College football has turned into a year-round sport, with the transfer portal, recruiting and spring camp filling the calendar after the four-month regular season and postseason.
The expanded calendar means today’s college coaches don’t get a lot of time off, so when they do, many choose relaxing vacations, like time on the beach.
What Utah defensive coordinator Colton Swan does in his free time is just a little bit different.
The former Weber State linebacker grew up in Jerome, Idaho, a small town in the Magic Valley 227 miles from Salt Lake City, and fell in love with rodeo while at his grandpa Bill’s large cattle ranch.
Quarterback Bill Swan led the 1939 Utes to a 4-1-1 record, including wins over rivals BYU and Utah State, and received All-Skyline Conference recognition before graduating from Utah with a law degree.
After college, Swan was drafted and served in the Navy during World War II.
“He came back from war and my grandma thought that they were going to live the good life, the country club life, being lawyers and all that good stuff,” Colton Swan said.
Instead, Bill bought a ranch in Idaho, starting the Swan family’s combined love for football and cowboying.
“It’s all been cowboying and football ever since,” the coach said.
Swan’s uncle also played football at Utah, and Swan’s dad, John, and his brother, Clayton, played at Utah State. Another of Swan’s brothers, Shay, played at Boise State.
“It’s football and cowboying. We just grew up that way and it’s kind of a way of life. You don’t ever, ever move away from it. It’s awesome,” Colton Swan said.
All of those early mornings on his grandpa’s ranch instilled a toughness in a young Swan. That toughness would be key in one of his specialties, steer wrestling.
Competing in a rodeo in Hailey, Idaho, in 2012, Swan — then coaching at Weber State — starts on the back of a horse, charging towards a steer. He leaps off of the moving horse and attempts to wrestle the steer, but is struck in the face by the steer’s horn.
Swan simply got up a second later, walked it off and signed up for more.
In a 2021 article in The Athletic about Swan’s rodeo experiences, Swan showed a video to Utah’s linebackers of him losing his front teeth while bulldogging.
“I actually think it teaches you a lot about toughness and endurance and just the way that life really is — the hard way — and not cowering down to stuff, adversity that can become difficult,” Swan said.
When everything goes right, though — as it has many times for Swan — the feeling of getting the timing right, jumping off the horse and grappling the steer to the ground, is on par with the highest highs of football.
Swan was so successful in high school rodeo, in fact, that he earned a partial scholarship to Weber State for it.
At the same time, Swan was also a walk-on for the Wildcat football team, where he turned into a leader on the defense as a linebacker. He was named to the All-Big Sky team as an honorable mention in 2002, leading the team in tackles with 89, and then earned All-Big Sky second-team honors as a senior in 2003, totaling 109 tackles, three forced fumbles and an interception.
Developing NFL talent
After his playing career, Swan immediately jumped into coaching at his alma mater, starting as a graduate assistant in 2004 and taking over the linebackers room in 2009.
2009 was also the year Swan got his first taste of being a defensive coordinator, serving as co-DC with Jake Cookus from until 2011 while former Ute head coach Ron McBride was head coach at Weber State.
In 2009, Swan’s and Cookus’ defense allowed 21.7 points per game (second-best in the nine-team Big Sky) and 375.8 yards per game (third in the Big Sky).
In 2010 and 2011, Weber State allowed 31.1 points (sixth in Big Sky) and 32.2 points (seventh in Big Sky) per game, though the total numbers are skewed a bit from the overmatched Wildcats playing FBS teams in both of those years.
After the 2011 season, Swan held a variety of roles in Ogden for the next several years, including coaching special teams and tight ends along with linebackers before Kyle Whittingham hired him in 2019 to coach Utah’s linebackers.
“Colton has done an outstanding job for many years at Weber State,” Whittingham said at the time. “He has a track record of success coaching several positions, most notably linebacker, as well as being an accomplished special teams coach.
“His demeanor and coaching style are a good fit for our program and we are excited to have him join our staff.”
Since joining the Utes, Swan’s track record has been sterling, elevating Utah’s linebacker unit to one of the most consistent positions on the defense.
He developed Devin Lloyd, who was drafted No. 27 in the 2022 NFL draft and has become of the league’s best linebackers. Meanwhile, Francis Bernard, Mohamoud Diabate, Nephi Sewell and Lander Barton all signed NFL free agent deals.
Putting in his own spin
After longtime Utah defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley was promoted to head coach following Whittingham’s departure, he tapped Swan to replace him as defensive coordinator.
This time, there’s no co-DC — it’s Swan’s show, and Scalley has made that very clear.
“I mean, it’s his defense. Again, I wanted that as a defense coordinator. Kyle gave that to me. Now we are who we are and we have a mutual understanding of what we want to do here, but there’s certain things that they’re going to do,” Scalley said.
“They’ll ask my opinion, but I want him to have the freedom to be him, to not feel like someone’s looking over his shoulder, second guessing what he’s doing. I’m there to support him.”
As he takes control of a defense that had its foundation laid by Whittingham and strengthened by Scalley, Swan doesn’t want to drastically overhaul a scheme that has been working for the Utes.
In the decade that Scalley called the defense, Utah ranked in the top 25 nationally in fewest points allowed five times, including 2025, and have developed a reputation for being extremely tough to play against.
“This defense has been in place for a long time here at the University of Utah and has been very good, so you got to keep that in the back of your mind as a coordinator, is if it’s working and it’s providing very good production and it’s not broken, then don’t try to fix something that’s not broken,” Swan said.
That said, each defensive coordinator has his own way of doing things, whether that’s coverages or run fits, and Swan will certainly put his own stamp on Utah’s traditional defense.
“As a coordinator, you got to be smart with that, but at the same time, you want to have your own spin on things and really looking for ways to improve things where things maybe broke down in the past,” Swan said.
One area where things broke down in the past was Utah’s run fits late last season. Kansas State ran wild against the Utes to the tune of 472 rushing yards, while Kansas rushed for 290 (both games were Utah wins).
That stemmed from poor play from Utah’s defensive tackles and bad tackling from the safeties.
“I would say the thing that both (defensive ends coach Inoke Breckterfield) and (defensive tackles coach Luther Elliss) have been doing is making sure that what happened last year with the run fits and all that stuff, we are working run fits every single day,” Scalley said.
“They’re spending extra time in the film room, becoming much more football intelligent, situational football. I love the toughness, too.”
Passing down the rodeo legacy
While diametrically opposite in some ways — rodeo, for the most part, is an individual sport, while football requires 11 teammates on the field to work together — Swan’s two sports have a lot in common.
Both feature a burst of action — in football, the clashing of the offensive and defensive lines as the ball is snapped; in rodeo, the bucking bronco or bull as it bursts out of the chute.
The duration of each “play” is similar, too, typically over in a matter of exhilarating seconds. In rodeo, the goal of each rider is to stay on the bronco or bull for eight seconds.
Whether you’re charging toward a running back with a head of steam as a linebacker or trying to stay on a horse that’s trying to get you off of it with all of its might, each sport requires the participants to be tough and to do something that the average person wouldn’t sign up for.
Even though Swan turned his focus to football starting as a player at Weber State before rising up the coaching ranks, he never lost his passion for rodeoing. He has continued to participate in rodeo during the offseasons at Utah, and though steer wrestling is now mostly off the table for the 45-year-old, he still loves team roping — lassoing a steer with a partner.
Swan certainly doesn’t need the money — Utah takes great care of him on that front — he’s just doing it for the love of the game.
“That’s my passion right there,” Swan said.
Just like the passion for rodeo was passed down to him by his father and grandfather, Swan is passing it down to his kids.
While talking about his rodeo experiences — he said he went back to Idaho four times this July — Swan pulled out his phone to show a photo of his five-year-old daughter riding a sheep.
“She gets what we call ‘scorpioned.’ She’s getting bent over backwards right there, and that’s me in the background kind of yelling at her — or encouraging her,” Swan said.
“That’s kind of how I got into it, doing stuff like that. Just kind of grew up in that world.”
Though rodeos are a fun — and important — hobby for Swan, the most important thing for him is making sure that Utah continues to have a defense that is among the best in the country.
He’s taken a hands-on approach at times, volunteering to be lightly tackled by his defense with no pads on while coaching them on proper tackling form. With a mat to cradle his fall, it was nothing like like the hits he’s taken in his rodeo career, but it showed his players some of the toughness he’s trying to instill in them.
If there’s one thing that fans can count on, it’s that Utah’s defense will be tough — just like Swan.
