Kimberly Eck walked into the hospital to visit her doctor on the morning of Dec. 23, 2010. She was due in January, and she wanted reassurance that the baby was on track to arrive in the new year. A Christmas birthday, she figured, was the worst birthday a kid could get.
The doctor told her not to worry. She wasn't dilated and there were zero signs of an imminent birth.
That night, Jason Eck came home late from work at Ball State. The Cardinals had fired Stan Parrish a month earlier, and new coach Pete Lembo had spent some time evaluating the staff and he made his decision on the offensive line coach. Eck was fired..
"I went into labor that night and had him on Christmas Eve," Kimberly said. "Literally, it was like my fastest delivery, two hours. So it had to have been stress."
That baby, Palmer Eck, is now a sophomore quarterback at La Cueva High School in Albuquerque. His father, a burly, larger-than-life former offensive lineman with a personality to match, is now the coach at New Mexico and one of the hottest names on college football's coaching carousel.
New Mexico had one winning season in the 17 years before Jason Eck arrived two years ago. The Lobos are now 7-1, unbeaten in the Mountain West and ranked in the AP Top 25 for the first time in school history. Eck, 49, is 16-5 in two seasons leading the Lobos and 42-18 overall as a head coach.
Eck's turnaround projects at Idaho and New Mexico have looked easy, but they haven't been. He spent 23 years as an assistant coach, worked for 12 different head coaches, was out of work about four times and spent one offseason working at a university golf course.
Now everyone in college football wants a piece of him, and Eck knows it.
"I think the players and coaches are kind of mirrored right now," Eck told CBS Sports. "It's always been this way for coaches, but now with the transfer portal and NIL, what players are going through is the same thing. It's not as public. It's not as visible. There aren't articles on the internet about it. But this time of year our players are getting contacted by agents, and they're saying, 'Hey, we want to represent you, and I think you can get this much money at this place.' And my message to the players is no different than the message to myself."
A strong foundation
The first time Kimberly saw Jason Eck, he was working the door of a slow Wisconsin bar.
One July night in Madison, a friend who had just been dumped talked Kimberly into going out. They went to the Oakcrest Tavern, a pub known for cheese curds, margaritas and beer-league softball players. For reasons she still can't explain, the bar had a bouncer.
He was a Wisconsin football graduate assistant named Jason Eck.
"I walked in, and I told my friend, ' Oh, my God, he is so good-looking. I'm going to talk his ear off until he asks me out," she said. "And so I did that."
They got married in 2002, as he was leaving for a graduate assistant job at Colorado.
"And I think he knew I wouldn't move unless we were married," she said. "So that's what we did."
Eck had grown up a child of the coaching business. His father, Jay, coached college basketball and became the head coach at Toledo in 1987. In the 1991 MAC tournament, the seventh-seeded Rockets reached the final and lost to Eastern Michigan by one point. Jay was fired within a week. Jason, an eighth grader, had already picked which high school to attend in Toledo, but that — and his new friends — were off the table.
"One basket probably determined where I went to high school," Eck said, "because if you win the MAC championship game, they're not going to fire you if you go to the big dance."
Paying dues
Jason loved coaching, but the profession he picked was relentlessly exhausting. For a decade, the job seemed to do everything it could to talk him out of it and into a normal, 9-to-5 job.
Eck criss-crossed the country, jumping from Colorado to Idaho to Division II Winona State to Ball State, arriving just as Brady Hoke left after a 12-0 regular season. Two losing seasons later, the Ball State staff was fired. After the Christmas Eve news about Baby Palmer, Eck took the offensive line job at FCS Hampton for about $44,000, down from his Ball State salary of $75,000. When he left Hampton after a year, the family had 30 days to vacate university housing. Kimberly packed their belongings with three kids, including one on her hip, as Jason went back to work.
"Three little kids and a Kia Sorento getting like boxes from grocery stores," she said.
Western Illinois was supposed to be a safe haven for the Ecks. Mark Hendrickson had four years left on his contract when Eck arrived as a position coach in 2012. The Leathernecks went 3-8 that fall, and they fired Hendrickson anyway. Rather than paying buyouts, the school reassigned the assistants to jobs across campus, and Eck was sent to the golf course to service lawn mowers and golf carts, then to a cubicle at the campus transit center.
"That was my third job in three years," Eck said, "so I started looking at it: my next job is going to be my fourth job in four years, we got three kids, we're not making any money."
A decade-plus of being chewed up and spit out over and over again had Eck at his breaking point, so he set himself up to leave the coaching business. In 2013, he turned down jobs at a Mississippi junior college and at Valparaiso, then interviewed with FieldTurf for a sales territory in Kansas and Missouri. Eck felt like he had an "in" as a former coach who could relate with other coaches looking for new football fields. The regional manager, however, wanted a career salesman, Eck said.
"I mean, if I would have gotten offered that job, I would have taken it," he said.
So, after already passing up two coaching opportunities, he started making phone calls, hoping he could find a rare opening in the spring. Through his connections, he heard North Dakota was hiring Minnesota State-Mankato's offensive line coach. So he emailed Mankato coach Aaron Keen, whom he had never met, about a job that didn't exist yet. Keen called back and said he had no opening.
"And I was like, well, you might," Eck said.
Keen hired him. Minnesota State went 11-1, and Keen quickly promoted Eck to offensive coordinator. About a month later, FieldTurf called back with a different position and a job offer.
"You know what, I gotta stick with this," Eck said. "There's a reason why I'm doing this, but if that offer had come a year later, I probably would not have been coaching anymore."
The next season, Eck's offense put the Mavericks in the Division II national championship game, and Kimberly came along for the trip.
"I actually got pregnant while we were on that trip," she said. "That's why we named our son Maverick."
The family was growing to six – four kids and a husband and a wife. The family was already in debt, but for the first time in a decade, there was a sense of stability and Jason's career was finally on an upward trajectory..
They left Minnesota State for Montana State in 2015. Then, more of the same. They had to leave another job when the school fired Rob Ash.
Was the vicious cycle starting again? It was enough to make any man go mad.
Did Kimberly ever tell her husband to stop coaching?
"Never, never did."
Making the most of an opportunity
Dan Jackson was the young assistant without a family on John Stiegelmeier's South Dakota State staff in 2016, so of course he had a spare room. He wasn't told it also came with a roommate.
Eck had just landed a job as South Dakota State's offensive line coach for head coach John Stiegelmeier, who had averaged nine wins over the previous five seasons and was two decades into a long, successful career. Eck had finally found a landing spot with firm ground and a winning tradition.
"He was driving into town, and I got a phone call. And he was like, 'Hey, pal, this is Jason Eck. Coach Stig says I'm staying with you,'" Jackson said. "... And so I guess Coach Stig promised Eck a place at my apartment without me even knowing."
Eck crashed there for a couple of months. The offensive line coach and defensive backs coach bonded over boxing and horse racing. They have since gone to the Kentucky Derby together with their wives.
Jackson had already seen Eck work a room during his job interview with the head coach. Stiegelmeier asked every job candidate to teach the staff as if they were players. Eck studied the roster, gave each staff member the name of a Jackrabbits offensive lineman and ran a position meeting.
"So he was up there sweating in his suit," Jackson said. "And it is still the best interview that I've sat in on to date."
During that first season in Brookings, Stiegelmeier told Eck something no head coach had told him before: "I think you will be a very good head coach someday."
Head coach? Eck's primary goal was to coach offensive linemen at the highest level, maybe in the NFL. The Jackrabbits won the Missouri Valley Conference that season and advanced to the national semifinals the next two seasons. Eck was elevated to offensive coordinator in 2019 and won the AFCA's FCS assistant coach of the year award that season, which ended in the second round of the FCS playoffs.
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the 2020 season to the spring of 2021, and Eck suddenly had his Friday nights in the fall free. His second son, Jaxton, was a sophomore linebacker at Brookings High, which played in SDSU's stadium. For the first time ever, he sat next to Kimberly in the stands of his home stadium.
"She'd look over to me every game and just like say, 'It's so weird to be sitting here in the stadium with you watching a game. I'm so used to me being in the stands here and you being down in the field,'" Eck said.
Jaxton was maybe 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds. Eck figured he would play college football on the Division II level. SDSU's defensive coordinator at the time was Jimmy Rogers, now the head coach at Iowa State.
"He loves speed, and he was always trying to find really, really fast linebackers, which again, thanks to the genetics I gave my son, was not his biggest asset as a player," Eck said. "... I'm not going to have any say in recruiting as an offensive coordinator, but if I became a head coach I would have a say in recruiting."
The Jackrabbits lost to Sam Houston State in the national championship game that spring. In 2021, Eck finished runner-up for the Idaho State job, and that fall his offense finished ninth nationally in scoring. Then he emailed Idaho's athletic director, Terry Gawlik, whom he had met at Wisconsin when she was an assistant AD. In December 2021, at 44, he became a head coach.
The man in charge
Idaho had jumped to the FBS, struggled and dropped down to the FCS. The Vandals were coming off five straight losing seasons when Eck arrived on campus. He took it to the FCS playoffs three straight years and went 26-13. Jaxton, who wouldn't consider his father's scholarship offer until another FCS school offered him, became a first-team All-Big Sky linebacker.
Jackson left Vanderbilt to become Eck's defensive coordinator in 2024. The only house he and his wife, Missy, could find for sale in Moscow was two doors down from the Ecks.
Early on, the two left before dawn for a recruiting trip in a blizzard. Jackson offered to drive, knowing his boss could not stay off his phone. Eck refused. A Midwest guy, he told Jackson, had no business driving on winding roads yet.
"I was like, OK, well, all right, you're driving," Jackson said. "And then he proceeded to go through windy, mountain roads as it snowed, checking his phone throughout the drive. I was like, 'Holy shit!" But I still felt safer than if I was driving because he was right. That was a treacherous deal up there."
In Jackson's first game as coordinator, Idaho was within a field goal of Oregon in the fourth quarter before losing 24-14. Jaxton was in the zone, making 14 tackles in the near-miss against the eventual Big Ten champions.
"I've never been around a football player that maximizes his God-given abilities more than that dude," Jackson said.
The Ecks had found success after years of searching. The money finally came, too. For years, the family's summer vacation was its annual tax refund: five days in Minneapolis, a Twins game and an amusement park. Kimberly worked as a nanny and in remote customer service for Amazon so she could be around her children. In his first year at Idaho, Eck received a huge, unexpected tax bill and required a payment plan to pay it off.
"The whole first year at Idaho was getting out of debt," Eck said. "... A lot of the years we were probably negative month to month. We were not getting evicted or anything, but we were accumulating a little bit more debt every month."
Breaking good
Eck took the New Mexico job on Dec. 14, 2024, the day after Idaho's season ended in the FCS quarterfinals. Eck kept it quiet. Jaxton didn't know until his father told him that night.
Eck had three reasons for taking a job at an FBS program that averaged only three wins over the last 17 years. The first was the basketball crowds he saw on TV at The Pit, New Mexico's famous arena
"I think a lot of the schools that have been traditionally basketball schools are people probably just choosing good basketball over bad football," Eck said.
The second was conference realignment. Boise State and four other Mountain West schools were leaving for the Pac-12 in 2026, and the new, 10-team Mountain West was ripe for a new program to launch itself to the top.
"I'm 49 years old," Eck said. "New Mexico's never been in the top half of their conference resource-wise in any year of my life."
The third reason was athletic director Fernando Lovo, who won over a nervous Kimberly during the interview process. Eck calls him the best AD he has ever been around.
Jason has lived in about a dozen states, but had never been in New Mexico. His only impression of the state was what he heard about in the TV show "Breaking Bad," which features a former high school science teacher who becomes a meth kingpin when he is diagnosed with cancer. Now they gush about the food and the fans in Albuquerque. This week, a fan sent Jason home with homemade jelly. At Tuesday night's radio show, someone handed them hand-knit beanies.
New Mexico was picked to finish 11th in the Mountain West in 2025, but the Lobos went 9-4, routed UCLA 35-10 at the Rose Bowl and reached their first bowl game since 2016. Eck was named the conference's coach of the year and Jaxton, who followed him from Idaho, was co-defensive player of the year. UNM rewarded Eck with a five-year, $8.75 million contract.
Eck, whose burly, 6-foot-4 figure is a rare makeup for a head coach, has become a national phenom because of his fiery sideline demeanor, viral video skits and personable analogies, including a postgame press conference where he compared player rotations and injury management to playing Madden NFL.
He's gone ballistic on a player celebrating with a "turnover belt" while the Lobos were losing. Last month, he appeared in a video as a character named "Jeff," a new employee tasked with selling tickets to the Lobos' football games. Everyone in the skit, mimicking "The Office," knows it's just the coach in disguise.
"No, I'm Jeff, but I hear that guy's a heck of a coach," he tells a fan at the ticket window.
If you sit down to chat with Eck, you're liable to spend an hour discussing football, family and any other topic Eck might sense a personal connection.
"He knows families, parents' names," said center Kaden Robnett, a former Idaho walk-on who followed Eck to New Mexico and is now a starter. "He knows my wife's name. He'll talk to my wife about the games, too."
This season started with high expectations mixed with bad news. Quarterback Jack Layne, who also followed Eck from Idaho, needed a second elbow surgery in August and is out for the year. In October, Jaxton broke a bone in his shoulder.
"I'm going to my son, and he's crying on the sideline heartbroken," Eck said. "You're heartbroken for any player on your team that gets hurt, and he's one of our best players, and he's your son. I felt a little emotional, and he's crying because he feels like he's letting his teammates down because he's on the sideline hurt."
The family has seen those tears before. In kindergarten, Jaxton took a soccer ball to the face late in a close game. The pain wasn't what made him emotional.
"I got a bloody nose, and they made me come out because I was bleeding and was pissed because I missed the end of the game," Jaxton said.
The linebacker hopes to return against UNLV on Nov. 14 or against Wyoming on Nov. 20 at the latest. For now, he runs the scout team with play cards, and signals in plays during games.
"He definitely has overachieved the slow walk-on O-lineman genes that I gave him," his father said.
Despite the injuries, UNM has kept winning anyway. Backup quarterback Toa Fa'avae has been thrust into the starting role and is one of four quarterbacks with more interceptions than touchdowns to lead a team with a winning record. The defense ranks No. 1 nationally, allowing only 11.9 points per game, and the Lobos lead the nation in turnover margin (plus-17). A crowd of 34,794, the program's largest for a game against anyone other than New Mexico State since 2005, waited out a lightning delay to watch the Lobos beat North Dakota State 21-16 and reach bowl eligibility. Last Saturday, they won at San Jose State for the first time since 1969.
Everything is blooming in the desert. Jaxton could have left New Mexico for bigger pastures in January. After last season, he said, teams were offering him NIL deals between $600,000- $700,000. He stayed anyway to play for his dad and be around his four siblings, including his older brother, Quentin, who works part-time with the equipment crew while he finishes his business degree.
"Money's not the most important thing to me," he said. "I don't love football to make money."
His mother has her own theory.
"It probably helps too that I'll fly him to see his girlfriend in Idaho anytime he wants," Kimberly said. "Let's throw that in there. That's my own NIL deal."
"I get to watch three of my boys on the field together," Kimberly said.
Earning respect
On Tuesday night, the College Football Playoff selection committee released its first rankings of the season. New Mexico was absent despite being ranked 22nd in the AP poll. Boise State was the only Group of Six school in the CFP's rankings at No. 25.
That might be the only list Eck's name isn't on these days.
Four major college jobs are open, and Eck's name appeared on several media members' lists as a potential hire. Others are projecting other places Eck makes sense if jobs come open. His alma mater, Wisconsin, still has a head coach, and that job is unlikely to open after a turnaround season under Luke Fickell, even though the Badgers were blanked 30-0 last week at Iowa. Four games against unranked teams remain.
Colorado is 3-5, and Deion Sanders is in danger of recording a third losing season in four years. The Buffaloes' athletic director is Eck's old New Mexico boss, Lovo, and Eck was once a graduate assistant in Boulder.
Eck's buyout is $4 million through the end of this year, but the Albuquerque Journal reported a clause cuts it in half to $2 million for 12 months because of Lovo's offseason departure for Colorado. That full buyout remains if he follows Lovo to Colorado, per the terms.
Eck won't promise he's staying for a third season at New Mexico. He has watched the Nick Saban documentary that features the coach telling reporters covering the Miami Dolphins he wasn't taking the Alabama job, only for him to leave for Tuscaloosa.
"I never want to do that and lie to people and say something that isn't true," Eck said. "I just know this: I think I have a great job. This community has really rallied behind our team and given us great support, and if I ever leave here, I'm going to be very selective. It's going to have to be an incredible opportunity that I couldn't turn down."
Transfer portal. Job opportunities. He told his players those decisions can wait until the season is over.
"I think everybody who's a part of our program -- head coach, assistant coaches, players -- are going to have to evaluate: where am I at right now? Is it in my best interest to come back here next year? Are there other things that are worth pursuing?" Eck said.
His agent is already talking to New Mexico about what it can do to improve the program and Eck's resources, but the coach's demands are not only about him.
"You don't want to walk into the staff meeting (and an assistant say),'Yeah, you turned down this job, but we're all sitting here and you're living comfortably.' Some of my assistants are probably still living month to month," Eck said. "I have that stuff in mind, too."
The Lobos (7-1, 4-0 MW) travel to Nevada (3-5, 2-2) for a Friday night game in the Mountain West on the CBS Sports Network. New Mexico enters Friday with a 5.3% chance of reaching the CFP, according to CBS Sports Forecasting & Projections, the third-best odds among the Group of Six. The CFP assures only one G6 team, the highest-placed team in their rankings, are included in the 12-team postseason.
"We need to stay focused at the task at hand. It's good. It's a positive thing," Eck said. "If we were 1-7 right now, there'd be no articles linking me to jobs and [the players] wouldn't be playing as well as individuals. You'd have less people contacting you. This is a byproduct of us doing well. People realize they must have some really good players at New Mexico for them to be ranked for the first time in school history. They must have good coaches. But the second we start focusing on that shit, or it takes our mind off of what we're doing, we're going to lose value for ourselves. That's really what I want our program to do: create value for you going forward in your life, whether that's staying here and creating more value for players or coaches, or moving on somewhere else to do that."
The future is uncertain, yes, but Jackson, now the head coach at South Dakota State, is sure about one thing.
"He is not going to change," Jackson said. "... I think when people start changing who they are based on where they coach, then they lose themselves and they fail. He's not going to do that."
Until the future arrives, whether it be after a Mountain West title or playoff appearance, the speculation will continue.
"Yeah, it's pretty annoying, honestly," Jaxton said. "I wish people would just, like, be in the moment. That's what I honestly try and do. When people ask me, I just tell them I honestly have no idea what he's going to do. I think both of us are focused on trying to win a championship this year."
Cheese and Coffee
The Ecks are creatures of habit, maintainers of schedule, and a bit superstitious, Jason most of all. During the football season, he and Kimberly normally meet for lunch on Thursdays at the same restaurant. If they lose a game, they change it up. Right now, their spot in Albuquerque is Cheese and Coffee.
"If we're winning, we don't change it up and we order the same thing," Kimberly said. "But this week, our week changed because we play on Friday, so the lunch has to be Wednesday."
So on Wednesday, two days before New Mexico plays its first game as a ranked team, Kimberly met her husband at Cheese and Coffee. She usually leaves with a pint of the green chile cheese soup to put in the crock pot and heat up on game days for guests.
Things are busy for the Ecks, but for the first time life is actually less stressful. Kimberly can still tell you what the bad years cost. When heavy, monsoonal rain hit Albuquerque this fall, the Ecks' home needed repairs. For most of their marriage, that would have meant more debt.
"Thank God we can actually afford to fix our roof," Kimberly said.
