Arizona State football coach Kenny Dillingham studies young coaches. Knowing that, it is no surprise that Ra’shaad Samples came onto his radar. The 28-year-old is the son of famed Dallas high school coach Reginald Samples, and although he may have been reluctant to become a coach at first, he’s wowed those who have worked with him with his authenticity, communication skills and ability to lead. Speaking to people who have worked with him in his still young career, the question isn’t when Samples will become a head coach, but rather whether the young gun may get a head coaching role at a younger age than even Dillingham did.
Getting to know Samples and those around him unearths many of the themes around what takes a young coach from being a capable assistant to someone who many are assured will one day get to lead a program of his own.
The younger Samples, a former player at Oklahoma State and Houston, was working on a business degree when multiple concussions ended his playing career. He was working toward transitioning to perhaps become an athlete in a different arena: esports. At the time, he was a top-100 Madden player. Tom Herman, then the coach at Houston, had other ideas.
Herman recruited Samples when he was offensive coordinator at Ohio State, and the two have known each other since Samples was 15. As a player, Herman put Samples’s route-running abilities as the best he’d ever seen, on par with Danny Amendola’s and Garrett Wilson’s. As Samples’s playing career was ending, Herman saw how young players responded to him and always left the door open for him to be on his staff. He remembers trying to plant the seed.
“I hate to use the word persuading, because much like the old country song ‘Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,’ I've always subscribed, ‘Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be football coaches,’” Herman says.
Herman had seen Samples’s impact since he transferred from Oklahoma State to Houston in 2015, Herman’s first year as coach at Houston. Samples bucked at first but finally attended practices at Herman’s insistence.
“I remember one practice, he yelled out to me in the middle of the field,” Samples says. “A kid ran the wrong route, and he knew [that] I knew the playbook very, very well. That was one of the things he liked about me so much, that I just studied the game constantly. And he was like, ‘You're supposed to say something, Ra’Shaad. That’s what coaches do. They speak.’ And so he just rode me the whole year about coaching. He coached me into coaching.”
Herman left after the 2016 season for Texas, and Samples still had a year left to finish his degree. He stuck around the program and helped then-new coach Major Applewhite, who coaxed him to spread his wings. In the world of college coaching, that means participating in the rite of passage that is attending the American Football Coaches Association convention looking for a job. Hundreds of coaches with high school or college experience go every year. If you have a job, you’re there to see old buddies. If you don’t have a job, the pressure’s on to get one. The work of networking and self-promotion can be tiring.
“I [woke] up from my nap with a call from Herm and a text saying ‘call me.’ So mind you, we hadn’t talked in about three or four months now,” Samples says.
When the two did speak, Samples says Herman immediately asked how soon he could get to Austin.
“I was like, ‘Do I have a job?” Samples remembers. “He was like, ‘Hell yeah, you got a job.’ I said, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow. I’m gonna leave right now. I’m throwing all these résumés in the trash.’ I remember going back to the coaches’ convention, boy, I was smiling from ear to ear.”
Kiyoshi Mio/USA TODAY Sports
Samples spent the year at Texas as an assistant wide receivers coach, personally mentoring Lil’Jordan Humphrey and helping Texas with recruiting efforts in his native Dallas. Then he received an offer from Sonny Dykes to head home to Southern Methodist, first as an offensive assistant and then as a running backs coach and recruiting coordinator.
The challenge at SMU was finding ways to make a school that was in Dallas appealing to more than just those in the direct footprint of the ritzy Highland Park neighborhood.
They opened the doors to the city’s youth football teams and leaned on ties with local hip-hop artist Big Tuck. Samples was instrumental in spearheading efforts.
They revived the Mustang brand, with new logos and city-focused uniforms, and went on a billboard blitz across the metroplex, despite detractors.
“There were definitely some people uncomfortable with it,” Samples says. “But like I said, man, it became the norm around there, and that’s when it really started to pop and everybody started to realize, ‘Hey, man, this thing is real.’”
As with any initiative, it helps when you win, and the Ponies did under Dykes. SMU went 10–3 in its 2019 season, and followed that up with 7–3 and 8–4 records in ’20 and ’21. The SMU crew packed up and headed across I-30 to Fort Worth to take over at TCU in ’22.
Also instrumental to Samples’s success in Dallas were his deep ties to the community and the connection with his dad, who’s known as the godfather of DFW high school football. Ra’Shaad is a coach’s son, but he and his father are fundamentally different, largely due to the eras they started their careers in.
“I can’t tell a guy to just jump and expect him to ask me how high,” Samples says. “I have to get to know the kid. I have to find out who that kid is. I need to build a relationship with that kid so he knows when I tell him to jump to the sky, it’s because I know he can. … I’m not my dad, so for me to take that same approach would be irresponsible for me.”
Herman, who still leans on Reginald heavily for recruiting connections in the Dallas area, admits both of the Samples men are old souls. Any coach will tell you there’s something different about a coach’s kid, and Herman jokes that if he could sign 30 coaches kids a year in each recruiting class, he would.
Reginald Samples is a 33-year-old coaching veteran, and he has the bona fides to still get away with it in this era as some long-tenured coaches do. Reginald recently landed on the cover of the high school version of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine—the bible of Lone Star State football—after winning his first state championship at Duncanville High School. Sonny Dykes made the cover, making he and his father, Spike, the first father-son combo to have been on it. The elder Dykes graced the cover in 1990. Ra’Shaad says he one day hopes to do the same thing.
𝐀𝐭 𝐋𝐚𝐬𝐭 pic.twitter.com/G72kk3WY6K
— Dave Campbell's Texas Football — TexasFootball.com (@dctf) June 5, 2023
Samples says his father never pushed coaching on him, instead he let the bug bite him organically in the ways that fathers do when they truly know their hard-headed sons.
“I wanted to be understood, too. You know what I’m saying?” Samples says. “There was always this coach’s kid stigma for me. And I really fought that young in my career. I didn’t want to be the coach’s kid. I didn’t want to be Ra’Shaad Samples, Coach Samples’s son. I wanted to figure out how to be my own guy.”
The biggest way Samples put his own stamp on the job was by finding ways to deeply relate to players. This generation of kids is different, and using relationships as a teaching tool is how the new breed of coaches can have success getting their messages across.
“[Humphrey] earlier in my career taught me how to challenge players,” Samples says. “You weren’t going to get the best out of him unless he was challenged. … Once I started figuring out that and once I figured out how to do that and make him understand that, ‘Hey, I’m not challenging you from a demeaning standpoint. I’m trying to build you up. I'm trying to get everything out of you. I’m trying to help you become exactly what you want to be,’ he started to respond. … I needed to be challenged, and I think that’s why I related to him”
If Herman didn’t challenge Samples, would he be in this spot right now? Would he be the pro Madden player he dreamed about being? Or would he have settled for the fine life of being an accountant? Because of the meeting that set his course in coaching, Samples is now using Madden in recruiting and inviting his players over to his house for pizza night to talk to them about taxes, mutual funds and other key kernels of knowledge for the NIL era, when many players have more than just some walking-around money in their pockets.
Dear recruits,
— CoachSamp (@RashaadSamples) March 28, 2020
None of y’all can beat me in madden.#AskAround
For Samples, the work of helping players find their own identity became key when he got to TCU with Dykes, although he was there for only a few months. Those involved with the Horned Frogs’ 2022 run speak about how the players on the team almost had to be deprogrammed to a new approach with a staff that allowed players to showcase their identities and personalities.
Samples spent three months on the TCU staff helping to get things off the ground as assistant head coach, running game coordinator and recruiting coordinator. Then, somewhat surprisingly, the NFL came calling.
Rams assistant head coach Thomas Brown was moving to the tight ends coach role and was working to find a replacement. He’d been introduced to Samples through a mutual friend, then–TCU recruiting staffer and now Arizona State defensive backs coach Bryan Carrington. Brown wasn’t so sure Samples would take the leap—and a paycut—to come to the league. There were also other college suitors like Notre Dame and Alabama that had taken notice of him.
“I did the [Rams] interview via Zoom. It was supposed to be an hour-and-30-minute interview,” Samples says. “Within 20 minutes of it, Sean [McVay] stopped me and he was just like, ‘I stopped paying attention five minutes ago. I’ve been texting the other guys on this Zoom. … I’ve been texting the other guys on this Zoom, and you’re blowing us away.’ And he was like, ‘You got the job. I’m good. We don't need to keep doing this.’”
In Dillingham and McVay, Samples has coached for two of the fastest risers the profession has seen in recent memory. At 32, Dillingham became the youngest head coach in Power 5 when the Sun Devils hired him in December, surpassing 36-year-old Dan Lanning—who was Dillingham’s boss at the time at Oregon—for that distinction. McVay, famously, was the youngest NFL head coach in the modern era when he was hired at age 30.
When coaches rise quickly, it can seem like they haven’t really faced much on-field adversity. In weighing his options, Samples felt he needed to be challenged and leave comfortable confines to truly test his mettle as a coach; he also wanted to learn from McVay’s leadership, organizational and offensive schematic capabilities. But he got more than he bargained for along the way.
On-field adversity struck McVay, Samples and the Rams in the face in 2022. The team went 5–12 the season after winning the Super Bowl, and there were rumors (both inside and outside the organization) that McVay would leave the team. Samples was dealing with his own issues in his position room with reports of a rift between running back Cam Akers and McVay, and then further rumors of a trade request (which Akers denies). It was a miserable introduction to the NFL.
Samples realized he’d never really been publicly challenged like he was during the 2022 season. He leaned on Brown, who says he tries to be the sounding board he never had for young Black coaches when they come on staff, but, as the season dragged on, Samples found himself searching for answers and having tough conversations. Eventually, he realized he was better served going back to college football. But the experience in Los Angeles certainly changed him for the better through a hard season.
“When you’ve been successful constantly for so long, what do you usually do? Listen to what people say. Because what are they saying? How good you are,” Samples says. “My whole career had been upward, and I was eating the cheese. So now all of a sudden, I’m on Twitter and they’re like, ‘We need to get rid of Samples.’ I sent [a tweet] to my family in the midst of this because it was so funny. It was like, ‘Of course Cam Akers wants a trade. We hired a 17-year-old.’”
Kiyoshi Mio/USA TODAY Sports
Progress isn’t linear, and if last season was a slide backward, how Samples is aiming to move forward begins now. Dillingham was among a few coaches who inquired about whether Samples would want to come back to the college ranks with a proposition to move to wide receivers coach, one of the biggest position groups on the team, to gain more experience managing more people than a stable of running backs. The core of the pitch was twofold.
“Let’s come together for a common goal, and that’s making Arizona State better,” Dillingham says. “But within that, I’m going to help do everything I can to help you reach your endgame goal, which would be the youngest head coach in college football.”
Dillingham has done things to make good on his promise to help develop Samples. He called plays in the spring game, and Brown raves about his communication skills when teaching X’s and O’s, which is as important as having a handle on the schemes themselves. Samples continues to gain experience with off-field organization as well, meeting one on one with Dillingham and ASU administrators to get a handle on the administrative tasks a head coach performs. It continues a trend for Samples, who says he was in the “hip pocket” of Herman and Dykes to learn how to carry himself like a head coach. He’s dressing for the job he wants, not just the job he has.
Head coaches coach their coaches as much—if not even more—than they coach their players. Sometimes that even means coaching their players into being coaches, as Herman did years ago. It’s clear that Samples is Dillingham’s brightest prospect. Before you know it, he might just be coaching against him, too.
