Jamie Vaught: New offensive coordinator Bush Hamden excited to land in a ‘special’ place in the UK

From Boise to Lexington.

This is the path from Idaho to Kentucky that Bush Hamdan took when he accepted the job as the school’s new offensive coordinator at UK football in February, replacing Liam Coen, who left for Florida to become offensive coordinator with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL.

Hamdan is no stranger to SEC football, as the 38-year-old was an assistant at Missouri (2020-22) and Florida (2012). Hamdan’s job at UK is his fifth offensive coordinator position. He was also quarterback coach for the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, working with star QB Matt Ryan.

Kentucky coach Mark Stoops is happy to have Hamdan on the coaching staff.

“I have known Bush for a number of years and spent some great times with him in 2021,” Stoops said. “I have followed his career ever since and have been very impressed with him. He has coached under Chris Petersen (in Washington), Steve Sarkisian (NFL) and Eli Drinkwitz (Missouri), three coaches I have great respect for, and I think he is a rising star in the coaching profession. We are excited to bring Bush and his family to Lexington.”

Before heading to UK, Hamdan was reportedly set to become the highest-paid assistant coach in Boise State history in the 2024 season. Last season at his alma mater, Boise State, Hamdan led the high-scoring Broncos to victory in the Mountain West Conference, tying UNLV and San Jose State, and a trip to the LA Bowl.

As a college player at Boise State in the late 2000s, Hamdan was a two-time captain at quarterback under head coach Chris Peterson. In his final three seasons, all of which he played under Peterson, the Broncos posted a combined record of 35-4. In 2006, the fifth-ranked Broncos posted a perfect record of 13-0, including an overtime win over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.

During his senior year, Hamdan received the Bronco Excellence Award for Integrity and Leadership while earning a bachelor’s degree in communications. He also earned his master’s degree in sports administration from Idaho State in 2009.

Before coming to Boise State, Hamdan was a highly decorated prep quarterback in Arlington, Virginia, who rushed for more than 4,000 yards and 40 touchdowns. He was a member of the Super 44 Prep Team and All-Metro in Washington, DC

At UK, Hamdan is now one of the highest-paid assistant coaches in the country. According to the Lexington Herald Leader, he had a three-year contract and his salary for 2024 is $1.25 million.

It was a tough decision for Hamdan to leave Idaho as Boise State is pushing for an appearance in college football’s newly expanded 12-team playoffs this season. With Kentucky playing in the SEC, it was too tempting to turn down the UK job.

After six months in Lexington, Hamdan, who was born in Kuwait City, Kuwait, was asked about his new home.

Jamie H. Vaught, a longtime Kentucky sports columnist, is the author of six books about UK basketball, including the recent Forever Crazy About The Cats: An Improbable Journey of a Kentucky Sportswriter Overcoming Adversity. Today, he is a retired college professor who taught at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Middlesboro and the editor and founder of KySportsStyle.com Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @KySportsStyle or reach him via email at [email protected].

“I love it. It’s been great. I mean it,” he said at a recent press conference. There are great people in this city and I think you know that when you see how they’ve welcomed me. It’s been a great place for my wife and my kids and the culture here is just different. It’s special. Really.

“I’ve never been on a team where a head coach (Mark Stoops) has been on the job for 12 years, and then you look at the personnel, right? This has to be one of the longest tenured teams in America, and that speaks to what the coach has done. They know exactly what they want, how it has to be done and what the standard is, and that’s why the players here are excited every day. He understands we have to prepare them, but that doesn’t mean we have to burn them out and exhaust them on day one.

“I think the mix of all those things – how great the people in the city are, the culture the coach has here and the understanding that nothing crosses his desk that surprises him, and that with all his experience – made this an incredible combination for me and my family.”

Because Hamdan is also the quarterback coach in addition to his duties as offensive coordinator, he works very closely with the signal callers, especially junior Brock Vandagriff, a graduate of the University of Georgia. In high school, Vandagriff was rated as a five-star talent by three of the four major recruiting services.

Hamdan is impressed by Vandagriff’s toughness and intelligence.

“He’s a total professional,” Hamdan said of Vandagriff. “I’ve said that many times. This is a big league football. We finish practice at 6:30, he wants to be in the facility. He’s always watching the opponents’ games. We know that at this position, it’s about locking yourself in that room, so to speak. He’s got to take the side of the naysayers and just work and get better every day, and I think he’s a guy that understands that.”

Overcoming childhood adversities

As mentioned above, Hamdan was born in Kuwait. He was only four years old when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, sparking the Gulf War. While his family was vacationing in the United States, where his father, a nuclear engineer, had previously studied at the University of Illinois, their house in Kuwait was, as it turned out, destroyed by the war.

So the Hamdan family, which included his older brother, who eventually played as a starting quarterback in college at Indiana and later in the NFL, moved to San Diego and later to the Washington, DC area, where his father worked for the U.S. government.

“As a kid, you don’t really know. I look back and think about what my dad and mom went through,” Bush told the Seattle Times in 2016 while working as an assistant at the University of Washington. “As you get older, you really start to appreciate the values ​​that your parents instill in you. And I start to think about what I went through (in football), and it doesn’t even come close to what they had to go through to keep us going. …

“We were probably one of the last flights out of Kuwait. I’m not trying to make it more dramatic than necessary, and I understand I was very young – but we were very lucky. Very lucky.”

At his launch press conference in the UK a few months ago, Hamdan thanked his parents for their encouragement and support during this difficult time.

“My father, probably in his 30s and 40s, was just trying to get us to this country and provide us with a safe environment,” he recalls. “And I think about how I got into this (coaching) profession at 22 and just focused on that. So I’m incredibly lucky to have a father like that and what he did for us. I don’t take it lightly to make him proud.”

Hamdan and his wife Brita have three children: Sedona, Archer and Sahar.