STARKVILLE — Inside the Appalachian State football locker room, Kevin Barbay was not the head coach. But on game days, he sure sounded like one. Especially to his offensive players. Especially on Sept. 10, 2022, in College Station, Texas.
Minutes before the Mountaineers took the field at Texas A&M, Barbay, the team’s offensive coordinator, was putting the final touches on another one of the patented pre-game speeches that have followed him throughout his career.
“His speeches are crazy,” former Appalachian State running back Daetrich Harrington recalled. “He gets fired up and juiced up every game. That had me ready to run through a wall for him.
“(That day) it felt like the head coach was speaking to us. One of those speeches where we got to go out and do this, execute that. We are going to run, pass and he kept us juiced up.”
It wasn’t as over the top as the pounding tables and walls and throwing chairs routine he practiced in Mount Pleasant, during his coaching stint at Central Michigan, but enough to get the Mountaineers, a Sun Belt Conference program, ready to go toe-to-toe with the No. 6 team in the country.
By the time the clocks hit triple-zero at Kyle Field, it wasn’t a surprise to Harrington that his team pulled off the jaw-dropping 17-14 upset over the Aggies, but that they didn’t score more points while doing it.
“We didn’t have as much size as they had, but we could compete with them because of (Barbay’s) offense,” Harrington said. “We should have scored more points. We could have put 28-plus on them.
Harrington spent six years with the Mountaineers, from 2017-22. During that time, he had four different offensive coordinators. Of all of them, it was Barbay who stuck out.
“I wish he was here for five years,” Harrington said. “He knew how to spread the ball, manipulate the defense with different motions and formations. Nothing looked the same.
“That’s a coach that really cares about his players. He was a great leader. I never had an offensive coordinator come here and talk to the whole offense like he did…He motivated us the best.”
Now, Barbay will have to do that this fall in Starkville as Mississippi State first-year head coach Zach Arnett’s hand-picked offensive coordinator.
He will be leading an offense that has known nothing but throwing the ball in Mike Leach’s Air-Raid offense over the past three years, and doing so in the nation’s toughest college football conference.
To those who have played for him during his long coaching road to the Southeastern Conference, he is the right man for the job.
“If you go watch that Texas A&M game and the North Carolina game (last year), we put up 61 points with his offense,” Harrington said. “He keeps the defense on their heels and toes.
“You don’t know what is coming next.”
A constant presence
Brent Pease recalls Kevin Barbay always being around. Always.
The duo briefly crossed coaching paths at Baylor in 2005. Pease, now the wide receivers coach at Montana, was Baylor’s offensive coordinator. Barbay was a graduate assistant, taking his first collegiate coaching position after a playing career at Grambling State and a wide receivers job at Monsignor Kelly Catholic High School in Texas.
Barbay wanted to be involved with any and everything. It didn’t matter how much he was getting paid – which, from Pease’s memory, it wasn’t much – Barbay treated that job as the first step in a long career.
“He sacrificed a lot of time because he wanted to do it,” Pease said.
In between sessions on his bass fishing boat with his wife and co-workers, Barbay took care of a bunch of data-based jobs for the Bears. Entry-level-type stuff, helping develop gameplans, cutting up game and practice film.
In Pease’s recollection, Barbay was good at everything. Although he was just getting his feet wet in coaching, Barbay learned everything he needed to know in his 20s, as a graduate assistant.
Pease said Barbay possessed the traits of a high-level coach that early, too. He was a self-starter. He already had a strong recruiting background, coming from Nederland, Texas, where he knew the right people and made the right connections in a fruitful football area.
And at his age, he connected with players. That ability has benefited him at each of his coaching stops.
“He understood the kids real well at that time,” Pease said. “He understood where they were coming from, gave good input and feedback on what he was hearing, seeing and thinking.”
‘I would beat you’
Barbay wasn’t just known for throwing furniture and pre-game speeches at Central Michigan, but for his awful video game skills, too, especially at Madden.
“He was trying to learn how to play,” former CMU wideout JaCorey Sullivan remembered. “He would come into meetings talking crazy, like, ‘I would beat you.’”
It never seemed to go right for Barbay because he would play Madden like he coached – with a ruthlessness that helped him rise up the real-life coaching ladder, but didn’t necessarily translate in pixilated form.
Since his start at Baylor, Barbay’s coaching career has taken him to North Texas, Lamar, Colorado State, Florida, Stephen F. Austin and Central Michigan, before going to Appalachian State and then winding up in Starkville.
Behind Barbay’s resume is a versatile, but balanced offense, according to Sullivan, that if put together with the right pieces, could be as productive as any in the country.
Before Barbay became the Chippewas’ offensive coordinator, he was busy coaching the wide receivers. When he was promoted, he knew how to get the best out of his playmakers, like Sullivan and Kalil Pimpleton, who were both named All-MAC players in 2019, combining for 140 receptions and 1,702 yards.
Those sound like Air-Raid numbers. And it sometimes looked like it when Sullivan would walk into Barbay’s office and he had scribbled dozens of offensive plays and route combinations on his whiteboard. But the second a defense thought they understood what Barbay’s goals were, he would flip the game plan on his head.
“I always thought he was a genius,” Sullivan said. “An offensive guru when it came to that stuff.”
An open line of communication
Appalachian State was quarterback Chase Brice’s third college program, after he started at Clemson and then transferred to Duke.
Barbay was one of Brice’s he-has-lost-count-of-how-many college offensive coordinators. Yet, Barbay was different because of a constant, open line of communication, whether it was on the headset from the booth, on the sidelines, or in meeting rooms.
Even for a guy like Brice who had been there and done that, it was appreciated.
“Me being an older guy, I got to learn from years past about what I want to ask,” Brice said. “Once I got comfortable with his system, I was able to go more in-depth. When I got to learn the offense really well, we could just piggyback off of each other and just talk different things out, like how we could stretch a defense by doing different things within a formation or sending guys on different routes.
“That is what was different working with him. He was all ears.”
As Barbay begins the next chapter of his coaching career this season at MSU, he enters a similar situation, with a veteran quarterback in Will Rogers who has also been there and done just about everything there is to in the SEC.
He is the only quarterback in league history with over 1,000 completions and holds MSU career records with 10,689 passing yards and 82 passing touchdowns.
Brice said Barbay keeps things simple for the quarterback. For a defense, everything looks foreign. For the quarterback, it’s all straightforward. And when it’s all working, it’s tough to stop.
“If you have a capable quarterback,” Brice said, “a guy who is eager to learn and an offense that is willing to buy into what he brings to the table, then you got a great chance of being successful.”
Justin Frommer is the Mississippi State sports reporter for The Dispatch.
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