It's over for Kris McCullough at Gardner-Webb before he ever got a real chance to build anything. Pete Thamel confirmed the school is dismissing its first-year head coach, just days after suspending him "pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation." No hearing, no reinstatement, no second act. One game into the job, and he's already gone.
Source: Gardner-Webb is dismissing first-year head football coach Kris McCullough. He’d been suspended earlier this week by the school “pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation.”
The timeline here moves fast even by college football's ruthless standards. Gardner-Webb hired McCullough in December 2025, and he was formally introduced in January as a 30-year-old up-and-comer who'd already made a name for himself as one of the youngest head coaches in Division I. He'd built a 28-10 record at UT Permian Basin, including a program-record 11-win season and a No. 3 national ranking, the kind of resume that gets a mid-major to bet on someone young.
The Runnin' Bulldogs opened his tenure with a 35-17 loss at Austin Peay on August 27. Just three days later, Gardner-Webb suspended him and handed the program to special teams coordinator Pete Bennett, citing an off-field investigation the school never detailed publicly. FootballScoop reported the university was simply "evaluating options" at the time — turns out that evaluation didn't take long.
The school still hasn't specified what the investigation actually found, which leaves plenty of room for speculation. What has surfaced is a pointed allegation from Jake Maxwell, an offensive coordinator who worked under McCullough at both East Central and UT Permian Basin, who claimed he was fired for not being "a yes man" despite running a top-10 offense. That's a separate grievance from whatever triggered this week's suspension, but it paints a picture of a coach whose fast rise came with friction behind the scenes.
Whatever the specifics, Gardner-Webb didn't wait around. Firing a coach you hired 9 months ago, before he's coached a second game, is not a decision athletic departments make lightly — it signals the school views whatever came out of this investigation as disqualifying, not just embarrassing. Bennett stays on as interim while Gardner-Webb figures out its next move, and McCullough's meteoric climb through college football's coaching ranks now comes with an asterisk nobody saw coming a week ago.