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

For Nebraska’s first seven-plus decades playing football, the school was a solid regional outfit but never really a factor on the national stage. The arrival of Lincoln-born Bob Devaney, a budding head coach who had taken Wyoming to the Sun Bowl and earned four straight Skyline Conference titles, changed that perception for good.

Devaney went 9-2 in his first season with the Cornhuskers, then won four straight Big Eight championships.  A pair of 6-4 seasons in 1967 and 1968 proved a minor issue, as Nebraska returned to the top of the Big Eight in 1969 and won four more league titles in a row as well as the 1970 and 1971 national championships.

Following the 1972 season that ended with a 9-2-1 record, another Big Eight title, and a third consecutive Orange Bowl victory, Devaney resigned his post as football coach to focus full-time on his athletic director duties. Stepping up to take over the program was another non-alumnus Nebraska kid, Tom Osborne. After playing his college football at hometown Hastings College, Osborne spent three years in the NFL as a wide receiver before returning to the college sideline as an assistant under Devaney in 1964.

After four years as Devaney’s offensive coordinator, Osborne took over the program in 1973. Notably, not only did he win three national titles late in his career, but Osborne also went 25 straight years posting at least nine wins per year. Between Osborne and his predecessor Devaney, the duo won all five national titles the Cornhuskers can boast. The pair finished with an .854 combined winning percentage and 356 career wins between them.