How Delaware Football Shined in its Leap From FCS to FBS Under Head Coach Ryan Carty
The Fightin' Blue Hens went bowling in their first season in the Football Subdivision in 2025-26.
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This season, the North Dakota State Bison will play in the Mountain West Conference. A wild sentence to both write and, for longtime college football fans reading this, to read, too. Indeed, the longtime FCS juggernauts, winners of 10 FCS titles since 2011, are the latest storied program to move up from the FCS ranks into the FBS. It’s a new challenge for the Bison, and it will be interesting to see how head football coach Tim Polasek guides his team into uncharted waters next season at the next level. However, you may have missed another storied FCS program, the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens, winners of six titles at the FCS & Division-II level, made this same leap to FBS last season. In his fourth season as the head football coach at his alma mater, Ryan Carty led the Fightin’ Blue Hens to seven wins and a 68 Ventures Bowl victory over Louisiana.
The Delaware football program has been mighty successful for a long time now. Carty is 33-17 in his four seasons, which includes two nine-win seasons back-to-back in 2023 and 2024. Temple head football coach K.C. Keeler was a longtime coach and former player at Delaware and won the 2003 FCS national championship over then-undefeated Colgate, 40-0, at Finley Stadium in Chattanooga. Overall, Keeler went 86-52 as the head man of the Fightin’ Blue Hens. Before Keeler, legendary Delaware coach Tubby Raymond won 300 games and three national championships. In between Keeler and Carty, the Fightin’ Blue Hens wandered the wilderness a bit, going 40-46 across those nine seasons.
Under Carty, Delaware football is rolling again. It’s easy to forget that even though Keeler went 15-1 and won a national championship in 2003, where Carty was the backup quarterback, he only won nine or more games one other time in his first five seasons in Newark. Carty has averaged eight wins a season over his first four. Keeler averaged eight wins a season over his first five seasons as well. The Keeler-Carty Connection has proven time and time again to be a consistent winner at Delaware.
One of the major reasons for the Fightin’ Blue Hens’ success in their first season in FBS stemmed from their lethal passing attack. Delaware passed for 293 yards per game, good for sixth in all of FBS. To put that into context, Josh Heupel’s electric passing attack with Joey Aguilar in 2025 was one spot ahead of Carty’s Blue Hens. There were only seven teams in the FBS that attempted more than 40 passes per game, and the Fightin’ Blue Hens were one of them.
How have the Fightin’ Blue Hens been such a thorn in the side for opposing defenses through the air?
“It’s been something we’ve always been able to do successfully,” Carty told me in an interview on Thursday afternoon. “I think we’ve always been one of the better passing teams in the country. I think it’s just a product of what the scheme looks like and the variety of it. It’s also how we recruit the right people.”
It also has to do with the quarterback play under Carty, a former quarterback himself. You’re not going to have a prolific passing attack without a prolific passing quarterback.
Carty noted that one of the perhaps more overlooked aspects of Delaware’s success through the air is the amount of time his quarterbacks who play for him have spent in his system. “It’s been a long time since I played somebody who was a true freshman or a true transfer right away. It matters in our system. It does. You’re going to be better when you’ve been in it for a little bit because there’s so much nuance and there’s so much install. We do drop back [to] pass more than most teams in the country. It’s not just an RPO operation or a quick-game operation. It’s mainly drop-back pass, and we run Four Verticals a lot. We do things some other teams don’t do as much.”
That prolific offense was on full display early in the 2025-26 season for Delaware when the Fightin’ Blue Hens stunned the Connecticut Huskies and Jim Mora at home in their third game as an FBS program. Led by quarterback Nick Minicucci, in his third season at Delaware under Carty, threw all over the Huskies for an efficient final line of 23-for-34, 265 yards, one touchdown, and no interceptions. Best of all, Minicucci won the game for the Fightin’ Blue Hens in overtime with a quarterback scamper that went for six in walk-off fashion.
Minicucci finished sixth in FBS in total passing yards last season and threw for 250-plus yards in 10 of Delaware’s thirteen ball games. The Fightin’ Blue Hens played in six games decided by one score or less and went 4-2. So Carty and his Fightin’ Blue Hens were just a couple of plays away from winning nine-plus games for three consecutive seasons.
Carty is used to winning. He won as a player for Keeler at Delaware in the early 2000s. He won as a coach under Keeler at Sam Houston State. He’s won since returning to Delaware as the Fightin’ Blue Hens head football coach. It stands to reason he would like to win a lot more in Newark.
It was a huge achievement for the program to go bowling in its first season in the FBS. Now, how does Carty get his guys ready to build off that success in Year 2? Carty told me, “What I said after the season, I mean, and I would say it again right now. Not one person came to this place, the University of Delaware, to go 6-6. I understand that makes us bowl-eligible, and I understand that’s a huge feat. Don’t get me wrong, how excited we were to be in a bowl was unbelievable. The invitation that we got and the experience that we had was amazing. The fact that we got a chance to go down there and compete and win it was outstanding and so good for our program, so great for our players, our guys deserved it. This department and this university and this community deserved it because of the support that we’ve had in this transition.”
Carty has been a part of championship-winning teams both as a coach at Sam Houston State and as a player at Delaware. He knows what it takes to win at the highest level wants to win at the highest level in Newark. Carty continued, “But it’s not what I got into coaching for. It’s not what, you know, I took the head-coaching job at the University of Delaware for was not to be .500. And so, you know, I don’t think there’s a person in our building that thinks that way, and so that means we have to work at it because winning is really hard and winning takes what it takes. There’s no choosing how hard you want to work on a day. There’s choosing if you want to win on Saturdays in the fall or Wednesdays or Thursdays, or Tuesdays or whenever we’re playing. That’s what you’re choosing. And so each day as we lead up to this that’s the message is, ‘Are we doing enough today to beat, you know, the teams that we’re are going to play on Saturdays in September, and Wednesdays in October and then in Championship Month in November?’ because, you know, that’s what we need right now is to kind of level up and continue to grow and continue to develop and every part of our offense and defense and special teams and every phase we need to get better. And so, we need to get better as coaches, we need to get better as players, we need to get better as support staff, there’s nobody that’s ever resting in Newark, Delaware.”
Carty made the transition from FCS to FBS look a whole lot easier than it is last season at Delaware. He won more games than he lost in his first season as an FBS head football coach. The same was true in each of the three seasons before when he was an FCS head football coach.
James Madison first played FBS football in 2023, and they made the College Football Playoff two seasons later. Could Carty guide the Fightin’ Blue Hens to similar heights in the next couple of seasons in Newark? Only time will tell, but history suggests it wouldn’t be wise to bet against the young, rising coaching star in the C-USA. Similar to what former Dukes head coach Curt Cignetti told folks when he first arrived in Bloomington, he wins. Google him.