Meet Charleston Southern Coach Gabe Giardina, College Football's Hidden Treasure

Charleston Southern head coach Gabe Giardina knows that plenty of people will hear of his name–and his unique identity–on Saturday Aug. 30 as his team takes the field against Vanderbilt at FirstBank Stadium, but he doesn’t appear to care all that much. 

Giardina is a movie buff that loves Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, is a “sucker” for Shawshank Redemption and will go to his grave thinking The Warner Bros. 2000 film Pay it Forward is “underrated.” The Charleston Southern head coach says he’d rather win a game 10-7 than a game that ends in a shootout. He shows up to interviews on the first day of fall camp in a Santa hat because he says it’s “like Christmas morning.”

He says he’s got a “coaching degree” from his time on the Buccaneers staff. Perhaps he got his masters as his team went 1-11 and gave him “by far” the “hardest” year he’s had professionally. 

But as he sits on the bus and his team pulls in alongside the Kensington Parking Garage on Vanderbilt’s campus, he won’t be worried about what anyone else notices about him. He’s worried about something else. 

“To me it’s about what they think about our team,” Giardina told Vandy on SI. “Obviously I want to glorify the Lord in everything I do, so I’m going to coach the snot out of these guys and do things creatively, but also with passion and effort that are rare. This is hard, but we love the hard.”

Pulling an upset as 36.5-point underdogs in the opener against Vanderbilt is as hard as it gets for a program like Giardina’s, but he’s approaching it by referencing Hackman’s measurement of the basket and lane in Hoosiers. He’s also preaching the same things that he’s always preached around his program. 

Perhaps reinventing the wheel and turning to a more pro-style offense this season in an effort to magnify the strengths of starting quarterback Zolten Osborne–as opposed to the option-oriented system Charleston Southern ran in 2024–was the right move for Giardina earlier in the offseason. Not now, though. 

Now everyone in his program needs consistency and knows the standard that they’re being held to. First, they have to “love each other.” Second, they have to play with “relentless effort.” Third, they have to play with "physical brutality.” Fourth, they’ve got to “love the team.” Giardina believes that if all those things are done correctly then the “scoreboard will take care of itself.” 

The third-year Charleston Southern head coach–who says he played for Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney as an Alabama walk-on wide receiver “100 years and 100 pounds ago”–also believes that all of his four principles should be interpreted in a biblical context. 

“Charleston Southern is a christian institution,” Giardina said,” But, look, I don’t care if I work here, Albany State–where I came from–or wherever, obviously I’m gonna be about promoting Christ and my personal relationship with Jesus. I like to coach with coaches that have that in common. I’m certainly not perfect. I’ve been married for 21 years, you can ask my wife and she would tell you ‘Gabe has plenty of issues,’ but I think we’re doing more than just football here.” 

Charleston Southern’s mission statement declares that it’s setting out to “promote academic excellence in a christian environment” and to integrate faith into learning, leading and serving. With that being said, Giardina feels as if only hoping to develop the players on his team only as football players would be a “disservice.” 

Giardina says he “still values” his 2024 team “a lot” despite their 1-11 season that was “no walk in the park” for him professionally. Perhaps those players didn’t deliver him the results that he hoped they would, but he says he still tries to call and text in order to see where things stand as his former players enter their professional lives. 

“You really look at things and go ‘what’s important here?’ And it’s those relationships,” Giardina said. “I want to keep in touch with former players and a lot of times I’m the one who has to initiate that. Guys  get busy, they’re trying to get their professional life going, they’re trying to figure out who they’re going to be, so I try to make phone calls or shoot texts and say ‘hey, how are you doing?’” 

In Giardina’s position, he doesn’t have all that much to gain from those phone calls. He doesn’t add a player to his roster because of them. He doesn’t make his team stronger by picking up the phone. He still does it, though. 

The calls he makes are a piece of what’s missing in college football’s current transactional landscape. In some ways, Giardina himself is a needed outlier within a sport that only thrives because of guys like him. He’s not changing anytime soon, either. He’ll continue to carry a mustard seed on the sideline to signify his faith and isn’t compromising his title as a football guy for anything. 

“I’m grateful, probably more than ever, to be the head coach here,” Giardina said. “I love being the head coach here. I love this group of people and I just feel blessed to have this job. I’d do it for less money, but don’t tell my boss that.”