Is Ohio State Buckeyes Head Coach Urban Meyer Already a Top 5 FBS Coach of All Time

With his third national championship, Ohio State Buckeyes Head Coach Urban Meyer has now joined elite company. Consider the people he’s in league with now: John McKay, Bud Wilkinson, and Tom Osborne.

Consider that in the process, he surpassed Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno.

And let’s also remember that, in addition to three national championships, he has two other undefeated seasons and in a 13-year career has a .845 winning percentage. He also joins only one other coach, Nick Saban, in college football history to win national championships at multiple schools.

And at age 50, he is far from finished.

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Meyer’s accomplishments are a sweep. He has proven he can turn around a program in serious trouble. That started his first year at Bowling Green, when he took a team that was 2-9 the year before to an 8-3 record and then a 9-3 record respectively.

He did the same thing at Utah, who was 5-6 the year before he got there but went 10-2 then 12-0 his two years there. His accomplishments at Florida were not as hard because all of the recruits were in place for him, but two national championships in six years is two national championships in six years.

Then came Ohio State. A third fix. The program was coming off of a 7-6 year and was entering a season in which they would be banned from postseason play. Meyer took them undefeated that year. The next year, they went 12-2.

And this year, his Buckeyes went 14-1 and captured the national championship. A program that appeared done when he took over immediately vaulted back into the national spotlight within a year. Two years later, they are on top of the college football world.

Meyer’s third national title may be one less than Saban’s four. But Meyer’s two undefeated seasons on top of that and much higher winning percentage makes a strong case to be on Saban’s level.

Saban deserves a little more credit right now because his fixes were more impressive when you consider how empty the cupboards were at Michigan State, LSU, and Alabama upon his arrival.

But very few people, if any, have come close to Meyer’s accomplishments as a college football head coach at age 50. By age 50, the great Bear Bryant was 141-47, a much worse percentage than Meyer’s as a head coach, and he only had one national championship. We can add the fact that he had already coached for 19 seasons in the sport.

Nick Saban, meanwhile, had no national championships at age 50 and was in the midst of his second season at LSU. To be fair, though, he had only coached seven seasons before that.

If that’s not enough, though, consider that Bowden, Osborne, and Lou Holtz were all without a national championship at age 50. In fact, the only people who come close to Meyer’s accomplishments at his age are Bud Wilkinson, Barry Switzer, Frank Leahy, Gen. Robert Neyland, and another Ohio State great, Woody Hayes. In fact, Hayes is somebody whose accomplishments still exceed Meyer’s.

Think about the elite company we are putting Meyer in already though.

When you add it all up, Meyer is clearly a Top 11 coach. That’s a wrap. He is flirting with Top 5 status, but there are a lot of people he still has to surpass.

If we had to do a Top 10 today, then Bryant, Bowden, Paterno, Hayes, Wilkinson, Leahy, Switzer, Osborne, and Neyland are the Top 9 in no particular order. Saban and Meyer are No. 10 and 11.

So the answer is at this point, no, Meyer is not a Top 5 coach of all time yet.

But he could get there very soon.

Next: In Ohio State-Oregon, Tradition Trumps Flash Again

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