Kent Austin will be Cornell’s 26th football coach, the Athletics Department confirmed yesterday, replacing Jim Knowles ’87 as the Roger J. Weiss ’61 Head Coach of Football.

Austin was offensive coordinator at the University of Mississippi for the past two seasons, the same school at which Knowles was defensive coordinator before coming to Cornell.

Kent Austin will be Cornell's 26th football coach, the Athletics Department confirmed today, replacing Jim Knowles '87 as the Roger J. Weiss '61 Head Coach of Football.

Jim Knowles ’87 resigned his position as the Roger J. Weiss ’61 Head Coach of Cornell Football on Dec. 23, 2009, opting to re-join former superior David Cutcliffe as defensive coordinator at Duke. Athletics Director Andy Noel said that a national search to fill the position would begin immediately, and players said interviews began earlier this month.

The names and shade of red on the uniforms changed, but to a casual onlooker, the football team’s 28-10 loss to Harvard on Saturday might have seemed like a repeat of the prior week’s game. For the second game in a row, Cornell was physically outmatched on both sides of the ball and gave up more than 200 rushing yards while struggling to get its own ground game in sync. Crimson junior running back Gino Gordon, who led his team with 137 rushing yards and a touchdown, summed up the reason behind his team’s success on the ground.

“The holes were wide open, and I just ran through them,” he said.

Wacky Wednesday sounds more like a first grade teaching technique than a weekly ritual for the Cornell football team. It evokes images of coloring outside the lines, opposite day and goofy hats — not sweating, bleeding college football players hitting each other.

But there was certainly nothing goofier and more colorful than head coach Jim Knowles ’87 on Wednesday, Oct. 22.

To rumbling laughter, Knowles came jogging out of the locker room stooped over, head bent down, carrying one of defensive line coach Pete DeStefano’s trademarks — a pole with a fake football attached to the end, used in a myriad of defensive drills. Wacky Wed­nesday was in full force for the Red. Knowles even had a thick unibrow and mustache painted on his face.