College Football’s 10 greatest back-to-back coaching duos

Losing blue-chip college football coaches often doom a program to fall from the top of the sport. These schools managed to replace one legend with another.

For most college football teams, landing a great coach is far easier said than done. When a school manages to find a leader for their program that launches the team into the stratosphere of the sport, the goal is to hold on to those coaches as long as possible. But whether due to retirement or a better job offer, no program can ever hold on to a great leader forever.

When top-shelf coaches depart a program, it usually spells a dramatic regression to the mean. Powerhouse schools can often still win plenty of games, but it becomes much harder to land in the best bowl games and secure a shot at a national championship. Last week in this space we looked at this phenomenon, trying to assess which coaches have presented the toughest acts to follow.

That has not always been the case, however. Though rare, programs have managed in the past to land coaches as good or even better than their predecessors.

These are the programs we are celebrating today in this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback.  The following programs kept the good times rolling thanks to securing back-to-back coaches who were able to build successful teams and preserve their team’s position as a powerhouse.

Narrowing down this list was much easier than last week’s look at tough acts to follow, as getting two Hall of Fame-caliber coaches in a row is definitively a rarity. In each case, both coaches had to win at least one national championship over his tenure at the school in question. With that in mind, let’s dive in and look at the eight greatest back-to-back coaching acts in college football history.