The right choice?

It is late in the summer of 2009 and Pittsburg State — a Division II program based in southeastern Kansas — has just begun fall practices ahead of the upcoming football season.
As the Gorillas defensive coordinator, Dave Wiemers stands at one end of Carnie Smith Stadium working with the first team defense and expectations are high.
Pittsburg State isn’t just any old DII program. It is the winningest football program in DII history, with three national championships won at that point in time, and the Gorillas are coming off a 2008 season in which they won 11 games and advanced to the second round of the DII playoffs.
And yet, Wiemers, by his own admission, is distracted. Highly distracted.
On the opposite end of the field, Wiemers’ gaze is drawn to a true freshman linebacker on the work team. It’s not because of any spectacular plays he’s making or incredible feats of athleticism on display. No, it is because this newcomer to college football is coaching, actively coaching the entire work team as an 18-year old, and doing it well.
“It was pretty amazing,” Wiemers, now a defensive analyst at Utah State, recalls. “I spent half the practice watching him, and thought to myself, ‘Why aren’t we playing him?’”
That 18 year-old linebacker was Nate Dreiling.
Fifteen years later, Dreiling is now the interim head coach at Utah State. At 33, he is the youngest head coach at the FBS level after taking over the Aggies’ job in July following the firing of Blake Anderson.
The Aggies have been mired in mediocrity of late, making the job anything but easy. USU has finished 6-7 in each of the last two seasons and has won more than seven games just once in the last five years (that outlier season was special, as the Aggies won their first ever Mountain West Conference championship in 2021).
With unprecedented roster turnover thanks to the NCAA transfer portal and landscape altering NIL, it has become a serious challenge for USU to consistently field a contending team.
And that is ever increasing expectation in Logan.
“We would like to be better than .500,” USU athletic director Diana Sabau said.
Throw in the untimely dismissal of Anderson — he was effectively fired on July 2 and fall camp started a month later on Aug. 2 — and the tragic death of defensive back Andre Seldon Jr. on July 20, and Dreiling’s task as head coach at Utah State could not be much more difficult.
Is he up to it?
To understand if Dreiling is the right man to lead the Aggies this season — maybe even in future seasons — requires an understanding of where he came from.
And that necessitates, first, another trip down memory lane. Or so Wiemers believes.
Weimers recruited Dreiling to Pittsburg State out of Hutchinson High School and then ultimately coached him there. Dreiling was, Wiemers contends, a ready-made star coming out of Hutchinson, where he played for his dad Randy Dreiling.
“Nate was a fantastic player. We knew as soon as we recruited him,” Wiemers said. “Right up until he walked into our place the first day he was a consideration to be put on the field right away.”
Wiemers would’ve played Dreiling as a true freshman. He wanted to, clearly. Only Dreiling wouldn’t let him.
Dreiling and his father, a legendary high school coach in Kansas, had a plan for Dreiling’s playing career and they weren’t about to deviate from it.
“We had to redshirt him,” Wiemers said. “They had a plan.”
It proved a highly effective one.
After redshirting his first season with the Gorillas, Dreiling went on to become one of the best linebackers in all of college football, division notwithstanding.
He finished his collegiate playing career as a four-time All-American, and in 2011 he was named the DII national defensive player of the year, the same year he helped Pittsburg State win its first national title since 1991.
He was good enough at Pittsburg State to earn a shot in the NFL, signing with the Green Bay Packers as an undrafted free agent in 2014 before having a stint on the Kansas City Chiefs’ practice squad.
Dreiling’s playing career ended shortly after that, as he transitioned to what he was truly meant to do, Wiemers said.
Randy Dreiling is a nine-time state championship winning coach in Kansas, at Hutchinson High in Hutchinson and now at Saint Thomas Aquinas in Overland Park.
At one point during his Hutchinson tenure, Dreiling’s teams won seven Kansas high school state championships over an eight-year period.
It was a run of success that did not go unnoticed.
“I’ve known Randy for a long time,” Troy Morrell, long time head coach at Butler Community College and now an offensive analyst at Utah State, said. “I used to recruit kids out of the high school his (Nate Dreiling’s) dad coached at. Just tremendous tradition there.”
Or as Wiemers put it, “(Randy Dreiling) is a fantastic high school football coach and still is. He wins practically every game he coaches.”
That is who Nate Dreiling grew up with.
It paid off for him, Wiemers said. “He just didn’t know any better, right?”
Dreiling was either born to coach or reared to coach. Maybe a combination, but any way you slice it, it is what he was meant to do.
“As a player, he was more than just a coach on the field. That is too cliche,” Wiemers said. “This was a guy who sat in my office every day and wanted to know exactly what we were doing, why we were doing it and how we were going to present it (to the players).
“He had all of that. It was nothing we did. He came to us like that. … Once he was done with his career playing, you just knew where it was going to go.”
Dreiling’s collegiate coaching career started in 2015 when he was a graduate assistant at Kansas. He didn’t stay there long, and went back to Pittsburg State where he worked as a safeties coach and later defensive coordinator.
From there, he had a stint as a defensive analyst at Oregon on Mario Cristobal’s staff, followed by a year at Southeast Missouri State and then the defensive coordinator job at New Mexico State.
Along the way, he crossed paths with many current USU coaches, including offensive line coach Cooper Bassett and defensive line coach Cedric Douglas, and left each one of them impressed.
He left them so impressed that while Bassett and Dreiling only coached together for a year at SEMO, Bassett was the one who stumped for Dreiling to get the defensive coordinator job at Utah State.
“Obviously the production, what he did at New Mexico State made him a candidate with this job,” Bassett said. “I was the one standing on the table for Blake to hire Nate. It is awesome that one of my friends gets to be the head coach here and I get to help him, hopefully, start a long successful coaching career.
“I think for all of us right now, the word experience is not something that really is floating around these hallways, but what we have is great energy, and when you look at Nate’s core values, it is love, integrity and toughness. Because of that you’ve got a lot of enthusiastic guys who love each other and are going to have great integrity about what we do, and when times get tough, we are going to get through it with toughness and enthusiasm.”
Douglas and Dreiling knew each only briefly too as GAs when Dreiling was at Kansas and Douglas at Coffeyville Community College.
That didn’t stop Dreiling from having an impact on Douglas, which ultimately led them to being on the same staff now.
“It has been cool to see where he is,” Douglas said. “The biggest thing I appreciate is he strains to keep it as simple as it can be for our guys. You have a lot of people who want to put a lot of scheme in people’s way, and with Nate it ain’t going to be about a bunch of scheme.
“I love his mentality, and now sliding into the head coach role, it’s the simplicity of how we do things. There aren’t a lot of things that he requires of us. Just be a good person, work as hard as you can, outwork everybody every day you get a chance to. I like simple. I like that mentality. This (football) shouldn’t be rocket science. Just be detailed at what you do, be an incredible teacher and incredible human.”
Like Douglas alluded to, Dreiling has proven to be an elite teacher of the game.
“He knows what to say and he knows how to present it,” Wiemers said, “and that is really because he’s had (football) coming out of kindergarten.”
Much has been made about Dreiling’s impact as the defensive coordinator at New Mexico State the last two years. He took what was one of the worst defenses at the FBS level and turned it into a plus for the Aggies, who played for the Conference USA championship last season.
Defensive tackle Gabriel Iniguez Jr. and safety Jordan Vincent both played for Dreiling at NMSU and followed him to USU, in no small part because of his coaching ability.
“He is a really intricate person,” Iniguez said. “He talks really carefully and when he talks you listen because he is giving real great information. He is a players first coach through and through.
“He played football, had a cup of coffee in the (NFL). He has an impressive resume, these past couple of years. Based off that, you can see that he is a great coach. He is really passionate, really caring and spending last year with him was tremendous. Playing in his defense was the most fun I’ve had playing football.”
Vincent echoed Iniguez’s sentiments, particularly when it comes to Dreiling being a players coach.
“He does a phenomenal job giving you the tools to be successful and then he also gives you the leeway to express your strengths on the field,” Vincent said, “which I feel leads to having an enjoyable experience playing for him. … I would say (Dreiling coming to Utah State) had a significant role in me coming here. Last year I felt like I fit really well in his scheme, and with the traits that he has, it was a no-brainer decision.”
While Dreiling garners no shortage of praise as a coach, people might actually like him better as a person.
Utah State offensive coordinator Kyle Cefalo hasn’t been around Dreiling much yet — though that is changing — but in their short time together Cefalo has come away impressed with the person Dreiling is, just as much as the coach.
“He is a real dude,” Cefalo said. “He is very honest and he’s very confident.”
Dreiling is one of Bassett’s good friends, even though they only coached together for a season. In a year’s time they became enough friends for Bassett to work hard to get Dreiling to Logan when the opportunity arose.
“I got to stand on the table about what a great teammate, person, father and husband Nate is,” Bassett said. “My wife loves Lex (Alexa Dreiling, Nate’s wife). Our kids know each other and got along great at SEMO. I got to really stand on the table for the person Nate is.”
Iniguez recalls going to Dreiling’s house while at NMSU and spending real quality time with his family, so much so that when the team found out that Alexa had cancer, playing for her and Dreiling became a real source of motivation.
“Fnding out his wife had cancer right before the season, we all grew together as a team,” Iniguez said. “He gave his all to us even though he had a lot going on at home. That meant a lot to us. We played really really hard for him last year.”
“Off the field, I think he is an amazing man,” added Vincent. “He’s one of the best coaches I’ve played for, but you really feel that genuine care for you as a player, as a person off the field.”
USU fans saw that first hand during the Aggies’ final scrimmage of fall camp. Dreiling first sent staff members into the stands at Maverik Stadium to collect names and address from those in attendance in order to send thank you cards to them for their support of Aggie football.
Later on that same afternoon, Dreiling himself entered the stands in an effort to meet fans, shake their hands and thank them for giving their time to his football team that Saturday afternoon.
He did the same with media at USU’s media day, personally introducing himself to most in attendance and thanking them for their time and coverage of his team.
None of it is surprising to Wiemers, who summed up Dreiling rather simply.
“He’s believable,” he said. “The kids are going to believe him. People are going to believe him. It isn’t phony or made up. He is genuine. He’s believable.”
Wiemers is convinced that Dreiling’s age isn’t the slightest bit of a problem, nor is his inexperience as a head coach.
“When he is coaching you will think he has been an NFL vet for years,” Wiemers said. “He’s very detailed and knows exactly what he’s looking for when he’s coaching, and it is very impressive and has been forever.”
And if there were any issues with Dreiling’s age, that’s why Wiemers and Morrell are now on the staff.
“There was value in getting some experience in here,” Wiemers said. “We (he and Morrell) are here to help him with some of the head coaching things, because he needs to coach. He needs to be a position coach and a coordinator, and we will help him handle the other things that may get left behind.”
Sabau, believes in Dreiling, too. That is why he is the interim head coach.
“Nate brings a tremendous toolbox to us,” she said. “… I have full belief that we have given Nate the tools and he is responding every single day to reach and rise to make us better.”
Expectations are steep in Logan. On the field yes, even with a schedule that includes USC and Utah, to say nothing of Mountain West competition.
Sabau and the university want to see some wholesale changes to the USU football program, changes Dreiling needs to bring about on the field, in the classroom and in the community.
“We all have to march to the same beat, and if we aren’t arm in arm in doing that then we won’t be successful,” Sabau said.
Dreiling will have the interim tag for the foreseeable future. Sabau wasn’t keen on giving specifics, but noted that a “really successful season” would see the tag removed and Dreiling made the permanent head coach of the Aggies.
“I think that is good right now,” she said. “I don’t want to tell you something that is unrealistic. Every person, as you work together, you figure out what is the reality and what the expectations and how we can work together to achieve that.
“We are going to work together every single day to achieve that. Communication and trust are going to be key.”
Those who know Dreiling best, though, believe he is the right man for the USU job, in the short term and for however long he decides to stay in Logan after that.
“I think it is a good fit here, him being in the position he is in for the first time,” Morrell said.
Said Wiemers: “it is pretty obvious that we have someone here who has the gift. Age, it has absolutely no bearing on this at all. He’s ready. Anyone that spends enough time with Nate, they will feel that too and know that we are in great hands.
“There is a hungry unit of kids here who’ve have been kicked around, had some things happen to them. I think we are going to see an amazing response with Nate leading the way on this. It is going to be fun to be a part of. That is why I’m here.”