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

The early years of college football at Yale are marked by a long string of national championships. Throughout the 19th century, the Bulldogs won their first dozen titles before teams even had head coaches on the sideline. The visionary addition of Walter Camp, a Yale alumnus who was on the team from 1876-1881 during a stretch of five championships in six seasons, built up Yale as the cradle of so many of college football’s innovations.

Camp was an instrumental contributor to the sport, spearheading key rules changes such as adding the line of scrimmage, standardizing offensive formations with four-man backfields and, the system of down-and-distance progression that separates American football from other football codes around the world. He also proved a fine coach, going 67-2 over five seasons with the Yale juggernaut and winning three national titles.

After 1892 Camp stepped down as the head coach of the program to move to California and coach Stanford. William Rhodes, a tackle on Camp’s 1888 national championship team, took over the reins in New Haven and steered the Bulldogs to two more national titles in his only two seasons at the helm.

While this was pre-modern football, and Yale had already established itself as a powerhouse even before coaching became commonplace, the duo of Camp and Rhodes proved formidable. Between them, the pair won more than 13 games per season, boasted a .969 winning percentage, and won a national title every 1.4 years.