This past Wednesday, December 17th, legendary Western Mustangs head football coach Greg Marshall announced his retirement after 18 seasons at the helm in London, Ontario, which included nine Yates Cup titles and two Vanier Cups.
Prior to coaching the Mustangs, Marshall enjoyed a brilliant spell coaching the McMaster Marauders from 1997 to 2003, where he won four straight Yates Cups before joining the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 2004.
The announcement came at a press conference as Marshall said he will step down once the university finds a replacement coach for the team.
As anyone who has ever been a fan of Canadian football and the landscape of it in this country knows, Western is a powerhouse of epic proportions, both in terms of winning and in talent development.
So, as the 2025 U SPORTS football season shrinks smaller and smaller in the proverbial rearview mirror, a massive question arises as to who will fill Marshall's shoes?
But another question that should be circulating as well concerns how potential candidates and media members should be looking at the suddenly vacant head coaching position of the Western Mustangs, as it is not your everyday job.
If you are looking for an entity to compare Western football with, you first need to understand who they are and where they sit in the Canadian university football hierarchy.
The Mustangs have been playing football since 1929 and have consistently upheld a dominant reputation in the sport, especially in Ontario. They have also built up a nationwide distinction for producing excellent rushing play spearheaded by wonderful tailbacks.
The only team to win more times on the national stage than the Mustangs is the Laval Rouge et Or in the Glen Constantin era.
(Photo above) Marshall hoisting the Vanier Cup after leading the Mustangs to a 39-17 victory over Laval in 2017 at Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton (Mike Hensen/London Free Press).
Quite simply, they have been and continue to maintain the status of the class of football in Ontario.
Just by ingesting that information, one could reasonably be led to believe that the proper comparison falls with the SEC's University of Alabama Crimson Tide in the NCAA.
Both programs are considered 'blue-bloods' in their own right; they can individually stake their claim as the best programs their conferences have ever seen in terms of success, and both schools' most notable football eras coincided.
However, since 1975, the Mustangs have had only three head coaches, all of whom achieved great success at Western: Darwin Semotiuk from 1975 to 1984, Larry Haylor from 1984 to 2006, and Marshall from 2006 to the present.
That figure is emblematic of the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers, as they have had only three head coaches in the last 50 years, all of whom went on to win Super Bowls in their respective eras.
Both the Steelers and Mustangs have long histories of success, making their head-coaching tenures quite extensive.
What that long lineage also does is make the job for the next guy a whole lot more stressful and rigorous, as fans, alumni, and those within the athletic department expect nothing less than the standard set by those who have held the post before.
Take the aforementioned Crimson Tide, for example.
From 2007 to 2023, all Tide fans knew was winning. Winning permeated the air around Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for so long with Nick Saban at the helm that when he eventually retired as the greatest college football coach in history at the end of the 2023 season, the void he left behind would undoubtedly create a suffocating environment for the replacement.
That replacement in question, Kalen DeBoer, is in the middle of his second season with the Tide, has gone 19-7 so far, and is in the College Football Playoff for the first time since his Washington Huskies went to the national championship game in 2023.
His team has a decent chance to win it all, but anything short of that will result in countless Alabama residents calling for his firing.
The same sort of situation can be expected for whoever replaces Marshall at Western. The following person in charge's duties will be to pick things up right where they left off and retake the torch from surging Laurier and Queen's as the best team in the OUA.
As reported by 3DownNation, the university is not expected to pursue an unproven candidate and is likely to lean towards someone with pre-existing ties to the school and its football program.
That opens up many possibilities for the school to look into, with several coaches who descended from the 'Marshall coaching tree' being mentioned as possible choices.
Now, some things will work heavily in the next coach's favour at Western. They will inhabit a team with enough talent to win now and will have access to extremely fertile recruiting bases across the entire country.
But the outside pressure will always be there until, at least, the program wins its ninth Vanier Cup and a consistent hold is retaken over the OUA.
This is not your ordinary coaching search. Jobs like these are not a dime a dozen, and it is not every day that a vaunted U SPORTS football program such as this suddenly has a head coaching vacancy.
This is not about finding the right coach for a program rebuild, but instead about finding the right coach, leader, and mentor, all rolled into one, to continue the longstanding tradition of winning at the provincial and national level at Western.
Jobs like these take a specific breed of coach to run them. This is not a search done by a Waterloo, York, Toronto, Carleton, or any school that is still proving itself as a consistent winner.
This is Western. They are different. They are winners. And so must the next coach be.