Louis Matthew "Sonny" Lubick (born March 12, 1937) is a retired American football coach. He was the 15th head football coach at Colorado State University from 1993 to 2007. Lubick won or shared six Western Athletic Conference or Mountain West Conference titles, guided the program to nine bowl games and was named National Coach of the Year by Sports Illustrated in 1994.
Lubick's success has made him one of the most recognizable figures in the CSU and Fort Collins community, so much so that when Pat Stryker, head of the Bohemian Foundation, decided to donate $15.2 million toward extensive renovations of Hughes Stadium, she did so with the stipulation that the playing surface be named after Lubick. The stadium was then known as Sonny Lubick Field at Hughes Stadium until its closure after the 2016 season. As a result of the donation, CSU added 4,400 new seats and a video scoreboard in 2004, a new press box and suites in 2005, and a new FieldTurf surface in 2006. In 2016, the university announced that the playing surface at its new football stadium, which opened in 2017 as Colorado State Stadium and is now known as Canvas Stadium, would also be known as "Sonny Lubick Field", following an anonymous $20 million donation for that specific purpose.
Montana State
A native of Butte, Montana, and a graduate from Western Montana in 1960, Lubick coached football at Butte High School for eight years, the last two as head coach. His collegiate coaching career began in Bozeman as an assistant at Montana State in 1970 under head coach Tom Parac. Sonny Holland became the head coach in 1971 and led the program for seven seasons, which included a Big Sky Conference title and the Division II national title in 1976. Following Holland's retirement announcement a year later, Lubick was named head coach at MSU in
Lubick's first season in 1978 was wildly successful, as the Bobcats finished overall in the new Division I-AA and second place in the Big Sky at The following year, the Bobcats won the Big Sky with a league record, but were overall and not invited to the four-team playoffs.
The following two years saw decline. In 1980, Montana State plummeted from first to sixth place in the Big Sky, finishing at and in league play. The Bobcats fell to in 1981, and despite his popularity in Bozeman, Lubick was fired.
Assistant coach
Lubick moved on to the Division I-A ranks as an assistant coach. His first stop was at Colorado State as offensive coordinator for Leon Fuller from 1982 to 1984. At the time, the CSU program generally regarded as one of the worst programs in college football. The Rams had been to just one bowl game in their history, and were coming off a winless season in 1981. CSU wasn't overly successful in Lubick's three years as offensive coordinator, winning only 12 games total and only once getting to .500 in WAC play. Nonetheless, Lubick was a popular and likable figure in the Fort Collins and university community, something that would ultimately benefit him later in life.
In 1985, Lubick was hired by Jack Elway at Stanford University as an assistant coach. In 1989, Lubick joined Dennis Erickson's coaching staff at the University of Miami as the Hurricanes' defensive coordinator. While at Miami, Lubick molded a tough and physical Hurricane defense that featured the likes of Cortez Kennedy and Russell Maryland. Miami won two national championships in Lubick's four years there.
Colorado State
1993–1994
Lubick returned to Colorado State in 1993 as head coach. Little had changed at CSU since Lubick had left the program a decade earlier. There had been a brief period of success under Lubick's predecessor, Earle Bruce, that featured the school's first-ever bowl win (32–31 over Oregon in the 1990 Freedom Bowl), but CSU was still considered a graveyard for college football. Since 1960, the program had recorded just seven winning seasons, and in that same span, the program had three winless seasons. Considering it a challenge, Lubick accepted the head coaching position at Colorado State prior to the 1993 season. Faced with a culture of losing, Lubick assembled a staff of assistants that included eventual Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer and began aggressively recruiting and attempting to change CSU's image.
Considering the dreadful state of the program he'd inherited, Lubick made the Rams respectable fairly quickly. After starting 1–4 in his first season, the Rams won three consecutive games to finish the season 5–6, providing hope that the program was headed in the right direction.