By John Dobberstein, Editor
After being introduced as the new football coach at Northeastern State University, Darrin Chiaverini said all the right things to a suit of NSU administrators, alumni and the media: More students graduating. More discipline. Character counts.
But it was clear Wednesday how much work Chiaverini and his incoming staff must do to rebuild a RiverHawk gridiron program that has lost 40 of its last 44 games. It wasn’t always this way, as the RiverHawks won two national titles in 1958 and 1994.
One 1999 NSU alumnus at the press conference was wearing a green hat that said, “Make NSU Football Great Again.” State Sen. John Haste (R-Broken Arrow) and former NSU Athletic Director Matt Cochran were also there and asked pointed questions about Chiaverini’s game plan for restoring the program.
Chiaverini said he was “blown away” by the rich football history at NSU with its two national titles, 21 conference championships and 94 Division II All-American selections, and it was his job to bring it back.
“My role as a head football coach is to develop a culture. It’s a culmination of your thoughts, your actions, and your attitudes. My job is to develop that culture within our football staff, within our roster with our support staff and to bring all those thoughts, all those actions, all those attitudes together to build a positive culture, a winning culture.
“We’re going to develop a culture of accountability and discipline. And that starts with me, the head football coach. It starts with our football staff and it starts with the players. And so I can tell you that as I get going here on this job is I’m going to develop that culture right away.”
Practical experience
Chiaverini most recently served as the head coach at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. He played wide receiver in both the NFL and University of Colorado and has coached at the NCAA Division 1 and junior college levels for 16 years.
Chiaverini took over a program at Chaffey College that was a combined 2-18 during the 2021 and 2022 seasons and revitalized the program, coaching the team to an 11-0 record and ending the season as the American Metro Conference Champions and 2023 American Division Bowl Champions.
Chiaverini’s other coaching accolades from the 2023 campaign include QB Dereun Dortch being named American Metro Conference MVP, and Chiaverini being awarded the title of American Metro Conference Coach of the Year, along with 3C2A Region IV California Coach of the Year.
Chiaverini spent the 2022 season as a senior analyst for UCLA, and served on the staff of his alma mater, the University of Colorado from 2016-2021. In those six years, he was wide receivers coach (all six years), offensive coordinator (five seasons), assistant head coach (one year), and briefly interim head coach, while also serving in the dual role of recruiting coordinator.
Chiaverini was the special-teams coordinator and outside receivers coach during the 2014-15 seasons for Texas Tech. During his tenure with the Red Raiders, he recruited from the Dallas, Houston, and the Southern California regions. One of his players, Jakeem Grant, earned second-team All-America honors as kick returner for the 2015 season.
Prior to his time at Texas Tech, he spent four years at Riverside (Calif.) City College from 2010-13, where he was the associate head coach and co-offensive and special teams coordinator, in addition to overseeing recruiting. Riverside was 40-5 during his four years and produced 15 NCAA Division I players.
Chiaverini got his start in coaching at Mt. San Antonio College in 2007, starting as a receivers coach and then promoted to co-offensive coordinator in 2008.
Prior to his coaching career, Chiaverini was one of Neuheisel’s first commitments in Colorado’s 1995 recruiting class. He earned four letters from 1995-98 and served as one of the team captains his senior season.
He caught 97 passes for 1,199 yards and six touchdowns, averaging 12.4 yards per reception in his career, exiting at the time as CU’s seventh all-time receiver. He led the team as a senior with 52 catches for 630 yards and five scores.
He was a fifth-round selection by the Cleveland Browns in the 1999 Draft and went on to set the club’s rookie receiving record with 44 catches for 487 yards and four touchdowns. He spent four years in the NFL, also playing for Dallas and Atlanta; he would conclude his NFL career with 62 catches for 662 yards and seven scores.
On his football philosophy, Chiaverini said he has an offensive mind and will be calling the plays. The way I attack defenses is that I don’t want to sit down and wait and see what defenses are always doing to us offensively. I’m always going to apply pressure on the defense. We do it through multiple personnel groupings, multiple formations on balanced formations, and tempo.
“I want to keep defenses guessing. I don’t like it when defenses can just put their cleats in the ground and attack us. And I want to be able to run with the ball on our terms.”
Chiaverini envisions a multiple defense with multiple fronts that attacks offenses with pressure, but he is likely to let the defensive coordinator to run the formations that are appropriate with the goal of taking away easy throws and making opponents earn their yards.
Time is short
Getting the program turned around quickly is paramount, as NSU may be looking for another conference without improvement.
The Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association recently approved NSU’s request to play football as a Division ll independent for the upcoming season. The RiverHawks have played in the MIAA since 2012. The MIAA said in a news release that the arrangement “gives NSU a greater chance to gain success and rebuild its football program to conference standards.”
While NSU will play as a non-conference opponent for all MIAA schools, the agreement also says conference schools will have the option to find other non-conference opponents the week they are scheduled to play the RiverHawks next fall.
The MIAA will soon approve schedules for the 2025 and 2026 seasons that will not include NSU. Following the 2025 season, NSU and the MIAA CEO Council will reassess the state of NSU’s football program to determine its status for the 2027 and 2028 football seasons.
Following the 2025 season, officials will reassess the state of Northeast’s football program to determine its status for the 2027 and 2028 football seasons.
Chiaverini said the program will be built on four principles: recruitment, retention, development and graduation. In terms of recruitment, he believes the NCAA’s transfer portal will help build the program more quickly than was possible previously – and he wanted to make sure “any player that is a good football player and is not going to Division One should be looking at NSU.
“It’s my job as a coach to evaluate the high school players in our area and our surrounding communities and make sure that, ‘Hey, if this kid’s a good football player, we need to know about him.’ We need to know about him before he becomes a senior. We need to know about him when he’s a sophomore, when he’s a junior, because the way college football is working right now, there’s not enough scholarships to go around with the portal the way it’s working.
“So for us, we need to identify and evaluate the talent in our state and make sure we know who they are before they become a rising senior.”
Chiaverini said he’ll be quickly getting to the task of looking at what players are available in the transfer portal or through junior college and evaluating any holes on the roster.
“To win in college football, you got to win with older players. We want to look at that and see what kind of issues we might have right now with our current roster and then try to find ways to upgrade that going forward,” he said.
Keeping the good ones
Player retention is another area he wants to improve, making sure players collaborate with staff to improve their physical abilities and “doing the right things in the classroom.”
He will also be sitting down with staff to build a “very, very detailed” offseason workout program focusing on strength, conditioning and improving quickness and football movements.
College graduation is another areas he is focused on. He remembers in high school wanting badly to play pro football someday and being fortunate enough to get drafted and have that opportunity.
“But,” he noted, “the numbers show the majority of our student athletes will not play professional football. And so I want to make sure our student athletes have a plan when they’re at NSU. We’re going to work our butts off to get you to that goal of being a professional athlete.
“So that doesn’t happen for you? You have your degree and you’re in the process of getting your master’s degree. We’re going to recruit great football players and great people. But at the end, I want to see them walk across that stage and get their degree.”
Matt Cochran said retaining players was a major problem with the program and wanted to know specifically what Chiaverini planned to do.
“We’ve got to find out what the issues have been, why players are ineligible, why players are not going to class, why players are not doing the work. So I need to dive a little bit deeper as I get my feet wet here at NSU and get with our compliance and academic people and dive into why these players not graduating and why they’re not getting retained,” Chiaverini said.
“We’re going to get those things fixed now. You can’t save them all, but the ones that want to be saved and want to do the work are going to do the work. Now, sometimes guys just don’t want to do it and we got to weed those people out of the program. But that goes into the recruiting process.”
Chiaverini and his staff will also be watching a lot of film to determine which players can or can’t play football well and determine what recruiting and transfer options look like. He believes the roster will need to be reshaped.
“Whenever you have a record that you’ve had over the last couple of years, it’s not just one area. It’s not just the players, not just the coaches and it’s not just the administration or faculty. It’s a combination of things that make an organization great, but also make an organization fail,” Chiaverini explained.
“I’m going to look at those things from all angles, but first and foremost, I want to evaluate the roster and see what players can help us on the field.”
Alumni are welcome
NSU alumni at the press conference asked Chiaverini what they could do to help the program succeed. Some complained there is little or no communication between the program and alumni.
“You’re all welcome. Just understand that any practice is open to the alumni. Anytime that you guys want to get on a phone call and talk about the university, how we can make the university better, I’m open to that,” Chiaverini responded.
“I think it’s important to get the alumni involved in what we’re doing, seeing them at the tailgate, seeing them at functions and getting them excited about where we’re taking NSU football.”
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