Irene Boehm
Sports Editor
Football is a family business, especially for us in the South. At The University of the South, football means energized tailgates on Saturday and watching the Titans lose on Sunday with our loved ones near. By blood and brotherhood, Sewanee Football’s Head Coach, Joe Freitag, is a family man.
For Coach Freitag, building a football program is about more than X’s and O’s. It starts with relationships, and for offensive coordinator Nate Graham, that philosophy has been proven time and again. Freitag was originally Graham’s coach at Monmouth College, an Illinois Division III powerhouse where Freitag also once played for the Scotts. Upon graduating in 2021, Graham joined the Scotts coaching squad, building on a bond with Freitag that would eventually lead them to Sewanee.
“If you see a really energetic guy coaching football and knows all the words to every song and does all the dances with our players, and he’s got some tattoos and a whole bunch of energy, that’s Nate,” Freitag told members of the Monteagle-Sewanee Rotary Club last month. “He played for me at Monmouth, graduated from college, and then we hired him back to coach receivers up in Illinois. So, like, Nate was around when our kids were both born. He’s like part of our family.”
For Graham, joining Freitag at Sewanee was a continuation of a partnership that had already shaped his own approach to coaching. “He told me he wanted me to be a part of his staff wherever he got an opportunity,” Graham said. “After he was offered the job at Sewanee, he called me and said he knew this was the place he wanted to be.”
The family culture that Graham and Freitag share is evident in their efforts to make personal connections with every member of the Tigers’ 2026 roster: no small feat with a historic 43 freshmen joining the squad. Graham said that the first priority when the coaching staff arrived on campus was getting to know the team beyond football, meeting individually with players to learn about their hobbies, family lives and goals after graduation.
“We want authentic relationships with our players so they know we care about them beyond football,” Graham said. His philosophy is rooted in his experience as a player under Freitag. Graham recalled Freitag having the offense over for dinner, talking with players about life outside football and organizing team-bonding activities. “When the team knows that their coaches truly care about them, it makes it easier to get up and grind every day,” Graham said. “Football is a hard sport, but when you have a strong support system around you, you can get through it.”
That family extends beyond Freitag and Graham. Defensive coordinator Cooper Gosch also followed Freitag to Sewanee, earning a particularly strong endorsement from the head coach. “Cooper’s kind of my right-hand man,” Freitag said. “It’s nice. I call the offense, I coach the quarterbacks, and it’s nice to know that I’ve got a coach running our defense that’s got control of things and is a great human and a really good football coach on top of it.”
For Graham, that shared trust is part of why he believes in what Sewanee can become. “I came to Sewanee because of how much confidence I have in him as both a leader of men and a coach,” Graham said. And so, the three former Scottsmen have journeyed 471 miles Southeast to the Mountain- where students, alumni and players hope they’ll show us how to win football games again.