New Kansas State assistant Brian Lepak gave up promising law career to coach football
Brian Lepak had everything figured out.
Four years after he played in his final college football game as an offensive lineman with the Oklahoma Sooners, he was graduating from law school and ready to take a job as a young civil attorney in Oklahoma City. The position came with an impressive salary and a lucrative signing bonus, which he planned to spend on an engagement ring. Life was good. So was work. He couldn’t ask for anything more.
Or so he thought.
Something made him change course before he could argue his first case, buy a diamond ring or propose to his future wife. He was offered a different job in an entirely different field ... and he turned his world upside down in order to accept it.
Turns out, Lepak wasn’t quite done with football. His old offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, Kevin Wilson, was the head coach at Indiana in 2014 when he asked Lepak to join the Hoosiers as a graduate assistant. The job paid less than one third what he was expecting to earn as an attorney while requiring longer hours and more work. There was also no signing bonus.
But none of that prevented Lepak from taking the job. Even though he had been away from the gridiron for four years and he was on the verge of an exciting new career he blew up his plans. Why? He is more passionate about winning a game on the football field than winning a case in a courtroom.
“I really did enjoy law school and I really did consider pursuing that as my serious profession,” Lepak says now, “but I just kept coming back to coaching. When that opportunity came up, I knew I would regret not going after it. I like being involved in young men’s lives.”
Lepak jumped into coaching eight years ago and he hasn’t looked back since. He is now working at Kansas State as an assistant coach in charge of fullbacks and tight ends under Chris Klieman.
Players say his coaching style has been a breath of fresh air during spring practice and his fellow coaches think his passion for the game, combined with the mind of an attorney, have made him a welcome addition to the staff.
“Coach Lepak is one my favorite people that I have ever meet,” K-State tight end Sammy Wheeler said. “Me and him really work well together. There are exciting things ahead for the K-State tight end room because he is going to be elite. I think he is one of the best tight end coaches in the country.”
Lepak also helped more than some expected him to last season when he worked as an analyst for the Wildcats.
His peers can tell he would have made a good lawyer. It was an easy decision for Klieman to promote him when K-State had a coaching vacancy.
“He’s done a really, really good job, and the guys were excited when Brian was hired,” Klieman said. “Brian’s a great energy guy. Obviously, he’s very intelligent, knows the game of football really well, can explain the game of football well. He does a lot of things for our staff with data analytics. Brian was ready for this opportunity.”
So why did football keep calling to Lepak even when he was finishing up law school?
Good question. That’s not an easy thing for Lepak to explain, even all these years later. He comes from a family of attorneys. That’s what his mom does for a living. She had five children. Lepak is the youngest. Would you believe he is the only Lepak child who didn’t become a lawyer?
He was ready to follow in their footsteps, until he wasn’t. Shortly after he finished his playing career with the Sooners, he volunteered to coach offensive linemen at his old high school and fell in love with the gig. Nothing could match the high that came with teaching a teenager how to make a pancake block.
Teaching football turned out to be such a thrill that he began reaching out to college coaches about opportunities while he was in law school. Eventually, his former offensive coordinator offered him a job at Indiana and he took it. Timing be damned. His family supported the move, telling him he should have gone straight into coaching out of Oklahoma.
“Getting to work with players every single day is the most rewarding thing in the world,” Lepak said. “It’s such a privilege. I’m humbled that I get to do this.”
Lepak has no regrets.
Well, maybe one. For his wife’s sake, he wishes that first job at Indiana paid a little more.
“She was relocating to Oklahoma City and then I got the Indiana job,” Lepak said. “We kind of put that whole thing on ice. I didn’t get my signing bonus, so I didn’t have money for a ring. But we still got engaged the day before I went to Indiana. Then I had to do the whole proposal correctly a few months later. I will say this about my wife: she is a trooper. She puts up with some crap, it’s unbelievable. But we’ve been married since July of 2015. We’ve got two kids and another one on the way. Things couldn’t have worked out better.”