SMQ: Evaluating the backgrounds of championship coaches
By Zach Bigalke
The Lifers: 14 who won at their first and only stop as a head coach
When people look at coaches that might move at the end of a season, the stack of potential hires really comes in several flavors. While those with head coaching experience often get the longest look, there are also always contenders for big jobs from the ranks of coordinators and position coaches.
Often, waiting for the right opportunity for that first job is the shrewdest move of all for a coordinator. While it might seem like gaining experience is valuable, the truth is that the plurality of title winners since 1974 consists of those head coaches who made just one stop as the top dog at a program in their college football careers. The primary driver of success, then, seems less predicated on how many stops one makes than landing at the right place in the first place.
This trend extends back to the first post-bowl championship title. That year, Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer led the Sooners to their first of back-to-back national titles. While Oklahoma won the Big Eight, they did not get the chance to play in a bowl game that year thanks to postseason sanctions related to recruiting violations. The coaches refused to rank the Sooners as result of the infractions, but the AP voters put Oklahoma as the top team in the country after they went wire-to-wire at No. 1.
In 1974, Switzer shared the title of national champion with USC and their head coach John McKay. The longtime Trojans head coach got his shot to lead the program after nine seasons as an assistant at Oregon and another year being groomed under Don Clark in 1959. The first year of post-bowl rankings for the Coaches Poll put the Trojans atop the list. McKay won his fourth of four titles at USC, and he stayed in Los Angeles one final season before jumping to the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers
In the end, the list constitutes more than a dozen coaches in total. Aside from McKay and Switzer, this group also includes guys like Georgia’s Vince Dooley, Penn State’s Joe Paterno, Colorado’s Bill McCartney, and Nebraska’s Tom Osborne. More recently, Phillip Fulmer of Tennessee, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, USC’s Pete Carroll, Jimbo Fisher of Florida State, and Clemson’s Dabo Swinney have all won at their first and only school.
The one anomaly of the bunch is the one that fits into multiple categories. LaVell Edwards became the last mid-major coach to win a national title when his 1984 BYU team was selected by both major polls as the post-bowl champion. It was the first and only stop for the school’s coach of nearly three decades.
The Full List (14)
- John McKay (USC)
- Barry Switzer (Oklahoma)
- Vince Dooley (Georgia)
- Joe Paterno (Penn State)
- LaVell Edwards (BYU)
- Bill McCartney (Colorado)
- Gene Stallings (Alabama)
- Tom Osborne (Nebraska)
- Lloyd Carr (Michigan)
- Phillip Fulmer (Tennessee)
- Bob Stoops (Oklahoma)
- Pete Carroll (USC)
- Jimbo Fisher (Florida State)
- Dabo Swinney (Clemson)