After getting cut by the Tampa Bay Bucs in 2011, Nick Reveiz figured he was done with football. He pondered his options. Maybe he’d go into the ministry. He even got his license and started selling insurance.
Ultimately, like a siren song, football called him back, as a coach. Now the first-year defensive coordinator at Western Carolina, with 14 seasons in the coaching profession under his belt, Reveiz can’t imagine doing much else. To him, it’s not just a job. It’s a calling.
“Now that I’m knee-deep in it, this is what I really feel God called me to do,” Reveiz said during a telephone interview with I-81 Sports on Monday. “I want to continue to do it as long as He calls me to it and gives me the opportunity.”
Tennessee Vols fans probably recognize the name of Reveiz. His father, Fuad Reveiz, kicked for Tennessee and then for the NFL and spent several years on the Spanish language broadcast team for the Vols. Nick grew up in Knoxville, played his high school ball at Farragut, and walked on at Tennessee under Phillip Fulmer. He emerged as a starter at middle linebacker in 2009, Lane Kiffin’s lone season leading the program, but tore his ACL in the fourth game. Reveiz returned in 2010, now with Derek Dooley as head coach of the Vols, to start every game, make 108 tackles, and serve as team captain. He also met his future wife, a cheerleader at Tennessee State.
But when pro football didn’t work out, Reveiz was left feeling lost. And yes, he actually did sell insurance for about six months. Then one day, the person who hired Reveiz for his insurance job invited him to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquet, where longtime NFL coach Dan Reeves was scheduled to speak.
“I heard Dan Reeves talk about the impact players had on him and, by God’s grace, the impact he had on players. My wife looks at me and says, ‘You’ve got to try that out.’ ” Reveiz recalled. “We prayed about it for like a month before I committed to it.”
To get started, Reveiz reached out to every coach he still had contact with: Fulmer, John Chavis, and Justin Wilcox, just to name a few. Reveiz also had an uncle who played for Ken Sparks at Carson-Newman. Connections were made and Reveiz had the chance to go be a graduate assistant at Carson-Newman.
It was the only coaching job offer that he got.
“Even when I first got into coaching, I thought that was the last thing I wanted to do,” Reveiz said. “Then I had breakfast with coach Fulmer at Sammy’s in West Knoxville. He talked about what it meant to be a coach, on and off the field. Eddie Courtney at Farragut, he’s another person I got to have lunch with. He reminded me that coaching is a lot more than X’s and O’s. It’s the heart content, the heart impact that goes beyond the scoreboard.
Reveiz spent four seasons at Carson-Newman, which were also the last of Sparks’ storied tenure. Sparks died just a few months later, in March of 2017, after battling prostate cancer for several years.
Of all the names that Reveiz played for, a group that includes legendary defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, the inventor of the Cover 2 scheme, none had more influence on the former Vol linebacker than Sparks: as a coach, or a man.
“He was the first one that showed me what it looked like to be a coach,” Reveiz said of Sparks. “What it looked like to be a believer, to be a father, to be a husband—I saw him do all these things so well, and he did it among us. He didn’t hide anything about his personal life or his public life from us. He invited me in. He impacted me eternally.
“That’s the person I really credit the most,” Reveiz added. “He literally discipled me, and for that, I’m forever grateful. There are still days I wish I could call Coach Sparks and ask, ‘What do you do in certain situations when you’re leading people, in every situation in life?’ ”
Reveiz actually spent two of his four seasons at Carson-Newman coaching on the offensive side of the ball, leading the running backs. He remained, and remains, a defensive guy at heart. “During that whole time, I was drawing things up, trying to stop the offense,” Reveiz recalled.
The opportunity to lead a defense emerged heading into the 2018 season, the second for Reveiz at Albany State, a Division II school in Georgia. He spent four years in that role, and by his final campaign there in 2021, Albany State led all of D-II in both yards allowed and scoring defense.
In building the X’s and O’s of his own defensive plan, Reveiz was heavily influenced by the defenses he played in under Chavis, Monte Kiffin, and Wilcox. He took aspects that he liked from each scheme to build his own.
“I’ll run into coach Chavis recruiting and I’ll remind him, ‘Hey, you really influenced me a lot,’ Not only on the field, but personally,” Reveiz said. “Coach Chavis was a great man to play for. A lot of the things he did, on the field and off, really impacted me. Coach Kiffin, when I was playing, he was 71 years old but he still had so much energy. … Coach Wilcox, I’ve tried to stay in touch with him. I thought I was going to go be a GA for him when he was at Cal, but it never worked out. The Lord had a plan through that.”
Reveiz made the jump to Division I in 2022, working as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach at VMI before becoming coordinator at Charleston Southern, a position he held for three seasons. That CSU unit peaked in 2025, holding opponents to 17 or fewer points in five games, ranking eighth among all FCS defenses in fourth down conversion rate, and forcing 24 fumbles. Reveiz also coached six all-conference honorees last year, including Big South/Ohio Valley Conference Freshman of the Year Anthony Paulk, a defensive back.
During his weekly press conference on Monday, ETSU coach Will Healy praised Reveiz and the defense he’s running at Western: “I think that he’s done a tremendous job of creating an opportunistic defense. I think their personnel is better on the deep side this year. They do a lot of different things. They make your life miserable with having a team against all these different looks. I think they play hard, they’re downhill, they’ve created turnovers, a lot of negative yardage plays.”
Both Healy and Reveiz described the Catamounts’ defensive scheme with the same word.
“The word you hear, the buzzword among defensive coordinators, is ‘multiple,’ ” Reveiz said. “We try to be as multiple as possible, popping in and out of different fronts and coverages, trying to be as complex as we can be. At the same time, we’re trying to make sure our players play fast. It’s the first year in this scheme, this defense, so you’re finding that line of what is too much. Through four weeks, you learn, ‘OK, we can run this, but we can’t run that.’ That’s been a constant shaving process, just figuring out what we’re good at. We’re trying to be multiple, we’re trying to be aggressive, we’re trying to attack.”
Coaching at Western Carolina puts Reveiz and his family closer to home in Knoxville than they’ve been in about a decade. Cullowhee, N.C., is about two hours and 20 minutes away from Knoxville. And Saturday’s game at East Tennessee State (3:30 PM, ESPN+) is as close to Knoxville as Reveiz has been since his days at Carson-Newman.
“My dad’s gonna come up. It’s not too far a drive from Knoxville. My wife and four kids are driving up. We get to sleep in our own bed here, not too far of a drive from Cullowhee, and have family at the game,” Reveiz said.
Reveiz’s father still holds three records at Tennessee: longest field goal (60 yards), single-season field goals (27, in 1982), and career field goals (71). Then he kicked in the NFL for 10 seasons.
That family legacy led to a hilarious, and quite brief, kicking career for Nick Reveiz. On his first day of freshman practice at Farragut, the coach insisted Reveiz could kick and had him try, even though Nick had never done it in his life. “I just tried and did what Dad does,” Nick recalled. “I took three steps back. I kicked it. I hit the offensive lineman in the back. That was the end of my kicking career.”
Reveiz’s future as a football coach appears to have, pun intended, more legs. That includes becoming a head coach one day.
“That is something I want to do,” Reveiz said. “I really believe the reason that was put in my heart is when I saw how well coach Sparks did it. He was a former offensive coordinator who became a head coach, but he really tried to be involved in all three phases—offense, defense, special teams. He also wanted to connect with all the players that he coached. When I saw that, it put a fire in my heart. I was 23, 24 years old, and I thought, ‘If I get the opportunity someday…’ When that’ll be or if that’ll be, who knows? Only the Lord does.”