Mississippi State head football coach Jeff Lebby is making another staff move as spring football approaches, adding Philip Montgomery to the mix as associate head coach for offense and wide receivers coach.
The news was first reported by ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
Montgomery replaces former MSU wide receiver Chad Bumphis as position coach, and fills a vacant role left by Bush Hamdan, who spent just nine weeks with the Bulldogs. Hamdan left MSU last month to accept the role of quarterbacks coach with the Miami Dolphins.
Montgomery arrives with 23 years of coaching experience in college and professionally with the Birmingham Stallions in the UFL. He was most recently at Virginia Tech, where he was hired as the offensive coordinator for the 2025 season and served as interim head coach after the firing of Brent Pry in September.
He is most known for his work as head coach at Tulsa from 2015 to 2022, where he compiled a 46-59 record with a 2-2 record in bowl games. His Golden Hurricane team was most notably MSU’s opponent in the 2020 Armed Forces Bowl, a 28-26 win for the Bulldogs under Mike Leach that made national headlines for a brawl between the teams after the end of the game.
Montgomery knows Lebby well from time shared on staff at Baylor, where Montgomery was offensive coordinator and a position coach from 2008-2014. Montgomery said in 2015 that he had known Lebby since he was in grade school.
Montgomery was not named in any official filings related to the Baylor sexual assault scandal that came to light in 2016 and led to the dismissal of Art Briles as head coach and the resignations of both the university’s president and athletic director. Montgomery worked as an assistant under Briles at both Houston and Baylor from 2003 to 2014.
There was some controversy for violating an NCAA rule in 2015 when Lebby was given a sideline pass as a guest of Montgomery for a game between Tulsa and Oklahoma, then a Big 12 rival of Baylor, where Lebby was on staff as a position coach.
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