Tennessee Tech’s Billy Wilder is the Walter Camp 2025 Football Championship Subdivision Coach of the Year
Tennessee Tech’s Billy Wilder is the Walter Camp 2025 Football Championship Subdivision Coach of the Year.
This is the third year the Walter Camp Foundation has given this award. University at Albany’s Greg Gattuso earned the honor in 2023, while Stony Brook’s Bill Cosh was the 2024 honoree.
Wilder was hired in December 2023 and has already led the Golden Eagles to back-to-back OVC–Big South championships in 2024 and 2025. In 2025, Wilder guided the Golden Eagles to its first-ever 11-win season, its second-straight OVC-Big South Football Association Championship (with a perfect 8-0 league mark) and its first outright Conference Title in 50 years.
TTU started the season 10-0 for the first time in program history and suffered only one loss, at FBS foe Kentucky. The Golden Eagles won 15-straight games against FCS competition dating back to last season and earned the No. 13 seed for the 2025 FCS Playoffs, only the second FCS playoff berth in program history. The team also earned its highest Top 25 ranking in school history (No. 5).
During the regular season Tennessee Tech ranked first nationally in defensive touchdowns (5), second in rushing defense (76.1 yards/game), team sacks (3.75/game) and team tackles for loss (8.6/game), fifth in scoring offense (40.2 points/game), seventh in total defense (292.6 yards/game) and 11th in scoring defense (17.7 points/game).
Tech qualified for its second-ever NCAA postseason berth (previously in 2011) and hosted for the first time in program history.
A native of Madison, Maine, Wilder played quarterback at the University of Maine from 1983–1986.
He served as a graduate assistant at Boston College (1988–1989) before coaching at his alma mater from 1990 to 2006. He served as the head coach at Old Dominion from 2009–2019), where he built the program from scratch and led them to national prominence in FCS before moving to FBS. He became Tennessee Tech’s 13th head coach in December 2023.
Considered the “Father of American Football,” Walter Camp introduced the play from scrimmage, set plays, the numerical assessment of goals and tries and the restriction of play to eleven men per side in 1880. Nine years later, Mr. Camp, then the Yale University head coach, selected the first-ever college football All-America team.
The Walter Camp Football Foundation – a New Haven-based all-volunteer group – was founded in 1967 to perpetuate the ideals of Camp and to continue the tradition of selecting annually an All-America team. Visit www.waltercamp.org for more information. The Foundation is a member of the National College Football Awards Association (NCFAA). Founded in 1997, the NCFAA includes college football’s most prestigious awards and its 25 awards have honored more than 950 recipients dating back to 1935.
Walter Camp FCS Coach of Year
2025 – Billy Wilder, Tennessee Tech
2024 – Billy Cosh, Stony Brook
2023 – Greg Gattuso, University at Albany
