Former Limestone coach Jerricho Cotchery talks school shutting down, what’s next
He thought the email was fake.
It had to be, right? There was no way Limestone University in Gaffney was in a dire financial crisis and two weeks away from shutting down and Jerricho Cotchery, the school’s football coach and arguably its most recognizable employee, had no idea.
But there he was on April 16, having just finished up a meeting with a recruit, being told by his assistant coaches that Limestone had sent a campus-wide email around 11:30 a.m. warning students and staff it was facing a “critical turning point.”
“I was as surprised as everyone else was,” said Cotchery, a former star wide receiver at NC State who played 12 years in the NFL and two with the Carolina Panthers.
Cotchery made a few calls and confirmed the worst. Yes, the email was real. Yes, Limestone was in major financial trouble and needed $6 million to stay afloat.
And yes, his Division II football program was on the chopping block.
“I didn’t have any inkling of it,” Cotchery said. “It was out of nowhere for us all.”
It’s been just over a month since that email hit Cotchery’s inbox and kicked off a whirlwind ending to the spring semester for Limestone, a private Christian college.
Six days after its initial announcement, Limestone’s board of trustees met on April 22 and said it had identified a “possible funding source” to save the school. Nearly 200 donors stepped up and committed a combined $2.143 million to help the cause.
It was too late. One week after Limestone’s board of trustees chair said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the school’s future, the board voted on April 29 to shut down the university after the spring 2025 semester ended.
The school’s last event was its May 3 graduation ceremony.
None of that has changed Cotchery’s message — the one he delivered in an emotional team meeting hours after the news, stood by as he scrambled to help his players and staff find new schools and kept coming back to in a recent interview.
“Even with the ending, I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he told The State.
A Limestone legacy
A lot of that has to do with the on-field product Cotchery and his program are leaving behind. Limestone, which competes in the Division II South Atlantic Conference, started playing football 11 years ago.
From 2014-21, the program was 17-59 (.223) with zero winning seasons.
The past three years have been a different story.
From 2022-24, the Saints went 24-11 (.685) and 21-5 in conference play. They won eight games three years in a row and made two NCAA Division II playoff appearances. They had 29 all-conference selections, 13 all-region selections and 12 D2 All-Americans. They had their first-ever draft pick, a wide receiver to the UFL.
“It was special, man,” Cotchery said. “The guys worked extremely hard.”
Cotchery, 42, had his hands all over that run, though he’d be the first one to credit former coach Mike Furrey for setting the standard that led to all of those wins.
Cotchery joined Limestone’s staff in 2022 as Furrey’s wide receivers coach, which made sense given his pedigree. Cotchery had two 1,000-yard receiving seasons at N.C. State in the early 2000s, then was a standout NFL wide receiver who played most of his career with the New York Jets and Pittsburgh Steelers. He finished his career with the Panthers in 2014 and 2015 as one of Cam Newton’s primary targets.
Cotchery’s final game as a player was the 2015 Super Bowl, in which his juggling “catch or no catch” play in the first quarter was controversially ruled to be incomplete against Denver. Longtime Panthers fans still like to say, “Cotchery caught it” whenever Super Bowl 50 is brought up, and point to that nullified 25-yard gain as a reason why Denver’s strip-sack-fumble recovery-for-a-touchdown never should have happened just two plays later.
Cotchery was promoted to head coach at Limestone ahead of the 2024 season after Furrey left to work as Shane Beamer’s wide receivers coach at the University of South Carolina.
Cotchery’s first and only team at Limestone went 8-3 overall and 6-2 in conference play last fall.
“We were really looking forward to this year because we felt like we had put everything in place to go and make a real run at a national title,” he said.
Finding new homes
Football statistics are one thing. $30 million in debt is another.
That’s the situation Limestone University was facing last month, according to various reports, due to a host of issues: Declining enrollment, mounting expenses, endowment issues, federal lawsuits surrounding misconduct by a former employee.
At a time when small, private colleges across the country have struggled to make ends meet — similar schools in North Carolina and Wisconsin have also closed this year — Limestone more or less needed $6 million at the drop of a hat to stay open.
Past that, its future was understandably murky.
In other words: Limestone’s football team could’ve been undefeated national champions last season and it wouldn’t have mattered. Their school, by all accounts, would’ve shut down anyway. Cotchery has encouraged players and staff to leave with their heads held high. Plus, they ended on a three-game winning streak.
“So we won our last ever game,” Cotchery said, laughing.
And after he heard the news on April 16, he had one final game plan.
Cotchery called a team meeting. He apologized to his players for not being more in the loop (though he wasn’t the only university employee who was blindsided). That night, he posted a farewell message pumping up Limestone’s “incredible” program.
“If you need a reference on any of them feel free to reach out,” he wrote.
One day after Limestone’s announcement, the football team also promoted a publicly accessible spreadsheet that contained names, heights, weights, hometowns, eligibility statuses, Hudl film links, social media accounts and cell phone numbers for every player on the roster — all 131 of them, sorted by position group.
Cotchery credited former Limestone staffers Lane Knost, Preston Rice and Reagan Davenport for finalizing that document roughly 24 hours after Limestone’s announcement, giving other teams an easy way to contact players.
“It was a lot of work, but after seeing the results, it definitely was worth it,” he said.
What’s next for Jerricho Cotchery?
Cotchery said the vast majority of his roster got “a ton of interest” from other schools and most players, especially those high on the depth chart, have already committed to new schools. Turns out, 24 wins in three years turned some heads.
“All of those institutions are getting wonderful young men,” Cotchery said.
Given how popular the NCAA transfer portal is nowadays, and Limestone football’s pedigree, finding new homes for players was rigorous but somewhat manageable.
Finding new jobs for assistant coaches and other people working on Cotchery’s staff was harder, considering the wheels of college football’s coaching cycle — usually at its height in December and January — “stopped spinning a while ago,” Cotchery joked.
A month later, though, most of them have found new opportunities as well.
“That part of it has eased a lot of the pain — just seeing our guys get opportunities and knowing that they’ll be taken care of for the most part come fall,” Cotchery said.
What about him? Cotchery said he was so consumed with helping his players and staff he only recently sat down and really thought about his own career.
Family geography will play a role in what jobs he considers — Cotchery and his wife, Mercedes, have five children, including a daughter who just graduated high school and will swim at Queens University in Charlotte this fall. The Cotchery family lives in Charlotte, as Cotchery routinely had commuted the 55 miles down Interstate 85 to Limestone each day for work.
But he’s not picky. Cotchery, who has also worked as an assistant coach in the NFL, said he’s open to professional and college coaching opportunities. He loves the profession and doesn’t plan on leaving it, even with his unceremonious ending at Limestone in April.
“I had an opportunity to be around great young men who worked hard and gave everything they had for me, and a staff that did the same,” Cotchery said. “So I wouldn’t change a thing. Wouldn’t change a thing.”
This story was originally published May 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
