Ferris State University Athletic Director Perk Weisenburger announced Nov. 30 that, after 17 years at the helm for the Bulldog foot­ball pro­gram, Jeff Pierce has been released from his duties as head coach.

“After eval­u­at­ing our pro­gram over the past two sea­sons, it became appar­ent that it is time for a change,” Weisenburger said. “In order to pro­mote the future suc­cess of our foot­ball pro­gram, new lead­er­ship is needed.”

As of Dec. 1, Pierce would no longer be the Bulldogs’ head coach. According to Weisenburger, a national search for Pierce’s suc­ces­sor will begin imme­di­ately. FSU assis­tant coach Chris Boden will serve as interim head coach until a suc­ces­sor is named.

Senior quar­ter­back Tom Schneider said Weisenburger, Pierce and the FSU coach­ing staff called a meet­ing early Wednesday to break the news to the team before it was released to the public.

“He [Weisenburger] said the pro­gram needed to change. He said it needed a spark,” Schneider said. “It’s a busi­ness. Unfortunately, we haven’t been as suc­cess­ful as we’d like the last 10 years.”

Redshirt fresh­man run­ning back Jamaal Jackson said the team was “shocked” by Pierce’s firing.

“It was a shock to me because the pro­gram has grad­u­ally been get­ting bet­ter over the past few years,” Jackson said. “He [Pierce] has been here for so long. I thought his job was pretty cemented.”

The foot­ball team’s meet­ing with the ath­letic direc­tor and coach­ing staff was brief, accord­ing to Schneider and Jackson. Pierce addressed the play­ers first and per­son­ally informed them of his dismissal.

“It was really tough for him,” Schneider said. “He said it was a shock to him. He said he’d miss us.”

Pierce began his coach­ing career at FSU in 1983 as a grad­u­ate assis­tant under Nick Coso after play­ing defen­sive back for the Bulldogs from 1974–77. He later coached the line­back­ers under Dan Underwood and con­tin­ued on with Keith Otterbein’s staff before being pro­moted to defen­sive coor­di­na­tor in 1988.

In 1995, Pierce took over the pro­gram fol­low­ing the depar­ture of Otterbein. Since his incep­tion as head coach, the Bulldogs only qual­i­fied for the play­offs in the 1996 sea­son. In addi­tion, FSU claimed the last of three con­fer­ence titles (won or shared) under Pierce’s direc­tion in 1999.

Despite los­ing four of their last six games, the Bulldogs’ 6–5 record in 2011 marked the program’s first win­ning sea­son since 2008. In 2010, FSU fin­ished with a 5–6 record after los­ing the final five games of the sea­son. The pre­vi­ous sea­son, the Bulldogs won just a sin­gle game to end with a 1–10 cam­paign mark in 2009.

Regardless of the records, Schneider said he was sad to see Pierce go.

“He gave his whole life to the pro­gram,” Schneider said.

“I thought Coach Pierce was a great man, a gen­uine guy. He’s done a lot for me per­son­ally and a lot for other guys.” Jackson agreed. “I like Coach Pierce. He’s one of the main rea­sons I came here. I’m sad he’s leav­ing. He gave us his heart. He put his all into the program.”

Neither Jackson nor Schneider was eager to dis­cuss whether or not Pierce’s dis­missal was the right move for the foot­ball program.

“I don’t make any spec­u­la­tions on the coach­ing staff,” Schneider said. “It’s up to the team to accept the lead­er­ship that is given to them and move for­ward. That’s the
real­ity of it.”