College Football: Top coaches that stayed at one school

Coaches often come to be defined by a school. Yet rare are those who actually stay put for an entire career. This week SMQ rates the best one-school guys.

Earlier this year in the weekly Sunday Morning Quarterback column, we took a look at how we come to perceive head coaches over time. One thing we didn’t discuss in that column was the impact that a coach spending his entire tenure at a single school can have on our perception of a career.

During the early slate of games on Saturday, Michigan started to rout Nebraska. As the Cornhuskers gave up one score after another in the Big House, a discussion started up between several writers about how odd it is to see a program like Nebraska slip to such irrelevance.

Fans of the school long for the days of Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne, when national contention seemed a birthright. But at this point the stability provided by coaches like Frank Solich or Bo Pelini would probably even appeal to some segments of the fan base.

Among that list of coaches, only one actually spent his entire head coaching career in Lincoln. Tom Osborne certainly rates among some of the greatest head coaches in college football history, and his career certainly falls within the purview of this week’s study.

Who else makes the cut?

To winnow down the list and determine who is the greatest coach in college football history to spend his entire career with one program, we first need to set a few criteria to help determine what denotes greatness.

First, only coaches who coached at one school were considered. Even if a coach spent just one season elsewhere before landing at his forever destination, it proved disqualifying. That helped narrow down the list, but several other factors were put in to make initial cuts.

Two sets of coaches were considered. First, to narrow down the list, single-school coaches who won 200 or more games over their careers were considered. Also considered were one-school coaches who won at least 75 percent of their games during their careers.

Singe longevity is part of greatness, only those coaches with at least 10 years of service at their schools were considered for the honor. That created a list of 15 coaches, three of whom are currently active at their respective schools.

Once that list was winnowed down and the 15 coaches were determined, five factors were taken into account when evaluating each man:

1. Longevity. How long a coach survived at his school matters in the grand scheme of greatness. Especially these days, loyalty — either from a coach or from a program — is often in short supply.
2. Wins per season. Given the differing lengths of college football seasons throughout history, this was determined by taking career winning percentage and calculating average wins for a 12-game season.
3. Winning percentage. Slightly different than wins per season, this calculates out a a coach’s overall success rate that also accounts for draws for those coaches who competed prior to 1996.
4. National championships. Often these are mythic, but in general a coach that won at least a share of the national title is in general more successful than a coach who failed to win a national title over the course of his career.
5. Conference championships. Beating one’s peers is also a valuable exercise for determining greatness. Because these teams see each other more frequently than others, coming out on top of a conference is valuable in seeing how this performance relates over time.

(For Notre Dame, the conference championship factor was omitted entirely from the calculation. For Joe Paterno, conference championship percentage was calculated to include only those years after Penn State joined the Big Ten.)

With those nuts and bolts out of the way, let’s look at the top five coaches all-time who spent their careers in one place.

Beginning our look at the top five coaches to spend their entire career at one school is a man whose name now adorns an SEC stadium. Robert Neyland remains a Tennessee institution to this day after a career that spanned four different decades and broke into three distinct periods.

Neyland first took over the job in Knoxville at the height of the Roaring Twenties, going 8-1 in his first season in 1926 and finishing second in the Southern Conference. The following year, Neyland’s team went 8-0-1 and earned a share of the league title. Before Neyland left Knoxville for the first time, he helped guide Tennessee to a new league as a charter member of the SEC. It was in the SEC where Neyland’s career vaulted to another level after a season away in 1935.

The Volunteers won three conference crowns and two national titles between 1936 and 1940, as Neyland’s squads went 31-2 over the three seasons between 1938 and 1940. After World War II, Neyland returned to Tennessee and won two more SEC titles and two more national championships. Known for his defensive mind, 112 of Neyland’s 173 career victories came by shutout.

Over a quarter-century at the helm in Lincoln, Tom Osborne piloted the last era of dominance for Nebraska football. For much of his career, Osborne was known as a coach whose teams were always on the cusp of a national championship but never managed to completely break through. That all changed in the twilight of his career, when the Cornhuskers won three national titles in his final four seasons in charge at Nebraska.

That made up for near misses throughout his career, such as the 1984 Orange Bowl loss to Miami where a tie would have earned a national title. But Osborne was still incredibly successful, especially given the unique challenges of his situation. Coaching in a conference that included Oklahoma made it tough to set up as a hegemonic force within the Big 8. Osborne still managed to win conference titles in more than half of his seasons coaching the Cornhuskers.

Barry Switzer is best known to current generations of football fans as the man who led the Dallas Cowboys to the last of their three Super Bowl victories in the 1990s. Before he embarked on a pro coaching career, though, Switzer spent 16 years restoring Oklahoma to its glory days. Switzer averaged 10 wins for every 12 times his Sooners teams took the field, and his teams regularly dominated not just at the Big 8 level but also on a national scale.

Under Switzer, the Sooners won three national titles and 12 conference titles in just over a decade and a half. One of the defining teams of both the 1970s and 1980s, Switzer’s tenure in Norman helped define a golden era of college football. To this day, Switzer’s .837 winning percentage remains the top mark in school history, besting both Bob Stoops and the man that ranks just ahead of him on this list of single-school legends.

Bud Wilkinson engineered two of the longest winning streaks in college football history during his 17 years in Norman. Under Wilkinson, Oklahoma won 31 straight between 1948 and 1950. Three years later, the Sooners reeled off 47 straight wins between 1953 and 1957, a record that still stands six decades later. Wilkinson’s teams, on average, won 9.9 games per 12-game season. Wilkinson was a beloved figure in the state of Oklahoma, intimately linked to the politics of the Sooner State and an exemplar for the state’s growth.

While his political career faltered, it was by no means a result of his ability as a coach. Wilkinson’s teams claimed three national titles and 14 conference crowns in his 17 years at the helm, a rate of success surpassed by few coaches throughout history. Wilkinson laid the foundation for a program that features two other coaches on the shortlist of 15 whose college tenures were spent entirely in Norman.

Knute Rockne tops the list this week as the top head coach to spend his entire career in one location. In 13 years at Notre Dame, Rockne won more than 88 percent of his games and claimed three national titles. He was only 43 years old when he was killed in a TWA airplane crash near Bazaar, Kansas on March 31, 1931. At the time, his teams won an average of 10.6 games for every 12 they played.

If not for that flight ending his life prematurely, Rockne may very well have spent another couple of decades winning even more national titles in South Bend. Notre Dame was able to move on and remain a national fixture for decades to come, winning national titles under Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine, and Lou Holtz. But all of those men spent their time not only under the gaze of Touchdown Jesus but also in the shadow of Rockne.

Final Thoughts

Now that we have looked at the top five men on the list, here is a closer look at the list of 15 coaches and where they rank in the big picture.

Three of the 15 coaches on the list are still active as of this season. Bill Snyder has by far the lowest winning percentage of any coach on this list, and he is one of four who cannot claim a national title. His Kansas State teams came closest to playing for a national championship in the first season of the BCS in 1998, but lost the Big 12 championship game to Texas A&M in double overtime to miss their chance.

Gary Patterson stuck by TCU as they navigated their way from mid-major purgatory to BCS Buster to Big 12 member. Patterson’s Horned Frogs have won seven conference titles in four different leagues. TCU claimed at least one crown or a share of the crown in every league where they played so far during Patterson’s tenure, from the WAC to Conference USA to the Mountain West to the Big 12.

Dabo Swinney is the one active head coach whose name lands on this list of one-school coaches. In his 11th season at the helm in Clemson, Swinney’s teams have played for three national championships during the College Football Playoff era and boast four ACC titles in 10 seasons. Still young, Swinney could still end up at another program to fall completely off this list. Then again, he just may entrench himself for years with the Tigers and retire as the top coach ever to lead the Tigers.

Two out of the 15 also coached primarily outside the realm of the traditional powerhouses. LaVell Edwards relied on what was at the time a revolutionary passing attack to become the dominant force in the WA throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Before Edwards, Frank Kush dominated the WAC when Arizona State was still a mid-major school in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Ultimately, though, the biggest takeaway for this week is just how rare it really is to see a legendary head coach remain at one school for an entire career. Neither Nick Saban nor Bear Bryant, two titans of the sport who will forever remain linked with Alabama, can make such a claim.

Neither modern mercenaries nor most coaches of the past can boast such longevity. Loyalty is a two-way street, and more often than not either the coach or the school gets wandering eyes. Sticking together for even a decade is a rarity that is well worth a celebration when it actually does happen, whether historically or in a contemporary context.