carty’s playing time came during Delaware’s championship season in 2003, when he was backing up Hall. He threw the only touchdown pass of his college career in the final stages of a first-round playoff win over Southern Illinois that year. All in all, he left Delaware with 14 games played from 2002-06, during which he totaled 192 passing yards, along with the 119 yards and two touchdowns he collected on the ground.

“Whenever I was called on to go in there and succeed in the chances I had, I feel like I did pretty well,” he said. “And those were always exciting for me.”

By the time Flacco was competing with Carty for the starting job in training camp, he already had two springs at Delaware under his belt.

Even though Flacco moved down a level to the FCS, he still had to sit out a year because then-Pitt head coach Dave Wannstedt didn’t release him from his commitment. That relegated Flacco to the Delaware scout team during his first go-around with the program, and it meant he had to pay his own way that year.

The next summer, Flacco, 6-foot-6 with a bazooka arm and deceptively quick legs, beat out the 5-foot-11 Carty, who had the brains and craftiness to operate the offense but once again didn’t have the keys to do so.

“It wasn’t just like a slam dunk that it was Joe’s job,” Keeler recounted. “But you saw the tremendous upside Joe had, and you felt like tie had to go to the guy who you think can really become a great player. So that’s the direction we went.”

Carty said he and Flacco are “still very close,” and he considers Flacco a great friend of the Delaware football program. But backing him up in 2006 wasn’t easy, especially because Carty was a team captain.

He appreciated the leadership opportunity, although he admits it made him occasionally feel helpless.

“There was that thing holding me back at times,” Carty said, “kind of reflecting on thinking about how I would take this if I was getting talked to by a person who wasn’t on the field and couldn’t make that play.”

That experience, though, is one he turns to when helping his current captains at Delaware find ways to confidently contribute through playing slumps and injuries.

Another experience that season jumpstarted Carty’s coaching career.

Climbing the ladder

It was Sept. 30, and rival UNH was in town ranked No. 1 nationally.

Carty was hanging around during warmups when UNH offensive coordinator Chip Kelly approached him. Kelly asked Carty what he wanted to do after graduation. Carty indicated his interest in entering the family business: coaching.

“He was like, ‘Well, the day after the season ends, give me a call. We’ll try to help you out,’” Carty said. “And of course I didn’t ’cause I was a kid, and I was an idiot.”

What followed was Flacco’s breakout game in blue and yellow. After letting a rocky start to the year roll off his back, he threw for 315 yards and three touchdowns in a 52-49 shootout. UNH won, but Flacco teased the NFL prospect he’d become the following season when he led the Blue Hens to a national runner-up finish.

Carty graduated in January. By February, Kelly called him. UNH had a vacant tight ends coach position. The job paid about $6,000 a year, according to Carty. It came with free lunches, too, McDonnell pointed out.

A glorified graduate assistant coaching gig, the tight ends job at UNH back then — the same one Day had in 2002 — was an invitation to grind.

“We had an opportunity to hire a part-time coach for no money, and we interviewed him, and he knocked it dead in the interview,” McDonnell said of Carty.

“It wasn’t about X’s and O’s. It was just the way he handled himself.”

Carty shared a workroom with UNH’s other “restricted earnings coaches,” who McDonnell explained were eventually afforded higher wages thanks to rule changes. They still weren’t making full-time money, though.

“Shoot, the guys that came through that room over the course of time,” Carty said, “impressive list of people.”

Carty started dropping names: Jerry Azzinaro, who went on to coach Kelly’s defensive lines at Oregon and in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers; Joe Conlin, Fordham’s current head coach; Derek Sage, once Kelly’s UCLA tight ends coach and now Toledo’s tight end coach; Tim Cramsey, the Memphis offensive coordinator and QBs coach who once held the same role for UNH; and Alex Grinch, eventually a defensive coordinator at Ohio State, Oklahoma, USC, Wisconsin and now UCF.

“They go from being a guy in the room that’s listening to a guy in the room that’s suggesting to then a guy in the room that’s making the decisions,” McDonnell said.

“And that’s what’s happened an awful lot at UNH. I’m very fortunate to have a lot of young guys like that.”

A reunion and a precursor

Carty replaced Cramsey as UNH’s OC in 2012. That marked the beginning of a play-calling résumé that ultimately got Carty the job at Delaware.

First it led him to Sam Houston.

Each of Carty’s six seasons as UNH’s play-caller, the Wildcats featured a top-five scoring offense in the CAA, including in 2014 when they posted 36 points per game while winning the league and reaching the FCS semifinals. That year, wide receiver R.J. Harris led the FCS with 1,551 receiving yards, and only UNH running back Nico Steriti had more touchdowns than Harris among all CAA players.

Carty’s offensive philosophy was influenced by the coaches he learned from at UNH, and even Kelly, whom he worked clinics with over and over again. Carty wants to play with tempo and deploy a variety of personnel packages. He’ll get in a defensive coordinator’s head with gimmicky looks and he knows how to create a lot with a little.

“I feel like they do more different things than anybody that you watch,” Kevin Carty Jr. said of his younger brother’s offenses.

Eventually, Ryan Carty’s college coach came calling. Keeler took over at Sam Houston in 2014, two years after his 11-season run at Delaware ended, and he had an OC opening ahead of the 2018 season. He contacted McDonnell and gave him a heads up that he was going to try to get Carty to come to Sam Houston.

“Now, I was pissed. I didn’t want to lose him,” McDonnell said. “I tried to tell him it was a lateral move, but I think when growth has to happen, moves like that have to be made. And obviously it was the right move for him.”

Every year Carty was at Sam Houston, his offense averaged more yards and points than it did the season before. By the end of the 2021 season, the Bearkats were fifth in the FCS with 490.9 yards per game and third with 40.5 points per game.

The season before that, Sam Houston won an indisputable national title that could have had a pandemic asterisk had the Bearkats not gone through the three teams who have combined for the other 13 FCS crowns in the past 14 seasons.

Sam Houston authored thrilling victories over North Dakota State, James Madison and South Dakota State.

“The playoff run will go down as one of the great playoff runs ever,” Keeler said. “We beat the best three teams in the decade in 15 days.”

The apple(s) didn’t fall far from the tree

Keeler thought Carty would become the OC at Oregon, or maybe at USC or UCLA, or perhaps he’d become an NFL position coach. But the former Delaware linebacker-turned-coach is familiar with the appeal of his alma mater offering a head job.

“I would pinch myself every day I came up to the facility,” Keeler said. “I followed a legend, Tubby Raymond: 300 wins, three national championships. And then to think that I was the guy who had the chance to be the next guy was pretty special.

“So, yeah, I know how Ryan feels. It’s a special place, and expectations are high, but that’s just what goes along with it.”

Carty was ready for the challenge. Besides, leading football programs is in his blood.

His father, Kevin Carty Sr., served as the head coach at Don Bosco High School and Verona High School in New Jersey, a state where he also won 92 games from 1994-2006 at the forefront of a Somerville program that featured Ryan Carty and his older brothers, Kevin Jr. and Sean, before their college playing days.

Kevin Jr. is 6 1/2 years older than Ryan and 1 1/2 years older than Sean. He got his first head-coaching job at Bound Brook High in 2006 and spent five seasons there before taking over at Hillsborough in 2011. Sean, a wide receiver at Rutgers prior to coaching on Kevin Jr.’s staffs at Bound Brook and Hillsborough, just became the head coach at Montgomery High School.

Kevin Sr. and Kevin Jr. have both won state sectional championships as head coaches. Each of those Carty-led titles featured a father-son dynamic, with Kevin Jr. quarterbacking the 1994 Somerville team and Kevin Sr. helping out on staff for the 2021 Hillsborough team.

When Kevin went off to play quarterback at the University of North Carolina, Ryan was still playing youth sports. When Kevin wrapped up a transfer stint at William & Mary, he returned home and fully accepted that Ryan was no longer “our little brother.”

He wasn’t the biggest. He wasn’t the fastest, either. But elusive athleticism, good footwork and balance and pinpoint accuracy made him a valuable signal-caller. He knew when to take his medicine and make the throws he could hit in his sleep and when to trust his instincts and reach into his quiver for a more aggressive arrow.

He played with the same conviction he coaches with.

A calculated risk

The Blue Hens are a regional powerhouse and were regularly ranked inside the FCS top 10 in terms of home attendance. Yet even the most successful FCS programs are relatively obscure nationally.

To the casual college football fan, Delaware is Flacco’s alma mater, and the Blue Hens’ uniforms are the ones that kind of look like Michigan’s, winged helmets and all.

Moving up to the FBS instantly makes Delaware more recognizable. There’s more money to be had, too.

The school’s inclusion in the “EA College Football” video game, for instance, helps in both ways. Boosted by the athletic department’s “Dynasty Challenge,” the game increases the program’s digital footprint. Delaware additionally benefits from a change in the game’s payment model, which now uses engagement as a qualifying measurement for how schools are paid. Whereas schools were previously compensated by tier levels determined from a decade average of end-of-season AP Top 25 poll finishes, they’re now receiving royalty checks based on their usage.

The multimedia rights deal Conference USA has with CBS Sports and ESPN is even more lucrative for Delaware. The agreement went into effect during the 2023-24 season, and it sees that all October C-USA football games are played during midweek evenings on linear television. Not only does that set Delaware up for greater financial resources, it also offers the Blue Hens relatively unoccupied real estate on the FBS calendar. Plus, they’ll have some higher-profile Saturday games, namely a Week 2 showdown in Boulder against Deion Sanders’ Colorado team.

There are costs, however, that come with the jump to FBS. In October 2023, just before Delaware announced its move, the NCAA Division I Council added three more zeroes to its fee to join the FBS, catapulting the number from $5,000 to $5 million.

The jump has required an investment from the school and its athletic department, both of which are now navigating changes of their own. As Delaware prepares for its first FBS season, it has an interim president and interim athletic director.

There are lots of moving parts, in Newark and in the league where the Blue Hens have perched. Conference realignment in 2021 left a Lone Star State-sized hole in the Dallas-based C-USA, with two-thirds of its membership bailing in 11 days.

Since then, C-USA commissioner Judy MacLeod has brought the league back from the dead. She pulled in independents Liberty and New Mexico State. And she added FCS schools, first Jacksonville State and Sam Houston, then Kennesaw State and eventually Delaware and Missouri State.

C-USA enters the 2025 football season with 12 members. Five were playing in the FCS this decade. MacLeod believes that nomenclature is temporary.

“If you think about Appalachian State or Coastal Carolina,” she said, “I mean those schools transitioned not that long ago, and people don’t even talk about them in that way.”

She continued: “Sure, you’re going to have that history as an FCS [school], and Delaware’s had a tremendous history, but as long as they can establish themselves at this new level, in the future it’s not going to matter.”

Jacksonville State has won nine games each of its first two seasons in C-USA. Last year, it won the league under head coach Rich Rodriguez, who is now at West Virginia, and K.C. Keeler’s final Sam Houston squad was the only C-USA team to record double-digit victories.

Ryan Carty, who led Delaware to an upset win over Navy in his first game as head coach three years ago, is striving to become C-USA’s next coach to usher in newfound FBS success.

“What I know about the community of Delaware football is that, yes, there’ll be a little bit of, ‘Oh, well, we’re an FBS team now,’” Carty said. “There’s also going to be an expectation of winning, and that’s fine. That’s who we are as a program.

“You don’t have six national titles in your history and a million playoff appearances and the things that have happened here and the amount of NFL players we have and Hall of Fame coaches without the expectation of a community that there’s going to be a winning product on the field. And, so, believe me, that is my expectation as well.”

Carty never got his shot as Delaware’s starting quarterback. But he’s playing a far more important role for his alma mater now. He’s guiding the program through a perilous transition in the sport’s most uncertain of times: the recent House settlement, which allows schools to share revenue with their student-athletes, is the latest NIL wrinkle; the CFP format can’t sit still; and more realignment dominoes could fall soon.

Delaware was willing to take a calculated risk to share its storied tradition with a much larger audience. The university decided moving up was the right play, and Carty wasn’t afraid to call it.

This news was originally published on this post .

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