After five years in the United States Senate, Republican Tommy Tuberville wants Alabamians to know one thing above all else as he embarks on a gubernatorial bid: His time as a college football coach.
That his campaign website is framed by a banner reading “Coach Tuberville for Governor” speaks to how much the GOP is relying upon local sports heroes to compete for offices up and down the ballot as the pivotal midterm elections approach.
Athletes and coaches are playing in some of the highest-profile races of the 2026 cycle, with control over Congress up for grabs in a year expected to favor Democrats. In Georgia, former University of Tennessee head coach Derek Dooley is hoping to capitalize on his athletic experience – and his father’s football fame in Athens – to break through in a competitive Republican primary and unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff. Former NFL kicker Jay Feely is running for Congress in Arizona. And former MLB star Mark Teixeira is a front-runner for Rep. Chip Roy’s open House seat in Texas.
Tuberville, who once led the Auburn University football team, still goes by “coach” around the Capitol.
Athletes-turned-politicians are hardly a new concept: former Rep. Jack Kemp brought his football background to the halls of Congress and the 1996 GOP presidential ticket; Jesse Ventura leveraged his WWE fame to win Minnesota’s governorship; and two-time NBA champion Bill Bradley served New Jersey in the Senate for nearly two decades and mounted a bid for the White House.
But at a moment of deep distrust and disdain for elected officials in Washington, both parties are looking for outsider candidates and athletes are increasingly fitting that mold. And the trend of leveraging sports fame for political gain has been supercharged in the era of Trump, who once owned a pro football team. The president has routinely campaigned alongside athletes and coaches, including Notre Dame hero Lou Holtz — whom he later awarded a presidential medal of freedom — and professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan. He backed Tuberville in his Senate run and endorsed former University of Georgia star running back Herschel Walker in his unsuccessful Senate bid in 2022.
This trend has been especially prevalent in the southeast, where college football culture reigns. Tuberville’s successful entrance into politics has inspired a new crop of football figures to make their own bids as Republicans in the SEC corridor, and many of them have consulted directly with the coach-turned-legislator about how to replicate his win.
Tuberville used his gridiron fame in Alabama to rocket to the Senate in 2020 without any experience in the public eye off the football field.
“I spent a lot of time in public life going to a lot of alumni meetings, shaking hands, marketing our program, selling recruits on the road, dealing a lot with parents – and it’s no different than being in politics,” he said in an interview.
The party in Alabama isn’t making an active push to recruit former sports stars to run for office, but that hasn’t stopped other like-minded college athletes and sports figures from running their own plays for office.
“I think there’s a natural bend towards these figures,” said Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl, who worked on Tuberville’s 2020 Senate campaign. “They already have some name I.D., they have fundraising capabilities, but they’re seen as political outsiders and people who are going to represent the average, everyday American.”
Dooley, who is running for Senate with the backing of Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, approached Tuberville for some coaching prior to his run.
“The people that have called me, they ask: what is this? What do I have to do? And what does it entail? You know, first of all, being a senator, they all want to know first about campaigning. They want to know the ins and outs of it and what you have to do with raising money,” Tuberville said.
Dooley’s campaign did not make him available for an interview for this article.
Earlier this year, former University of Alabama star quarterback AJ McCarron launched his own bid for lieutenant governor – opening the possibility that, alongside Tuberville, the state could have been helmed by figures representing rival local football programs. He ended his bid on Wednesday, announcing he would no longer seek Montgomery’s second-in-command post “in order to accept a new career opportunity in football.”
Paul Finebaum, the lauded college football commentator, passed on a run for Tuberville’s seat earlier this month. He, too, spoke with the senator about the job as he was exploring a run, according to Tuberville. So did fellow Auburn Tigers basketball coach Bruce Pearl, who similarly opted against a bid after retiring from coaching.
But there will still be plenty of ‘Bama pride left: Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) husband Wesley Britt starred for the Crimson Tide before playing three seasons in the NFL, a fact she was sure to highlight in her ads during her 2022 run for Senate.
This same trend is playing out in other parts of the country too. Michelle Tafoya, the longtime NFL sideline reporter, is inching toward mounting a bid as a Republican in Minnesota’s open Senate race. Meanwhile, Democrats have yet to significantly capitalize on that same trend in the deep-red part of the country to challenge the Republicans’ regional hegemony.
That isn’t to say they don’t have a bench elsewhere: former Rep. Colin Allred leaned hard on his bio as an NFL player in his unsuccessful 2024 Senate bid in Texas (he’s now running for his old seat). Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy played a few years of professional basketball in Europe before returning to the Bay State to launch her political career. Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) is a former professional mixed martial arts fighter.
“Democrats tend to recruit a lot of ex-military or CIA people. They seem to think that’s more in their wheelhouse,” said long-time Democratic strategist James Carville.
“I think as people become increasingly turned off by ‘politics of Washington, ’you’re going to find these parties are going to be looking for different kinds of candidates,” he continued. “It might be a good idea to look for more opportunities like this.”
Nearly three-quarters of American adults are “frustrated” by the Democratic Party, an October Pew Research Center poll found. Sixty-four percent of Americans held similarly negative views of Republicans. That dissatisfaction makes the appeal of an outsider candidate who hasn’t touched politics before even stronger.
“I think people are ready for change,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and president of the progressive candidate recruitment organization Run for Something. “Often the best folks to shepherd that change are people who are new to the system, whether that’s new to politics or new to community engagement.”
“I wouldn’t say athletes is, like, a specific profile we’re looking for, because you have to be really in it to solve a problem,” she continued, adding that wants to see “more artists, I want more musicians, and I want more nurses and teachers to run for office. I want more people who really care and who maybe come with a fresh perspective.”
While outsider candidates may prove a balm to those fiery sentiments, the public is not entirely sold on athletes wading into a political space. A late 2024 poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC at the University of Chicago showed that 26 percent of adults approve of athletes speaking out about political issues. 36 percent of respondents said they explicitly disapprove of athletes specifically sharing their political opinions.
“When you’re famous in athletics, everybody likes you,” Carville said. “In politics, as soon as you open your mouth, half the people hate you.”
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