A former Warren Central football player and long-time football coach, Jay Hopson, is one of four finalists for the head coach position at Alcorn State University.

If hired, Hopson would be the first white head coach in the history of the historically black university’s football teams that date to 1921.

The other three names announced Friday by the university as candidates to replace Melvin Spears, who was fired Feb. 24 after a 2-8 season, are Northern Colorado offensive coordinator Michael Armour, former Kentucky State coach Fred Farrier and Todd McDaniel, Alcorn’s coordinator of football operations and interim head coach.

Attempts to reach Hopson were unsuccessful.

Hopson, 43, was defensive coordinator at Memphis until last year. He also has been a defensive position coach at Michigan and Ole Miss, where he played college football, and was defensive coordinator at Southern Miss from 2005 to 2007. Hopson had coaching stops at Marshall and Delta State early in his career.

“He’s spent his whole career at Division I and that’s a major plus,” ASU president Dr. M. Christopher Brown said Friday afternoon. “He definitely brings the best in this class in experience and I think he’ll more than hold his own in this candidate pool.”

Brown hired Spears in an early big decision after taking over as Alcorn president in December 2010.

Brown said 48 applications were received for the coaching position and a 28-member screening committee reduced the number to nine. An eight-member search committee and Brown whittled the list to four finalists. Each will be interviewed Monday by Brown, members of the search committee, students and academic deans.

Vicksburg Mayor Paul Winfield, a former Ole Miss defensive back, was one of the eight members of the search committee and the only one to have played college football. Winfield went through a transition from Billy Brewer through interim coach Joe Lee Dunn to Tommy Tuberville in his senior year and he knows that the transition won’t be an easy one for coaching staff or player alike.

“I’m really enthused with selection of the finalists,” Winfield said. “I think they’re all young men with a lot of energy and I’m confident that the university will hire an excellent candidate. As someone who’s been through a coaching transition, it’s going to be an awesome task to evaluate talent and put the best players in the best position. It will be a welcome opportunity for the returning players to prove themselves. It’s going to be difficult for Alcorn, since the new staff will have a smaller window of opportunity coming in after spring practice. They’ll probably want to keep someone from the old staff to connect the dots.”

Brown will announce the decision at the annual Alcorn spring game a week from today.

“I think this coaching search has been more thoughtful than the last one, which was rushed,” Brown said. “There was an anxious feeling when (Earnest) Collins announced his departure (to Northern Colorado), and the process was very closed. This one has been very open. The candidates are going to have to prove to this campus that they are ready to be head football coach at Alcorn State.”

Alcorn is a member of the 10-team Southwestern Athletic Conference.

Armour has Alcorn ties. He was the Braves’ offensive coordinator in 2010 and, under Collins, the coach for quarterbacks and wide receivers in 2009.

Brown said Armour also was a candidate in the last coaching search.

“We put in a background check to find out why he wanted to come back here after leaving a year ago and all of the reports we got about his time on campus were very positive,” Brown said. “He had a definite interest in the head coaching position last time and he wanted to put his name in the hat with us again.”

Farrier’s last experience was a four-year stint as head coach at Kentucky State, where he was fired in 2009 after going 19-25 in four seasons at the school, which plays in the Division II Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

“That’s the one unique thing about him is that he has been a head coach,” Brown said. “He’s a very solid candidate, but we’re going to have to come to an understanding on what happened with his termination at Kentucky State. There’s a big difference between (NCAA) Division II versus Division I with the scholarship rules and APR (Academic Progress Rate). It’s very different in Division I.”

The lone in-house candidate, McDaniel, has run spring practice and brought in Alcorn’s recruiting class in February. The 34-year-old former Hazlehurst High School coach has been running the program since Spears was placed on administrative leave in December.

“He’s definitely demonstrated an ability,” Brown said. “I’ve talked to our players, and they have a lot of confidence in him. He’s definitely in it to win it.”

Alcorn State, located 80 miles south of Vicksburg in Lorman, is the largest historically black land-grant university in the country and is the second oldest state supported institution of higher learning in Mississippi.