SMQ: The Grover Clevelands of college football head coaches

Only one U.S. President, Grover Cleveland, served non-consecutive terms. This week’s SMQ looks at college football coaches who have had second acts at a school.

In his seminal 1932 biography Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Allan Nevins captures a fun quote from his wife Frances. After Grover lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison, Frances allegedly told a staff member, “I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, for I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.” Following up on the request, the outgoing First Lady stated to the staffer, “We are coming back four years from today.”

And so it came to pass. After four years away from Washington, DC, the couple indeed returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after Grover won the 1892 election. In the process Cleveland earned the distinction as the only person in U.S. history to serve non-consecutive terms as the President of the United States.

Waking up on this Sunday morning, sitting here with a cup of tea, I randomly got to thinking about Cleveland and his unique place in American history. In the context of several coaching changes around the country this season, I started pondering several coaches whose legacies include non-consecutive stints at a given school.

It isn’t quite as unique a phenomenon in college football, but it is still rare to see head coaches return to a school where they previously helmed the program. It is rarer still to see them match or exceed the success rate that leads athletic departments to reach out and bring former coaches back into the fold.

In this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback let’s look at some of these coaches who fall into the Grover Cleveland mold of leaving a post and then returning after an absence.

2019 provides several storylines featuring Grover Cleveland coaches

Out in the Little Apple, Bill Snyder won’t be running the show on the sidelines at Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium on the campus of Kansas State University. The longtime Wildcats head coach retires for the second time, hoping that this departure sticks and he isn’t called back for a third term leading the program.

Back in 1989, Snyder left his post as Iowa’s offensive coordinator under Hayden Fry to take his first head coaching gig at Kansas State. At the time the Wildcats were a moribund program, with more losses in the program’s history than any other college football team in the country. After a 1-10 freshman season, Snyder and Kansas State rapidly grew into a perennial threat in first the Big Eight and then the Big 12 through the 1990s. By 2003 they won the Big 12 title, over a run when they won 11 games in six out of seven seasons on either side of the millennial shift.

After a pair of losing seasons in 2004 and 2005, Snyder opted to ride into the sunset of retirement. That lasted just three years. After three mediocre seasons under Ron Prince, the school opted to call Snyder and cajole him back into the leadership post. In his second stint, the legendary K-State head coach led the Wildcats to a share of the 2012 Big 12 title and a second Fiesta Bowl appearance. He leaves with a career record of 215-117-1, and a legacy as one of the greatest rebuilders among coaches throughout college football history.

Not everyone gets the chance to come back and coach at a stadium that was already named after them. But even now there are still coaches getting a second chance. This year, Mack Brown gets his chance to return to Chapel Hill after last coaching the Tar Heels in 1997. After leaving the Tar Heels to take the head job at Texas, Brown spent 16 years in Austin before his summary dismissal on the cusp of the College Football Playoff era.

While Brown led the Longhorns to two BCS championship games and claimed one national title, his last years at Texas could not live up to the lofty standard he set earlier in his tenure. Now, after a half-decade away from the sidelines, the past and future intersect again as Brown returns to the ACC outpost where he first proved his coaching ability.

Brown will hope that his second act at North Carolina goes more like Snyder’s return than the tough go that Randy Edsall has experienced in his return to Connecticut. Entering 2019 on the hot seat, Edsall has found it much tougher to replicate the successes he enjoyed with the Huskies during their Big East days.

That is something that cannot be ignored: coaches might remain the same, but the conditions into which they coach change over time. Edsall was the architect who led UConn from the I-AA ranks up to the FBS, then led them to a share of two Big East titles and a trip to the Fiesta Bowl. When he left UConn in 2010 to take the Maryland job, his 74 wins with the Huskies marked the most by a head coach in program history.

Returning seven years later, Edsall has found his second stint at Connecticut to be vastly different in nature. No longer in an automatic-qualifying conference, Edsall and the Huskies have found it tougher to engineer a conference contender as the gridiron game lost streams of revenue and shifted toward a different strength of schedule.

With only four wins in his first two years back at the school where he made his name, Edsall could see his second act shut down before it could ever really blossom. He would hardly be the first head coach who failed to replicate the success from that first period with a program.

Matching early success is always hard for coaches to pull off

Should Edsall find himself out of work after the 2019 season, he will join a list of Grover Cleveland head coaches who for one reason or another could not return as successfully to a program where they manufactured impressive results on the first visit. This is especially true when a coach won a national championship on their first run with a team.

That was the case for both Johnny Majors and John Robinson, two coaches who won national titles in the 1970s at Pitt and USC respectively. Majors spent four years at Pitt from 1973 through 1976, and his final Panthers squad went 12-0 and won the national championship before Majors left western Pennsylvania for the Tennessee job.

Forced to resign from the Volunteers after the 1992 season, Majors came back to Pittsburgh the following year for another four-year term with the Panthers. This time success was harder to find, as Majors posted four straight losing seasons in the Big East before riding off into the sunset for good.

For Robinson, the two-time Trojans head coach, the second go at the gig wasn’t quite as unsuccessful as it was for Majors. Taking over for John McKay in 1976, Robinson joined the pantheon of coaches who can claim national titles when he led USC to the crystal pigskin in his third year on the job. In three of his first four years, Robinson’s teams finished top-two in both major polls.

Departing USC after 1982, Robinson stayed close as he spent nine years in the NFL as the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams. After his return to the college ranks, Robinson returned to USC from 1993 to 1997. Those years coincided with several more shares of the Pac-10 title and Robinson’s fourth Rose Bowl victory as a head coach in 1995.

Maintaining success at a traditional powerhouse like USC is obviously going to be easier than trying to restore it anew at a place like Pitt. What Majors and Robinson demonstrate, though, is that returning to a place where you already brought home the ultimate prize is always going to come with often unreasonable expectations. When a decade or more has passed between departure and return, the shift in conditions throughout college football cannot be ignored.

That was certainly the case for Bobby Petrino, the two-time Louisville head coach who was fired before the end of the 2018 season from his second term with the Cardinals. Joining the team in 2003, Petrino won the Conference USA title with Louisville in his second season at the helm and then followed up with another league crown in 2006 after the Cardinals shifted to the Big East.

That success opened the door for a shot in the NFL with the Atlanta Falcons, a short-lived affair that was terminated prematurely. Before the end of his first season, Petrino left behind a short letter in his pro players’ lockers and bolted to take the Arkansas job.

After a motorcycle crash revealed that Petrino was not only cheating on his wife but also using his position as football coach to get his mistress preferential treatment in hiring, the disgraced coach resigned. A rehabilitation stop at Western Kentucky turned into a chance at redemption with Louisville.

Lamar Jackson, the 2016 Heisman winner, helped make Petrino’s first years fairly successful on his return. But once Jackson graduated on to the NFL, the Cardinals regressed rapidly. After opening the 2018 season 2-8, the university opted to let Petrino go before the end of the season rather than allow him to continue coaching a team who had tuned him out in the locker room.

And then there are coaches who find more success in second term

Not every coach is destined to have a rougher go of it in his second period of coaching at a given school. While those who set high expectations in their first span will inevitably find it hard to maintain that level of success, sometimes coaches are welcomed back despite their first run with a program.

A great example of this phenomenon is Bill Walsh, whose two runs coaching Stanford were sandwiched around his Hall of Fame career with the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL. That first period of employment with the Cardinal was in no way a bad stretch, as Walsh’s teams won 17 games over his two years with the team.

Then Walsh became a legend, his West Coast offense executed to deadly effect by Joe Montana and company on the path to four Super Bowl victories. When he came back to the ranks of college coaches in 1992, four years removed from his pro coaching days, Walsh returned to Palo Alto and immediately led the Cardinal to a share of the Pac-10 title in his first year back on the job.

But two losing seasons followed, and thus Walsh ended up merely doubling his win total at Stanford with another 17 victories total over that second three-year run. Ultimately coming back proved a mixed bag — Walsh earned the conference crown that eluded him in the first stint, but also tanked his career college win percentage from .730 to .576 in his final two seasons.

Mike Riley, on the other hand, improved his winning percentage from his first period coaching his alma mater. Riley first took over the head coaching duties at Oregon State in 1997 and posted two losing seasons before failing upward into the same position with the San Diego Chargers. The NFL proved to be no easier a place to win games, and after three forgettable seasons in the AFC West Riley was welcomed back to Corvallis with open arms.

With a roster bolstered by Dennis Erickson over the previous four recruiting cycles, Riley’s Beavers won eight games and went bowling immediately upon his return. In a dozen years, Oregon State went to the postseason eight times and challenged for the Pac-10 title on several occasions. The 2009 Civil War proved especially epic, as both the Beavers and Ducks were still alive for a trip to the Rose Bowl. Oregon ultimately prevailed 37-33, thwarting Oregon State’s path to Pasadena for a second straight year.

On four occasions Riley’s Beavers squads won at least nine games, they won six bowl games over the 12-year stretch, and they closed out four seasons in the Top 25 rankings. That run of competence at a traditional college football doormat earned Riley a chance to take over a fallen blueblood at Nebraska, a task that ultimately proved too big. In 2018, Riley returned to his hometown a second time to serve as an assistant and advisor to new head coach Jonathan Smith.

These are the most prominent tales of Grover Cleveland head coaches

One could also consider including the slew of head coaches whose careers were postponed by their involvement in war efforts. World War I and World War II stalled the the careers of many head coaches, including such prominent names as Minnesota’s Bernie Bierman, Robert Neyland at Tennessee, Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy, and Wallace Wade at Duke.

Then there is the curious case of Pop Warner, the legendary coach who put in non-consecutive stretches at both Cornell and Carlisle Indian School. After starting his head coaching career at Georgia, Warner spent two years at Cornell in 1897 and 1898 before moving on to Carlisle. After five seasons in Pennsylvania, Warner returned to New York in 1904 for another three years at the future Ivy League program.

By 1907, though, Warner retreated to Carlisle for another eight-year run at the school. His teams won at least 10 games in six of his 10 total seasons at Carlisle, while his Big Red teams at Cornell never pulled off the feat. After 1914, Warner moved on to Pitt, where he won his first three national championships, and then Stanford for his fourth.

As a result, Warner holds the distinction as one of only three head coaches in college football history to put in multiple non-consecutive multiyear runs at two different programs. The other two are Eddie Anderson, who put in two long stretches at Holy Cross sandwiched around a pair of shorter World War II-interrupted stints at Iowa, and Branch Bocock of Virginia Tech and William & Mary fame.

While technically more than 200 head coaches can claim to have put in non-consecutive runs at a school, not all Grover Cleveland claims are created equal. Those claims that involve single-year runs with gaps in between are pale comparisons to the above examples, or even other stories like Fielding Yost’s one-year retirement at Michigan in 1924 between his two coaching runs with the Wolverines.

What these Grover Cleveland-type college football coaches reveal, though, is that fan bases will happily invite a beloved former leader back into the fold for another try on the sidelines.