Scott Cochran is ‘enjoying every freaking second’ of return to coaching
Scott Cochran, once one of the top strength coaches in the country, now lives in a college dorm — at least part time — in a small Alabama town.
Cochran, often referred to as “Coach Yeah,” is in his first year as a head football coach at Division II West Alabama, a far cry from the SEC powerhouses he once worked for. For the last few years, his career took a winding path — and a full halt for a season — as he addressed a painkiller addiction.
Cochran has been open about his addiction, even sharing that in 2021, when he stepped away from his coaching position and into an analyst role, he called Georgia coach Kirby Smart to tell him: “I am a drug addict.”
Now sober and back to his calling, the football coach is “enjoying every freaking second of it.”
A perfect display of Cochran’s coaching style was on display during a game in South Georgia in October.
Opponent Valdosta State had just extended its lead to 17-7 with a touchdown in the second quarter. Cochran’s Tigers needed a spark on the road before halftime.
Instead, West Alabama’s kick returner muffed the kickoff. He recovered the kick in the end zone and — instead of taking a knee for a touchback and possession at the 25-yard line — opted to return the kick out of the end zone. The returner was tackled at West Alabama’s 5-yard line, setting up another poor offensive drive.
Cochran and special teams coordinator Thomas Fletcher yelled at the returner as he trotted off the field, but they did so in different tones.
Fletcher yelled like many would expect a college football coach to yell: a classic, Nick Saban-esque “chew-out.” A former long snapper under Saban at the University of Alabama, Fletcher knows how to rip into a player.
Cochran, who coached under Saban at LSU and Alabama for 17 years, took a different approach.
Cochran threw his arm around the player and encouragingly said “You’re better than that.”
Cochran has always been a friend of the player. Fletcher saw it firsthand when he played for Cochran at Alabama.
His coaching style created a need for intense coordinators like Fletcher on his staff when he took the job at West Alabama in February. A good cop by nature, Cochran needed some bad cops around him.
“I have no fear of just going ballistic, and I’m that way when things are good, I’m that way when things are bad, I’m that way when things are in the middle just because it’s who I am as a football coach,” Fletcher said. “I can do that because of who he is.”
Cochran was nicknamed “Coach Yeah” at Alabama for his energetic “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” yelling in the weight room. Cochran was a key piece of Saban’s dynasty at Alabama, serving as a connection point between the coaching staff and the players.
“Coach Yeah,” like most college strength coaches, spent more time with the players than the head coach did. He kept a pulse on the locker room for Saban and helped the head coach win six of his seven national titles.
Cochran gained his own national notoriety when he appeared in a Regions Bank television commercial with Saban and was featured on “60 Minutes” in 2013.
Cochran left Alabama before the 2020 season to serve as special teams coordinator for his former co-worker, Kirby Smart, at the University of Georgia.
At this point, he had kept his addiction secret. Two months after joining the staff in Athens, his wife Cissy found him lying unconscious. “She found me dead,” Cochran told the AJC in 2024.
He had become addicted to opioids and fentanyl while coaching at Alabama. He hoped a change of scenery would help him break the addiction.
But the battled continued.
Cochran missed parts of Georgia’s national 2021 championship season in a rehab program. He remained sober in 2022 before relapsing again in November 2023.
Cochran reentered rehab soon after and stepped out of college football coaching for the first time in two decades. He spent the 2024 season sharing his story with college teams around the country, encouraging struggling college athletes to speak up when struggling with mental health.
Cochran had been sober for over a year when West Alabama approached him with the head-coaching offer.
But Cochran would only take the West Alabama job if he could invest in his recovery. He couldn’t work on the nonstop schedule of an SEC coach, and he had several “nonnegotiables” for his daily schedule.
“My nonnegotiables are different from others, but my nonnegotiables are that I have to work out every single day, I have to meditate or pray every single day and I need family time every single day,” Cochran said. “I say family time, but it’s recovery time for me, right? Every single day, I need to do something with my recovery.”
Cochran can attend his son’s high school football games on Friday nights. He can attend sobriety program meetings in Livingston, the quiet college town home to West Alabama.
Life at West Alabama is noticeably different from Cochran’s last two jobs in Athens and Tuscaloosa.
For example, Cochran lives on campus with his team for half the week during football season. He eats meals with his players in the dining hall and sleeps in Stickney Hall, a West Alabama student dormitory.
“It’s not one of the better ones either,” quarterback Spencer Arceneaux said.
Cochran has implemented many of the same principles that Saban did at Alabama — much like Smart did at Georgia — but it looks different. Very few Division II players have enough talent to chase a career in professional football, so academics are more important at West Alabama.
“They have an uncle … who’s a really hard worker, who’s blue-collar, and so some of these kids think, ‘OK, once I graduate, I’m going to have to go to a trade school so that I can become a plumber and be like my uncle,’” Cochran said. “I’m like, ‘No, you’re going to get a college degree, you’re going to go into a white-collar job and you’re going to own the plumbing company one day.’”
Cochran saw Saban instill high academic expectations at Alabama for years, and it’s even more important for him to do so at West Alabama.
“In every team meeting, I bring up academics,” Cochran said. “I get their reports, and if a guy is struggling, he’s brought into the office. I’ve called his mom and dad already. We’ve talked to their family, like, ‘Hey, this is not acceptable. This is not something we’re going to tolerate.’
“And most of the time the mamas and dads are like, ‘Oh, don’t you worry. We don’t tolerate that s--- either. I’m on my way in now.’”
Cochran has also seen a higher standard of motivation at practice and in the weight room at the Division II level.
“In Division I and in the SEC world, you know, there is a little bit of a privilege, right?” Cochran said. “They get gear whenever they want it, they have meals set for them. You know, here’s a shake with all your ingredients you like.
“We don’t have all that here, and so our guys are pretty tough. So it is a very different deal when I don’t have to go in there and motivate and excite every single day to get under the bar or to work hard.”
Cochran loved coaching on college football’s biggest stages, but he loves his West Alabama team’s pure love of the game, too.
“The relationship, I feel like, means more, just because there’s no strings attached there,” Cochran said. “I don’t know if it’s more fun, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it, right? Like, I’m enjoying it because I feel like it’s a combination of my recovery, my relationship with the players, with God, all of it.”
Cochran has brought plenty of “Sabanisms” to West Alabama, but he’s also brought lessons from recovery, too. Cochran has shared his recovery story, and he employs positive self-talk and mantras with his team.
Cochran’s personal mantra in first season as a head coach?
“I’m built for this,” Cochran said. “That’s what I say to myself when the bullets are flying. I just say, ‘I’m built for this.’”
Cochran has already seen his players improve mentally, too. Arceneaux, a former preferred walk-on at Kansas and Nebraska, transferred to West Alabama before the 2022 season.
Arceneaux had been at West Alabama for three seasons when Cochran took over. The veteran quarterback said he grew in Cochran’s “skull sessions,” team mental development meetings before the season.
Cochran’s leadership and development translated to the field, where Arceneaux felt he had the best season of his career.
“(Arceneaux’s) mama grabbed me and was like, ‘He’s never played this good before. It’s because you believe in him,’” Cochran said. “I just thought he was a baller. I didn’t know that I had anything to do with it. She’s like, ‘No, he did not play this well last year. He was very erratic and struggled, and now he’s playing out of his mind.’
“So things like that makes me realize I’m supposed to be here.”
Cochran brought literal pieces of the Alabama dynasty with him. Much of his coaching staff is made up of former Alabama national champions like Fletcher, OJ Howard, Bo Scarbrough, Blake Sims and Reggie Ragland.
Cochran said the coaching staff’s youth is one of its greatest strengths.
“They have a lot of energy, and they bring in a lot to the game,” Cochran said. “They know the game, they played it at a really high level, so they can help the other coaches see it differently, help the players see it differently.”
Sims, who quarterbacked the Crimson Tide to an SEC championship and College Football Playoff berth in 2014, now serves as Cochran’s wide receivers coach. He’s enjoyed watching Cochran lead players the same way he used to lead in Tuscaloosa.
Cochran earned his first win as head coach in West Alabama’s season opener against Fort Valley State. The Tigers went on to win four more games in a row before finishing the season with four losses.
“Some of my players told me the other day they love when we have team meetings because every time coach Cochran speaks, he just motivates them and makes them want to play for him even harder,” Sims said. “Like at the beginning of the year, I was telling some of the players, I was like, ‘How big of a blessing is this to be a part of coach Cochran’s story of giving him his first win in three years?’”
About the Author
Jack Leo is a sports writer and reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Jack worked for the AJC throughout his four years studying journalism and sports media at Georgia State University and the University of Georgia. He's now focused on telling stories in the grassroots: bringing comprehensive coverage of high school sports for AJC Varsity.
