Prairie View, TX – Tremaine Jackson knew he wasn’t living right. 

He had decided to give up college football ahead of the 2005 season and instead joined a couple of childhood friends in the club promotion business, passing out fliers and hosting parties from Houston to Austin to San Antonio, even dabbling in the famed Kappa Beach Party scene down in Galveston. 

Jackson, then 21, knew it was time to start finding internships or places to volunteer coach, but the allure of the money and the clubs made it difficult to leave. 

“The club business was too good,” Jackson said from his offices at Prairie View A&M. “It is the nightlife. I thought I was Suge Knight.” 

Jackson faced a crossroads moment on Memorial Day 2005 when the police pulled him and a few friends over as they were leaving a club. There was stolen property in the car, so everyone went to the precinct, even Jackson. And as he laid in a holding tank wondering if he had just ruined his life by being in the car with the wrong people, Jackson made a promise in a prayer that he’s lived by ever since. 

“I said, ‘Lord, if you get me out of this situation, I’m going to coach. I’m going to do all the things I know I should be doing.’ And that is exactly what I did,” he said. 

Jackson fell in love with football as a four-year-old, finding it a perfect escape from his reality in the Acres Home neighborhood of northwest Houston where he grew up without a dad or a brother. He found them on the football fields with the coaches becoming his dad and his teammates playing the role of siblings. 

Football fields were his sanctuary, until he needed a break.

Jackson parlayed a successful career at Waltrip High School into a scholarship to play defensive tackle at Louisiana Monroe. Losing wasn’t any fun, however, and the Warhawks did plenty of that as a new member of the Sun Belt. He transferred back home and played for a year at Texas Southern, but he didn’t find that experience any more satisfying. 

Jackson took out student loans to pay the $18,000 in legal fees stemming from the incident and finished his degree online. He began logging into FootballScoop.com to start applying for jobs until 1 or 2 a.m. every night during the spring. He finally got a response that June when Texas A&M-Kingsville head coach Richard Cundiff emailed him back about an opening to coach tight ends as a graduate assistant. 

Cundiff couldn’t offer Jackson any money, which was a problem considering he already had a young daughter and his wife was also finishing school, but Jackson had made a promise. And here was his opportunity to walk his talk. The position did offer room and board, so Jackson took it and never looked back. 

Jackson became a fast riser in the coaching ranks. By 2008, he was on the Texas Southern staff as a tight ends coach. He moved to defensive line in 2009 and was the defensive coordinator by 2011. The Tigers didn’t win many games, but the defense was ranked atop the FCS and that gave Jackson some buzz. 

But Jackson didn’t want to be a position coach or a coordinator. He wanted to be a head coach. Back on those fields in Acres Home, Jackson was transformed by the adult men who poured into him growing up, including Waltrip legend Van Malone, who came back to his alma mater to coach after an injury in the NFL. He took Jackson under his wing, even letting him stay at his house. 

Jackson wanted to be that for other young men; not just in his position room or on one side of the ball, but for the entire team. 

He and the rest of the Texas Southern staff were fired after the 2011 season, so he spent the next three months putting together a head coaching manual in his downtime. From 2013-2019, Jackson would interview for a head coaching role 14 times. He was told no 13 times. 

One of the things that Jackson was told during those failed attempts at becoming a head coach was that he lacked FBS experience. He was on staff at places like Evangel, Sioux Falls and Abilene Christian. And he kept losing out to candidates who had made a stop or two in the FBS ranks. 

Jackson checked that box in 2019 when he was the defensive line coach at Texas State. He wasn’t there long enough to receive a paycheck when Dan Lanning, the defensive coordinator at Georgia in 2019, called with an offer. He wanted Jackson to be an analyst on the defensive line, promising him a promotion within a year when the full-time defensive line coach moved on to a bigger job. 

For most coaches, this would’ve been a no-brainer. Georgia was the pinnacle of college football. Jackson could’ve joined Kirby Smart’s staff, expanded his network, and finally checked every box athletic directors had told him he was missing.

Only a crazy man would turn that down. That 2019 Georgia coaching staff included Kirby Smart, Shane Beamer, Lanning, and Todd Monken. That’s three current head coaches in college and one in the NFL. Jackson could’ve joined that coaching tree and expanded his network beyond Division II and the FCS. 

But Jackson declined. 

“The calling on my life was not to expand my network,” he explained. “The calling on my life, the promise that I made way back in a jail cell in 2005, was to do whatever I need to do to influence these young people.”

Jackson stayed at Texas State for one season and then he returned to applying for head coaching jobs. He applied for two jobs after the 2019 season: Pittsburg State and Colorado Mesa. He flew to Pittsburg State believing he’d get the job. He knew the region, he knew a lot about Division II, and the program was already checking in with his references. 

But Jackson didn’t get the job, and he was mad. He didn’t know anything about Colorado Mesa other than they needed a coach. Jackson was in Houston recruiting and was eating some Mongolian Chicken in the Houston Galleria when Mesa called him. Jackson admits he mailed in the interview because he was still mad about the Pittsburg State experience and assumed he’d never hear back from Mesa when he hung up the phone. 

Jackson was wrong. He flew to Grand Junction, Colo. for an in-person interview. The rest is history. 

“I tried to interview my tail off, man,” Jackson said. “To the point that my shirt was so wet that I had to change in the Grand Junction bathroom because I was sweating through my clothes.” 

Jackson realized a lifelong dream and was prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. Then COVID hit. He says it was a blessing because it allowed him to try some things out without the pressure of a full season. That’s where he came up with the “DOG” acronym, which means “Discipline, Obedience, Grit”. He decided how he wanted his players to sit, how to dress, and how to practice.

“I’m sitting in the mountains of Grand Junction, Colorado, and we can’t do nothing but hike,” Jackson said. “So, while I’m hiking, I just have these thoughts about how I wanted my team to look. And all the things we do right now are a combination of those experiences before Colorado Mesa and then that time in COVID before I ever coached a game.” 

It worked. Mesa went 8-2 in 2021 and Jackson parlayed that success into the job at Valdosta State ahead of the 2022 season. The transition wasn’t easy. In fact, Jackson says of the three head coaching jobs he’s had, he’d rank Valdosta State No. 5. The Blazers went 5-6 in his first season, but were 25-3 from 2023-2024, including a trip to the Division II national championship game. 

Jackson is used to people calling him crazy. His friends and mentors scratched their heads when he turned down Georgia then raised their eyebrows when he left Texas State for Colorado Mesa. So, he was used to it when they called him and questioned his decision to leave Valdosta for the job at Prairie View A&M ahead of the 2025 season. 

“I’ve always been the defiant one. I’ve always went against the grain,” Jackson said. “I didn’t come to Prairie View because I’m from Houston. I came to Prairie View to prove a point, really. To prove a point that you can win here, you can mentor and help kids from the portal. That just because they hit the portal, life ain’t over, and you can do it at a historical Black college.” 

People scoffed when Jackson said he’d win right away at Prairie View. But like he’s done most of his career, he turned his doubters into believers. The Panthers won the SWAC championship and were two points away from a Black national championship in his first season. 

“I came to Prairie View with a bold faith,” Jackson said. “We had just lost the Division II national championship, so anything short of a national championship is unacceptable. I still feel that way. We’re going to Atlanta because I said we’re going to Atlanta. When you tell folks something and they believe it, nothing is impossible.”

Sometimes, becoming a head coach can feel impossible when you’re Black. The only two Black head coaches at four-year universities in Texas are Jackson and Texas Southern’s Cris Dishman, and they’re both at HBCUs. There are only two Black play-callers at the Power Four level – Texas A&M offensive coordinator Holmon Wiggens and Sam Houston defensive coordinator Freddie Aughtry-Lindsay. 

Jackson doesn’t think the low numbers are completely a racial issue, however. He believes it is more of a heart issue; that athletic directors lack the guts to hire someone who doesn’t look like them or the fan base. That it is easier to pick a coach that will win the press conference than it is to find one that will win games. 

“Guys that look like me, we’re always in a fight.” he said. “We always finish second.” 

Jackson wants to be a head coach at the FBS level. But don’t expect him to take the normal route. He says he won’t leave Prairie View A&M for anything other than a head coaching job at the FBS level. He won’t go be a position coach at the P4 just to get a head coaching chair in Conference USA. 

“Tremaine Jackson is living pretty good right now, but I do aspire to that,” he said of an FBS head coaching job. “But I’m not going to go the way the profession says I should go. I’m going to go the way I’m going. And if you’re getting beat bad enough, you’ll need our services because we’ve shown that if you’ve got flies, we’ll exterminate them.”

Jackson and his Panthers can make a statement in the non-conference portion of the schedule. They open on the road against Tarleton State, the No. 5-ranked team in the FBS. They also play Baylor, SFA, and East Texas A&M this season. The main goal is to win the SWAC and return to the Celebration Bowl to right last year’s wrongs, but Jackson doesn’t shy away from the importance of the non-conference games against FCS programs chasing a playoff berth. 

Jackson says he is more excited about the Tarleton State game than any game he’s ever played or coached again. When the Texans called with the opportunity, Jackson immediately told his athletic director to say yes. Like most things with Jackson, it comes back to respect, or the lack thereof. 

“If you call me, I’m going to play you because you think you can kick my ass,” Jackson said. “That’s why you called. Let’s not say we wanted to play a system game, that ain’t why you called. You called because you think you can kick my ass. So, I said, ‘Bet.’”

Jackson knows that his team’s season isn’t over if they fall short at Tarleton. He knows the experience – win or loss – only makes the Panthers a better team. He doesn’t feel pressure to win for himself, but he does feel it to win for others. He knows that SWAC teams are considered on the level of the other FCS conferences. And he wants to change that perspective so people who look like him don’t have to keep finishing second. 

“There are a lot of folks who look like me who are not hoping and praying for us to win, but who are depending on us to win,” Jackson said. “Just so they can even put their name in the hat, not so they can get the job, just to put their name in the hat. That’s the pressure, right? But we welcome it. We feel privileged and honored that we get a chance to have that pressure because we could be on the other side of it.” 

Jackson knows what the other side looks like. He lived it as a kid, as a college athlete searching for wins, and as a young man on the brink of going down the wrong road. He spent his career fighting for a chance to become a head coach on his own terms. Now, he wants to make sure the next young man who looks like him doesn’t have to fight quite so hard for his.