What most college football national championship coaches have in common

Even though going out and hiring the top college football coach in the country worked out for Ohio State and Alabama, there’s a far more common route.

Believe it or not, out of the 130 FBS teams, only five of them have a head coach that’s won a national championship and if Les Miles and Mack Brown hadn’t both recently come out of retirement, there would only be three: Dabo Swinney, Jimbo Fisher and Nick Saban.

It’s no wonder why they have three out of four of the biggest salaries in college football.  Considering what they bring to the table and how much schools stand to make just for winning one playoff bowl game let alone a national championship makes all of their compensation packages sound investments.

Imagine if you were in charge of hiring a football coach at one of the other 125 schools. Short of harassing Bob Stoops and Urban Meyer to come out of retirement, what do you do?

For starters, it’s always a good idea to begin by look back over the last 20-30 years and take a gander at all the teams that won a national championship and see if you notice any trends that might be able to give you a fresh perspective on how to best position your program to win a national title.

It won’t take long before you begin to notice that a majority of the coaches that won a national title over the last 30 years, did so at their first school.

That’s something to keep in mind the next time you hear about the latest head-coaching hire and its some guy nobody has ever heard of and he doesn’t even have any head coaching experience — just remember that Tom Osborne, Stoops, Lloyd Carr and Swinney, just to name a few, were all that guy at one point. Even Jim Tressel’s first FBS coaching job was with Ohio State.

This is something fans should keep in mind this season as the schools continue to hire and fire head coaches in pursuit of making it into the college football playoff.

Although simply going out and hiring the top names in the game to take over their programs worked out for Alabama and Ohio State, there are far more examples of no-name guys, without head coaching experience that wind up leading the first school they’ve coached to the top of the college football world.

With this mind, take a look around at this year’s pool of first-year, no-name head coaches and remember the next Swinney might be in there.