Legendary College Football Coach Fired After 18 Seasons

A famed college football head coach who worked the sideline for almost two decades and became famous after being featured on a Netflix series is out of a job after making comments that criticized changes to the season and the playoff format.

Buddy Stephens, the East Mississippi Community College coach who won five national championships and was featured on the first two seasons of the “Last Chance U” series, is no longer with the football program.

Change in leadership

The school announced that offensive coordinator and associate head coach Preston Rice will work as the interim head coach for the team, which began its 2026 season with a win against Southwest Mississippi Community College.

Stephens notably was not mentioned by name in the school’s official statement, but another one put out on the college’s Facebook page included an apology for comments that were revealed in a recent media report.

Coach branded his superiors as ‘idiots’ for changes

Stephens said that the Mississippi Association of Community Colleges Conference leaders who introduced changes to the season were “idiots,” in comments made to The Commercial Dispatch newspaper.

That group added one game to its regular season so schools would play an equal number of home and road games, and changed its playoff system to include only the two division champions rather than the top two teams from each division.

Stephens also said that a number of school presidents didn’t want to spend more money on travel for the playoffs and instead created a format where they would be more likely to host those national postseason games themselves.

“We wouldn’t have won two national championships because we were the second place team in the North [division]. It’s not a very well thought-out process,” Stephens said.

He added: “It was really junkified, the way they decided they were going to do it, and there wasn’t a lot of real thought. I was very surprised at how it came out because there were actual people who have doctorates that came up with this.”

Buddy’s bosses didn’t like those comments

Consequently, those remarks were branded “inconsistent with the college’s core values and standards of professionalism, respect, and civility, and do not reflect the views, mission, or expectations of EMCC,” by school president Scott Alsobrooks.

And they resulted in a veteran football coach losing his job. Netflix famously profiled the school during the 2015-16 seasons as part of its “Last Chance U” series.

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