Tom Craft
American football player and coach
Thomas Jay Craft (born November 12, 1953) is an American football coach and former quarterback, who served as the head coach of the Riverside City Tigers from August 2010 until his retirement in December 2024. He played college football at Monterey Peninsula and San Diego State. He then served as the head football coach Palomar from 1983 to 1993 and at San Diego State from 2002 to 2005.
Craft is the father of former UCLA quarterback Kevin Craft.
Career
Craft graduated from Pacific Grove High School, in Pacific Grove, California, and thereafter played quarterback at San Diego State University.
After serving as an assistant coach at Palomar College from 1977 to 1982 and with the school openly questioning its commitment to football, he took over head coaching duties in 1983. After a pair of 4–6 seasons, the Comets' fortunes began to improve. By the time Craft left the San Marcos school for the Aztec coordinator's job in 1994, Palomar was coming off a three-year stretch of 31–2, had an offense ranked among the nation's top five for five consecutive years and was sporting two national championships. Craft returned to Palomar in 1997 and was the head coach from 1997-2001. At Palomar, Craft coached seven All-American quarterbacks: Duffy Daughtery, Scott Barrick, Brett Salisbury, Andy Loveland, Tom Luginbill, Greg Cicero, and Andy Goodenough.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Craft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.