Grambling set to hire Mickey Joseph as head coach, per report

Grambling is set to hire Mickey Joseph as its next head coach, ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg reported Sunday evening. Joseph most recently served as the interim head coach at Nebraska in 2022 following the firing of Scott Frost.

He led the Cornhuskers to a 3-6 record to close out that season and did not coach anywhere in 2023. Now he will end his hiatus as he prepares to take over a Tigers team that finished 5-6 this past year. This will not be his first stint at the university as he was also a receivers and special teams coach in 2014 and 2015.

Prior to taking over as the Huskers interim coach, Joseph spent the first three games of the 2022 season as the associate head coach, receivers coach and passing game coordinator. He is a former Nebraska quarterback who played for the team from 1988-91.

Following his playing career, Joseph played beifly in the CFL before begginning working as an assistant coach at several high school programs across the country. He later made his way up to the college level as a graduate assistant at Tulane in 1999.

From there he went on to work for several small schools before returning to the high school level to take over at Desire Street Academy in New Orleans. He coached there for the next four years and then went on to take over as associate head coach at NAIA Langston University in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

He would go on to serve as head coach in the 2011 and 2012 seasons. Langston finished with an overall record of 13-7 in the two seasons under Joseph’s direction.

Other than that, Mickey Joseph has no head coaching experience to bring with him to Grambling. Prior to his one-year stint at Nebraska, he was an assistant at LSU from 2017-21 under Ed Orgeron. He was promoted to associate head coach following the 2019 season in which the Tigers won a national championship.

Joseph has two brothers, Vance and Sammy, who also played football. Vance played college at Colorado before later going on to become the head coach of the Denver Broncos in 2017. He led them to an 11-21 record over two seasons and was fired following 2018. Sammy Joseph played college football at LSU and later in the NFL for one season.

Grambling has won 26 SWAC Conference Championships in program history, with its last one coming in 2017. It will hope Joseph can do enough to get them there once again soon.