'It just felt right': Andrew Jackson football hires state champion coach Bobby Ramsay

Jackson made the biggest splash so far in Northeast Florida's high school football offseason Tuesday, introducing former state champion Bobby Ramsay to lead the Tigers' football program.

Five years after his turnaround at Mandarin, from 2-8 in 2017 to a first-ever Florida High School Athletic Association Class 8A championship in 2018, Ramsay is welcoming his return to the Gateway Conference ranks at Jackson.

He said that a conversation with Kevin Sullivan, former football coach and athletic director, was instrumental in his decision. For Ramsay, "it just felt right."

"The main two things were coming here with an opportunity to win and to be a part of the tradition that they have here," Ramsay said.

He takes the place of Darryl Bartley after Jackson's 3-8 season this fall, when the Tigers qualified for the Class 2M playoffs but lost in the first round to rival Raines.

Ramsay, who owns a 99-74 record on the field in 16 seasons as a head coach, has spent the past two seasons at independent Impact Christian while leading the school's transition to 11-man football. After a 1-8 debut, Impact improved to 7-4 this fall in Sunshine State Athletic Association play.

Previously, he coached at Yulee from 2008 to 2016, qualifying for the FHSAA Class 4A semifinal in 2012 with a team built around all-time national rushing champion Derrick Henry.

Ramsay then moved to Mandarin in May 2017, where he won Florida Dairy Farmers Coach of the Year honors in 2018 following the Mustangs' turnaround to the championship. He parted ways with the Mustangs after the 2021 season.

During his career, he's coached two Florida Dairy Farmers Mr. Football winners: Yulee's Henry, who went on to win the 2015 Heisman Trophy with national champion Alabama and owns two NFL rushing titles with the Tennessee Titans, and Mandarin's Carson Beck, who quarterbacked the 2018 champion team and now plays for the University of Georgia.

At Jackson, Ramsay said he plans to begin laying a foundation quickly for a program where no head coach has remained for more than three seasons since Sullivan left at the start of 2010.

"We've got to establish structure, organization and discipline, and teach the routine to the players, and make sure the older guys understand it better than anybody so they can be an extension of the coaching staff with the younger players," he said.

Principal Truitte Moreland said the school had received more than 30 applications for the opening.

Ramsay, who is scheduled to begin his Jackson tenure in January, appears to be the first head football coach hired for a Duval County public school to have a prior state championship on his resume since Parker's 2008 hiring of Jim Scible. Scible had won the Class 5A title in 1998 while at Kissimmee Osceola. Several others won state championships after their Gateway Conference hires, either at their original schools (Welton Coffey and Deran Wiley at Raines) or later at non-Gateway programs (like Corky Rogers at Bolles or Craig Howard at Nease).

Jackson has yet to learn its FHSAA district assignment ahead of pending reclassification for 2024. In 2022 and 2023, the association grouped the Tigers with Northside rivals Raines and Ribault, but that assignment will likely change after the FHSAA ended its Metro-Suburban football split earlier this month.

Jackson is the first Duval County public school this winter to fill its football coaching vacancy. Jobs at Sandalwood and Stanton remain open.

Ramsay told dozens of assembled Jackson players that he's confident that Tigers football can rise to the top in Duval County.

"That's why I came here, because I knew there were good football players and good people here, and there's a lot of things we could do together," he said.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Bobby Ramsay: Jackson High School football hires FHSAA champion coach