Derek Dooley, experienced university football coach and athletic director, NFL assistant coach and originally but briefly a practicing attorney, is now campaigning for another position, the Republican nomination for U.S. senator from Georgia, hoping to sack Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff in November 2026.

Campaigns for the May 2026 party primaries have been well underway in the fall of 2025, and Dooley on Oct. 30 stopped by the Herald for an interview while on a campaign visit to Statesboro.

“I’ve always been big on leadership,” Dooley said. “Of course, I watched my father serve this state for 50-plus years with a level of hard work and class and respect for everybody. Of course I worked for Nick Saban for nine years, he was like a mentor of mine, in some ways like a second father, and learned so much about leadership.”

As you probably know, Dooley’s father was real-life-legend Georgia Bulldogs head coach Vince Dooley. But Derek Dooley, 57, has had a multifaceted football career of his own. After graduating from Clarke Central High School in Athens where, of course, he had played football, he also played for the University of Virginia, where he attained his bachelor’s degree, then returned to Athens for his law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law.

Dooley started his coaching career as a graduate-assistant coach at Georgia, then spent a couple years each as wide receivers coach at Southern Methodist University and tight ends coach at Louisiana State, where he was hired by that other real-life-legend head coach, Saban, and promoted to assistant head coach.

When Saban left to become an NFL head coach with the Miami Dolphins, Dooley went with him as the Dolphins’ tight ends coach. But Dooley became a head coach and athletic director in his own right with Louisiana Tech, 2007-2010, and then head coach for the University of Tennessee, 2010-2012, before assistant roles with the Dallas Cowboys, University of Missouri, New York Giants, and at last Alabama, where he served as an offensive analyst, working again with Saban before his retirement at the end of the 2023 season.

Kemp made opening

Asked if the run for Senate was his own initiative or suggested by someone like Gov. Brian Kemp, who has endorsed him, Dooley said he was already thinking about leadership in terms of government when Kemp’s decision not to run for the U.S. Senate seat gave him an opening.

“This really began for me after COVID and during the last administration where I just felt like things were happening in our country I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, and in some ways I felt like our country was being driven off a cliff,” Dooley said, “and I was very frustrated with a lot of leadership that’s going on in DC … and I wanted to be a part of the solution of getting our country back, in a way that there’s not all this division and in a way that people have a lot of trust and confidence that the ones going up to DC are there for the right reasons.”

The reporter wasn’t trying for more sports metaphors when the coach-turned-candidate volunteered the next quote.

“So, when the governor decided he wasn’t going to run, that’s when I engaged with him and his team, to get my arms around what this would entail, because I knew there was a risk to it. I’ve had a great career. But then I also wanted to prove to him I had what it took to get us over the finish line,” Dooley said.

The endorsement

About four months passed before Kemp publicly endorsed him, which Dooley called “a real big honor” but added that “the most important endorsement” would be from “the people of Georgia.”

Asking whether there is anything he wishes Kemp had done differently in two terms as governor or anything Trump would do differently now prompted a reply about the important question being “Is the ball moving forward?” but nothing critical of the governor or president.

“I think Governor Kemp showed what leadership looks like,” Dooley said. “I mean he stood there in the face of a lot of criticism, back in 2020 and then post-that, and I can’t tell you how many people as I’ve driven around and met them have said, ‘Governor Kemp saved my business, saved these jobs,’ and that’s leadership. It takes courage to do things in the face of a lot of difficulty.

Visited Trump

“And if you look at the things our president has run on to get our country back, whether it’s closing the border and keeping our communities safe, and peace through strength around the world, you know, get a lot of this woke stuff out of our world, all these things he ran on, I’m very supportive of,” Dooley said.

He had visited the White House and “had the honor to sit with President Trump in the Oval Office for an hour and a half,” about two months prior to the interview.

“I wanted to tell him about who I am and why I’m running, and I told him, I said, ‘Look, I’m not asking for your support. I just want an opportunity to earn it, and if you’ll give me a little time to show, you know, who I am and what I’m about, that I’ll be the guy you’ll be wanting to support because I think I’m the best candidate to beat Jon Ossoff,’” Dooley told us here.

Shut-down solution?

A question, based in current events, about whether the Republican hopeful foresees a solution to funding impasses that lead to government shutdowns led to interesting comments.

“What frustrates me is, you look at what the consequences are. You have military not getting paid, TSA, you’ve got these SNAP food stamps we’re losing, our farmers aren’t getting what they need,” Dooley said. “But here’s who hasn’t been affected, members of Congress. They still get paid, they can go home, spend time with their family, they can campaign, raise money. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

So, in follow up, was he suggesting that Congress shouldn’t be paid during a shutdown?

“Just think of it this way,” Dooley said. “If we had a rule that if you don’t pass the budget, then here’s what happens: Number one, it’s an automatic continuing resolution – in other words, the government stays open, you … Congress, don’t get paid, you can’t go home and you can’t debate any other issues until the job gets done. I’m curious that if those three things were in place, how long do you think they would go? I think they would get it done immediately.”

Healthcare subsidies?

Questions about the aspect of the shutdown having to do with Democrats’ insistence that the subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance premiums should be extended led to the candidate commenting that they are holding “the government hostage trying to get an extra $1.5 trillion dollars of spending that we don’t have.”

But his wife, Dr. Allison Dooley, is an OB/GYN physician in rural Rabun County, where they live, and her husband said the health care affordability issue is very important to him.

“The two most important people in health care are patients and doctors, and those are the two people that are suffering the most, and so we’ve got a lot of things we’ve got to do to get our costs down from a premium standpoint and then allow the doctors to go to work on what they do best, which is treat patients. …,” he said.

“One of the big priorities for me is figuring out this rural hospital issue,” Dooley said. “These hospitals are critical. We have to incentivize doctors to be in these rural areas, and we’ve got to make sure we find a way to where these hospitals can thrive, because the math doesn’t work.”