By Howard Feldenkris
Congratulations Coach Carney on a well-deserved Promotion to Kent State Head Football Coach!
As a fan of 50 years of Kent State football, I have seen some very good and some very bad football played by the Kent State Golden Flashes football team. As a Freshman in 1973, I remember going to a full Dix Stadium every week and watching the likes of Jack Lambert, Gary Pinkel, Abdul Salaam, Larry Poole, Cedrick Brown and Greg Kokal star for the Golden Flashes. All of these players went on to the NFL and off course Jack Lambert onto the Pro Football Hall of Fame. At one point in that season Kent was actually ranked 19th in the country!
Over the years, I have stayed an interested and loyal fan of the Golden Flashes football team, attending games and watching great players like Jose Davis, Eugene Baker, Andy Harman, Brian Winters, Josh Cribbs, Julian Edelman, Dri Archer and Dustin Crum.
Over the last weekend the Flashes football team beat Bowling Green 24-21 for their third victory of the season, behind Interim Coach Mark Carney. For Carney and his staff, this is quite an accomplishment, given how far the program had fallen from the success former of Coach Lewis’ Flash Fast era that ended in 2022. Lewis, after a rough two-win season in his first year, found some magic in the form of Quarterback Dustin Crum, and his teams were able to make it to two bowl games, and in fact beat Utah State and Quarterback Jordan Love, now of the Green Bay Packers, in the 2019 Frisco Bowl 51 – 41.
Young, charismatic coaches coming to Kent for their first head coaching job, have had a boom or bust history at Kent. In the early 90’s Coach Pete Cordelli, came to Kent from Notre Dame, at the urging of Notre Dame Head Coach, and Kent Alum, Lou Holtz. Cordelli lasted three years at Kent going 3-31 during his tenure. Darrell Hazell and Sean Lewis had much better success as first time head coaches at Kent while Lewis’s replacement, Kenni Burns, joins the list of those who did not. Coaching success comes with the obvious downside that a young coach with success in the MAC, will likely be hired to move onto a school, where even Coordinator salaries are two to three times that of a MAC head coach.
Over the past five years, the landscape of college football changed with the ability of student athletes to transfer without sitting out a year, as well as with NIL money flowing to players from schools with significant financial support from athletic boosters. When Sean Lewis bolted to the University of Colorado, to become Deion Sanders’ Offensive Coordinator at the end of the 2022 season, almost all of the the team’s best players transferred out. Many of these players were all MAC performers who transferred out to bigger and better programs including, Colorado, West Virginia and UCLA. It is not uncommon for players to transfer when a coaching change occurs, but with the change in the portal rules, it was an exodus of mass proportions, which had a major impact on the depth of the roster, particularly when it came to returning starters.
Enter Kenni Burns, an up and comer mentored by University of Minnesota head coach P.J. Fleck. He was a charismatic young coach just like Coach Lewis, and even had his own catchy slogan like Lewis, called Kent Grit. As also was the case with Coach Lewis, Coach Burns had a rough first year, with his only win coming in the annual FCS game with Central Connecticut State. He finished the 2023 season with a 1-11 record.
At this point this is where the program began to sink to a historically low level. The 2024 season included the usual thumping by three power fives schools, Pitt, Tennessee and by Penn State by a combined score of 182-24. A very disappointing loss to FCS school St. Francis, 23-17 in week two, was unfortunately a sign of what was to come during the upcoming MAC season. The Golden Flashes lost every MAC game, by a total combined score of 324-126. 2024 was statistically one of the worse seasons in program history. A review of the Kent State Football website, shows that the Kent gained an average of only 232 yards per game, and gave up an average of 516 yards per game during the 2024 campaign. Kent was outscored by an average of 30 points in MAC games, and the season ended mercifully at 0 – 12 on November 26th with a 43-7 loss to the University of Buffalo.
If the team’s performance wasn’t bad enough, rumors of improprieties with the Coach’s finances began to surface and in combination with the team’s poor performance, rumors of Coach Burns’ demise were swirling. I’m guessing that Burns was not relieved of his duties at that point, due to the buyout on the remaining four years on his contract, totaling in excess of $2 million. Shortly after the 2024 0-11 season concluded, the winter transfer portal opened (January 2 to January 16th) and many of the team’s starters transferred out, including half of the Offensive Line starters, its best linebackers and both starting safeties. The ship was taking on water and sinking fast.
Then on March 27th of this year Coach Burns was put on administrative leave, and ultimately relieved of his duties on April 11th. The University named Coach Carney as the Interim Head Coach on March 27th. Coach Carney joined the coaching staff in 2023 as the Tight Ends coach, and was promoted to Offensive Coordinator prior to the 2023 season. The timing of Coach Burns ultimate demise, corresponded with the opening of the spring transfer portal season (April 16 through April 25) at which time an additional fourteen players hit the portal, including several likely 2025 season starters on the defensive line, linebacking corps, two possible Quarterback starters, and another starting offensive line starter.
Coach Burns, Coach Carney and the staff had already started on recruiting new recruits and transfer portal players for the 2025 season, but after Coach Burns went down in a ball of flames, Coach Carney and his staff had to go to work to keep the remaining team members in place, keep the recruiting class in place, and hit the transfer portal hard to replace the areas of the roster decimated in the transfer portal. Coach Carney and staff were able to retain the majority of the 2025 recruiting class, and recruit a number of offensive and defensive lineman out of the transfer portal. Half of the Offensive and Defensive line players on the current two-deep depth-chart were recruited out of the transfer portal including offensive linemen Matt Pajuste and Ashton Rivera, defensive lineman Thomas Aden, Jelani Davis and Jamond Mathis, and a wide receiver named Da’Realyst Clark. Coach Carney and his staff were also able to coax CJ Montes, the teams opening day Quarterback, and the team’s best linebacker Mason Woods, back out of the transfer portal.
Carney’s staff began to the difficult task of creating a new culture of leadership and positivity as it worked through spring practice. The staff continued to recruit and stay positive as fall camp was about to open. There was one more bomb that remained to be dropped on the Kent State Football program, when defensive coordinator Kody Morgan, announced he was leaving the program in July to become the defensive line coach at North Dakota state. This quote from the Hustle Belt publication, captures the essence of the situation after Morgan’s resignation was announced just a month before the season started:
“The new Defensive Coordinator will be moving on the fly in fall camp, especially considering Kent State’s mass transfer exodus in April. The Golden Flashes lost a multitude of their top defensive contributors including defensive linemen Stephen Daley and Oliver Billotte, linebacker Jaden Studio and safety Armahn Hale, in addition to the talent they lost pre-April.”
Carney and the Kent social media staff were all over creating a positive image of the team for the outside world during fall camp, with daily clips of players and coaches from each position group. There was an obvious chemistry building between Coach Carney, his staff and team. But chemistry alone, would not be enough to win football games. The staff rebuilt the depth chart with remaining veterans such as Gavin Garcia, Dustyn Morrell, Garret Masterson, Mason Woods, CJ Young, Stretch Carroll, and AJ Campbell, along with the veteran transfer players mentioned above. There was also the task of figuring out which red shirt freshman and true freshman could contribute to the success of the team. There was some talent in this group, and the Coaches have figured out how to put that talent on display so far this season. This group included Wide Receivers Da’Shawn Martin, Cade Wolford, Safeties Tevin Tucker, Joel Cordoba and a 6’8” 320 pound offensive tackle named Tyler Meadows. Coach Carney, a former Quarterback at Cleveland St. Edward’s and then at Fordham University, keyed in on the Quarterback Position, and as camp progressed, Carney reported on the battle taking place between veteran transfer CJ Montes and a redshirt freshman named Dru DeShields. Montes was a veteran QB, who in 2023 at Fordham had thrown for 28 touchdowns and only 1 interception, and he seemed like the logical choice to lead the team. But Coach Carney seemed to key in on the playmaking ability of the redshirt freshman DeShields. DeShields was a Football and Track star at little West Branch High School. He has had three knee surgeries over the last two years, but Carney saw something in the play making abilities of this young man.
As the 2025 Football season began, Coach Carney and his staff had rebuilt the offensive and defensive units, and implemented new coaching schemes to best fit the strength of their players. The season opened at home against FCS Merrimack College, a school I quite frankly had never heard. Kent entered the season with the longest losing streak in the country, standing at 22 games. Kent battled hard but Merrimac eventually took the lead in the fourth quarter. A loss in this game certainly would not bode well for the 2025 season.
This is where a Coach Carney was struck by the “Luck of the Irish”!! In 2019 during the Sean Lewis tenure, a successful onside kick turned the tide of a certain loss to a good Buffalo team, into a victory, and propelled Kent State on to a 7-6 season including a Bowl Game victory. In this first game of the 2025 season, trailing by a score of 17-14 late in the fourth quarter, kick returner Da’Realyst Clark, a 5”10” 150 speedster, who had previously played for Butler Community College and Defiance College, returned a kickoff 100 yards and seal a 21-17 victory in Kent’s home opener. Who was Merrimac and who was Da’Realyst Clark didn’t really matter, what did matter is that Kent State was 1 – 0 and the longest losing streak in the country was now off of the back of the Kent State Football program. Coach Carney and his staff had given players and the team’s fans something to feel good about.
Three of the next four games were against Power 5 teams Texas Tech, Florida State and Oklahoma. Kent, primarily behind Quarterback Dru Deshields “flashed” some big plays including several long beautifully thrown touchdown passes to Cade Wolford. Kent defense was for the most part physically not able to compete with these big boys, who were all ranked in the top 20 at the time of their games. Not surprisingly, Kent was smoked in these 3 games by a combined score of 172 – 24, but needed experience by all of the new starters was gained, and the team stayed relatively healthy. Most importantly these three games, earned the athletic program somewhere near $5 million in revenue that certainly helps to support the entire athletic department. I’m not sure if there will ever be a time when the Athletic Department is ever able to take the burden of three of these annual beat-downs off the schedule, and perhaps substitute another home game, but that is the subject of another article.
In Kent’s next home game in the friendly confines of Dix Stadium, Kent battled back from a 24 – 14 deficit against a good University of Buffalo team, with a 3 yd RPO run by Dru DeShields with. DeShields who also threw for 279 yards and two touchdowns, was really starting to look like former Kent State quarterback Dustin Crum, with the offensive coaching staff finding ways to move the offense and score on big plays. Unfortunately, Buffalo marched the length of the field and score a touchdown to win the game at the end. Coach Carney’s team played with great intensity during the entire game, and not quit when down by double digits late in the third quarter. This Kent team, dominated by transfers and redshirt freshman starters was gaining confidence and belief in their ability to compete. Coach Carney, and his staff had provided both the leadership and football schematic acumen to put the team in a position to play winning football, something sadly lacking from 2024 team.
In Kent’s next home game against a weak UMass team, Kent dominated on both sides of the ball and won the game 42 – 6. DeShields threw for touchdowns of 34, 36, 25 and 10 yards to four different receivers, and the team gained 151 yards on the ground. In this game, the Defense came to play! The back seven of the defense is small and inexperienced, but their quickness was on display. It was becoming apparent that this coaching staff could put together a game plan and coach up the players to execute it. One play in the UMass game really stuck out. On a fourth down from mid-field Kent executed a fake punt with the mythical figure of Da’Realyst Clark throwing a prefect pass to gain a first down. And by the way, Clark had already returned the opening kick-off for a touchdown.
After a loss on the road, Kent returned home to take on a good Bowling Green team coming off a big win over Toledo. New BG Coach, former NFL running back Eddie George, had an experienced offensive line and a strong running game. Kent had beaten an FCS team, and the doormat of the Mid- American Conference, but could the Flashes beat a good team with an experienced offensive and defensive front. BG ran roughshod over Kent’s defense and led 21 to 3 at the six-minute mark in the third quarter. Just as in the Buffalo game, the Flashes came storming back scoring three touchdowns, to take a 24 to 21 lead with three minutes left in the fourth quarter. The touchdown run included a 45 yard run by Senior Gavin Garcia, and a brilliantly executed halfback pass by Da’Realist Clark. In the fourth quarter the Defense unleashed a blitzkrieg on the Bowling Green offense, and ultimately closed out the victory by stopping BG on the final drive of the game. Bowling Green outgained Kent 379 to 294 in this game, but ultimately Kent’s coaching decisions, defensive adjustments, and the team’s ability to execute a well-timed gadget play, trumped the coaching decisions of the Falcons!
The Coach Carney led Golden Flash Football team had now hit a three-win threshold through building a belief in this team that they could compete and win. Since being named Interim Head Coach, at the lowest ebb in the history of the Kent State Football Program, Coach Carney named new offensive and defensive coordinators, built a culture of positivity and engagement amongst the team and community, built viable offensive and defensive units out of roster filled with new players and few returning starters, continued to recruit, and showed creativity and guts to find ways to win football games. The Golden Flashes football team looks energized, and as Coach Carney often says, the locker room believes in each other and has stayed together.
On October 30th, Kent State did the right thing and dropped the interim tag and named Coach Mark Carney as the 24th head football coach in Kent State History! With a good man at the helm, and the stability that this announcement will bring to the team and recruiting class, the Kent State football program has emerged from the depths of despair and headed back in the right direction! Go Flashes!