Chase Murdock is an assistant coach for Sacred Heart football in Fairfield, Connecticut, and enters his first season on the staff in 2026 working primarily with the outside linebackers. He brings nine years of coaching experience along with a strong collegiate playing background from Toledo. Murdock graduated from Toledo in 2016 with a degree in interdisciplinary studies and was a four-year inside linebacker for the Rockets, appearing in 49 of 52 games and playing in three bowl games. As a player, Murdock earned First And Monday Sophomore All-America Team honors in 2013 and was named Hustle Belt All-MAC Second Team that same season. He ranked second in the Mid-American Conference with 9.9 tackles per game and 109 total tackles in 2013. In 2015, he led Toledo in tackles while helping anchor a defense that ranked fifth nationally against the run. That playing experience carried into a coaching career that has included work at multiple levels of college football and in the high school ranks. Before arriving at Sacred Heart, Murdock spent the fall of 2025 at Bucknell as special teams coordinator and linebackers coach. There, he helped elevate the special teams units from 111th nationally to 13th, while the team also finished 27th in kickoff return defense, fourth in blocked punts, and 11th in punt returns.
Prior to Bucknell, he spent several years at Utah, where he served as a defensive graduate assistant and defensive administrative assistant before moving into an assistant coach role. His responsibilities included teaching the defensive playbook to incoming linebackers, preparing game plan installs in Visio, managing defensive play call sheets, handling offensive personnel identification on game day, and leading scout offense meetings. During that stretch, he worked directly with four future NFL draft picks as well as multiple All-Americans and a Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year. Earlier in his career, Murdock worked at North Park from 2019 to 2021 as linebackers coach and special teams and strength and conditioning coordinator before being promoted to defensive coordinator and linebackers coach. There, he developed and implemented a defensive system built around 4-2-5 and 3-4 concepts. Before North Park, he coached linebackers at St. Thomas from 2018 to 2019 and helped develop two first-team all-conference linebackers while the team finished with the No. 1-ranked defense in the nation. His earlier high school coaching stops included St. Viator High School, where he served as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach and helped the team reach the Illinois state playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time in more than a decade, and William Fremd High School, where he also served as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach and helped guide the program to the state playoffs.
