By Isaac Bourne, Sports Editor
After 329 games 32 years and 163 wins notched, Ouachita football head coach Todd Knight still hasn’t forgotten a single person that’s helped him along the way.
“Coach Derby has been with me,” said Knight. “He was a GA for me at Delta State, and we’ve been together ever since…Brett Shockley has been here now 19 years…you go back and we’ve had so many great defensive coordinators. J.R. [Eldridge] was here for 11 years. What an impact he had, really setting the base philosophy for who we are. Deke Adams defensive coordinator, Paige Anders. I mean, I can just go on and on and on.”
Knight, now in his 26th season with the Tigers, has still always focused on the next game no matter which season it has been. After starting off his tenure at Ouachita with nine seasons without a winning record, he hasn’t looked back, posting 16-straight winning seasons (longest in the state of Arkansas) at the helm of the Tigers.
“Three two-win seasons in those first five years…it just shows that it doesn’t just happen,” he said. “It takes a lot of work and a whole lot of nasty from a lot of people to get it done.”
A 1986 graduate of Ouachita, Knight played under the late Buddy Benson, who held the wins record prior to the 2025 season. Following his time at OBU, he gained a graduate assistant role at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mis. where he would work his way up into an assistant coaching position in 1989. After a brief two-year stint at division I UTEP as an assistant, the statesmen would bring him back as head coach in 1993. From there, Knight found a five-year home that would conclude with a Gulf South Conference (GSC) championship (the school’s first in its history) and a GSC Coach of the Year award.
In the year 1999, newly-minted athletic director David Sharp went to Ouachita’s well of former athletes to find a replacement for retired football coach Jimmy “Red” Parker, with Knight winning the coaching sweepstakes, coming to OBU with little expectation from the fans. Even with a slow start, Knight would turn his first winning season in 2008 into, currently, the longest streak of winning seasons for a college football program in the state of Arkansas.
No matter what the team looks like or how the program has been in the past, Todd Knight has established a culture not easily broken for the Ouachita Baptist football program.
