Wayne State football coach Tyrone Wheatley talks new job, success at Michigan alma mater

By Patrick Nothaft |
GRAND RAPIDS, MI – You’ll have to excuse Drake Reid for having a limited knowledge of Tyrone Wheatley’s achievements on the football field and the track.
After all, the Wayne State cornerback was born in the latter part of Wheatley’s pro football career and well after he earned Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year recognition and All-American honors as a hurdler at the University of Michigan.
So, when Reid learned Wayne State hired the 51-year-old Wheatley as its football coach in January, he did some research.
“I knew his name, for sure, and have definitely seen a highlight or two, probably didn’t know it was him at the time,” Reid said of Wheatley. “After (he was hired), our guys were definitely checking him out to see if he was the real deal, and I consider him definitely to be the real deal.”
Reid, Wheatley and junior offensive tackle Blake Bustard represented Wayne State at this Week’s Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference in Grand Rapids, giving the trio a chance to talk about a new era of Warrior football.
Like Reid, Bustard had some familiarity with Wheatley, but wanted to watch the highlights himself to see what the hype was about.
“I’d heard about him, but I didn’t really know where he went,” Bustard said. “Then, I checked out his film, and I was like, ‘This guy doesn’t play around.’ He’s got a lot of great NFL stories that he brings to the table, and it’s good to hear that experience from him.”
Following a decade in the NFL as a running back for the New York Giants and Oakland Raiders, Wheatley began his coaching career at his Dearborn Heights Robichaud alma mater, before moving to the collegiate and pro game, where he served as a running backs coach for 11 years, including two-year stops at Michigan, the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars.
He accepted his first collegiate head coaching job at Morgan State in 2019 and coached at the Football Championship Subdivision level for three seasons, before serving as the Denver Broncos running backs coach in 2022.
The midseason firing of Denver head coach Nathaniel Hackett left Wheatley’s status with the team uncertain, and rather than wait for the Broncos to make their next hire or pursue another NFL opportunity, he decided it was time to come home.
“First of all, it’s home,” Wheatley said of his decision to accept the Wayne State job after 19-year head coach Paul Winters retired. “It’s literally 20 minutes from where I grew up. We all kind of want that Rocky story-type job. The only thing is that this is not a Cinderella-type team. It has been there before; it has done it; it has come close.”
Under Winters, Wayne State posted a 94-105 record and reached the 2011 Division II national championship game, but combined to go 3-18 in 2021 and 2022.
“Paul did a good job of taking it from the shadows of obscurity and putting it on a national level,” Wheatley said. “Then, it fell off for a second, but it kind of gave you a glimpse as to what this place could be.
“Just seeing what he did with those 2011, 2012 and 2013 teams gave a glimpse of what this place could be, and I just said, ‘Wow, this is the place to be.’
“On top of that, they play in arguably the best Division II football conference in America, so where else would you want to be. Grand Valley has its litany of championships. Ferris has won back-to-back. Davenport has gone from NAIA to rolling in a few years now. Saginaw Valley is turning it around.
“The team is home and plays in one of the best conferences against some of the best coaches, regardless of level of football. This is the place.”
In the preseason coaches poll, the Warriors were picked to finish sixth in the seven-team GLIAC, and with only three starters back on defense, Wayne State could see its share of struggles this season against a schedule that includes four returning playoff teams, including defending national champion Ferris State and preseason national No. 2 Grand Valley State.
“I was always taught that you find out the truth of a person when they battle adversity, so that’s what I want to see from these guys is some adversity, and hopefully I can get them prepared to get through that and stick together through those tough times,” Wheatley said.
As part of Jim Harbaugh’s first Michigan coaching staff in 2015, Wheatley has seen the early stages of a successful rebuild and understands that it takes time, even in a place like Ann Arbor.
“It was one of those deals where people had to understand it’s Michigan, and it’s one of those deals where the standard is the standard, and you’re happy about it, but it was going to take Harbaugh a few years to get it to where he wanted it to be,” Wheatley said. “To say he’s going to come in and turn it around immediately, he would’ve loved to, and we as a staff would’ve loved to turn it around, and I think we did better than most had thought we would do in that first year, but at some points, not as good as some would have liked. But it took time.
“A lot of people don’t realize right when Jim took the job, college football was in a shift…That’s right when things started opening up with the camps and going across the country and allowing coaching staffs to hold their camps off-campus.
“I would say that we kind of got a hold of it, but we were still behind the 8-ball a little bit. The SEC kind of gets ahead of us in certain things, but we were catching up, and he was doing a great job of building his brand and getting Michigan back to what we call Michigan football. He was doing a great job, and I think those couple years where we didn’t do as well as people thought we should have, we were building that from where it was, and it takes time to get to where it is now. He’s done an incredible job.”