SMQ: Why college football coaches need more than two years to thrive at a school

Fans want new coaches to win immediately. What would college football history look like if coaches were fired after failing to win big in just two years?

After losing 47-28 at home to top-ranked Alabama, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher is already starting to feel the heat in College Station in just his second season at the helm. Now 6-5 in conference play over the past season and a half, some among the Aggies faithful are wondering whether Fisher was the right guy to turn around the program. Even when a new leader boasts a national championship at his last stop, coaching is inevitably a “What have you done for me now?” field of employment.

At Fisher’s last stop, Willie Taggart is feeling even more heat. The Florida State head coach left Oregon after one season to take his dream job in Tallahassee, but that dream has quickly turned into a nightmare after the Seminoles saw their bowl eligibility streak die with a 5-7 season in 2018 and now sit 3-3 in the current campaign.

Even when a new leader boasts a national championship at his last stop, coaching is inevitably a “What have you done for me now?” field of employment.

Fans look at success stories like that of Bob Stoops, the former Oklahoma coach who led the Sooners to a BCS national title in his second season on the job in Norman, and expect that paying big money to a leader should equate to instant results. Football doesn’t always work that way, however, and the history of the sport would look far different if coaches lasted only two seasons before either signing a second contract or getting summarily sent packing.

Some legendary head coaches needed a few years to install their systems before really seeing results start to fall into place. Once they did, it opened up a world of possibilities for their programs.

Imagine, though, that they had never had the time to put everything in place. This week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback does just that, looking at five legendary coaches and what their careers might have looked like if their results after two years led to dismissal instead of patience.

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Frank Beamer’s career at Virginia Tech began with two straight losing seasons. It wasn’t until Beamer’s seventh season at the helm that the Hokies actually went to a bowl game. And if the two-year rule were in place, the coach might never have even landed in Blacksburg.

That is because a similar fate might have befallen him in his first head coaching gig, at the I-AA level with Ohio Valley program Murray State. During his time in Kentucky, Beamer guided the Racers to an 8-3 season and a top-10 finish in the I-AA polls. The following year, Murray State fell to 4-7 and was nowhere near contention in their conference.

What if Murray State had decided that Beamer benefitted from beginner’s luck in his first season as a head coach, and that 4-7 was the new normal rather than 8-3? That would mean the coach never got the chance to coach the Racers in the I-AA playoffs in 1986, a turnaround at Murray State that attracted the attention of the Virginia Tech brass.

Without the faith that the Racers placed in Beamer, would Virginia Tech have considered the coach when the Hokies position came open after Bill Dooley parlayed a 10-2-1 season into a new job at Wake Forest?

Consider that as well for a moment. When Virginia Tech hired away Beamer from the I-AA ranks, the Hokies were coming off a 10-win season where they finished at No. 20 in the AP poll. In the 21st century, a coach that was on the clock when a team’s win total dropped by eight wins from his predecessor would be on the hot seat heading into the second year on the job.

Beamer was afforded the time to set up stable foundations in Blacksburg, and he rewarded the trust the school showed him by remaining at Virginia Tech for 29 years. Under Beamer, the Hokies won at least a share of seven conference titles between their time in the Big East and ACC. They played for the national championship in 1999 after an undefeated regular season.

Unprecedented success was the reward for keeping faith after two tough years to start Beamer’s tenure as head coach, and that success might never have transpired without the early show of faith in their new coach.

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Before Bobby Bowden moved to Tallahassee and turned the Seminoles into a perennial powerhouse, he first made his waves at the top division of the sport at West Virginia. Hired away  from historical black college Howard to coach the Mountaineers, Bowden was a respectable enough 15-7 in his first two seasons in Morgantown.

Both of those seasons ended without a bowl appearance, though, after previous head coach Jim Carlen had guided the Mountaineers to the Peach Bowl and a 10-1 season in 1969. That performance led Texas Tech to poach Carlen and bring him to Lubbock, which is the main reason why West Virginia promoted Bowden from the offensive coordinator position in the first place.

This was a period when there were far fewer bowl game opportunities, which explains in large part why the Mountaineers were on the sidelines after both of Bowden’s first two seasons in the lead role. As an independent, West Virginia had to work that much harder to attract the attention of the bowl committees going around in their colorful logo-embroidered sports jackets bestowing benefices on the top teams across the country each year.

The fan base could easily have seen it a different way, however. Had they been disappointed instead of understanding about the difficulties of reaching the postseason and the unique challenges faced by an independent program — had they acted like a 21st-century fan base, in other words — Bowden very well could have been canned before he ever got the Mountaineers to a pair of bowl games.

One common refrain that lands on certain coaches is that they are better situated to be a coordinator. If West Virginia jettisoned Bowden before he could completely develop his chops as the leader of a program, maybe he returns to an offensive coordinator role and wonders when a new opportunity might come along.

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Another coach who had a deceptively disappointing start to his tenure was Lloyd Carr, the longtime Michigan head coach who finished third and fifth in the Big Ten in his first two years leading the Wolverines. While this might sound weird to 21st-century fans of the sport, contention in the Big Ten was a perennial birthright at a school like Michigan throughout the previous century.

Carr took over a program where legendary coaches like Fielding Yost and Bo Schembechler had established dynasties and dominated the conference. Finishing behind the likes of not only hated rival Ohio State but also Northwestern, Penn State, and Iowa for two straight seasons could easily kill a career at a place like Michigan.

Luckily, though, Michigan did not get an itchy trigger finger and take drastic measures against their longtime defensive coordinator. The impulse might have made perfect sense, though, after Carr’s predecessor Gary Moeller won the Big Ten three straight years to start his five-year tenure in Ann Arbor.

The Michigan athletic department and Wolverines fans were rewarded for their patience in 1997, as Carr led the squad to an undefeated season capped with a Rose Bowl win over Pac-10 champion Washington State. That performance earned cornerback/jack-of-all-trades Charles Woodson the Heisman Trophy and brought the AP national championship to the Big House as Michigan split the mythic national title with Bowl Alliance winner Nebraska.

Winning nine and then eight games certainly mitigated the challenge to Carr’s leadership over his first two seasons. But in relative terms it must also be recognized that this was underachievement for the Wolverines, who were accustomed to 10-win seasons and a place at the top of the Big Ten.

Carr brought four more Big Ten titles to Ann Arbor over his 13 years at the top of the program, and he also had the Wolverines in BCS contention in 2006 when they narrowly lost a No. 1-vs.-No. 2 matchup against Ohio State that determined which team won the league and earned the opportunity to take on SEC champion Florida for the national title.

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Another coach who could have easily been crushed by outsized expectations is Tom Osborne. When Osborne was promoted from his offensive coordinator position to succeed Bob Devaney in 1973, the Cornhuskers were coming off four straight Big Eight championships and back-to-back national titles in 1970 and 1971.

Osborne won nine seasons in each of his first two years at the top of the pyramid in Lincoln, but Nebraska ceded leadership of the Big Eight to rival Oklahoma. As we saw later in Cornhuskers history, nine-win seasons were the undoing of Bo Pelini when he led the program.

Coupled with a dip below the detested Sooners in the standings, the Nebraska fan base could easily have turned on their new leader.

It helped Osborne that Devaney had stepped down from the head coaching spot to concentrate on his duties as Nebraska’s athletic director. With his old boss during his coordinator days also his new boss once he took over the football program, Osborne had the institutional support necessary to eventually find a breakthrough.

In his third season in charge, Osborne engineered his first breakthrough. The Cornhuskers finished 10-1 in the regular season, earning a trip to the Fiesta Bowl and sharing the Big Eight title. Over a 25-year career as the head coach at Nebraska, Osborne ended up winning three national championships in the twilight of his career after several painfully-close calls in the 1980s.

Coaching at a school like Nebraska carries with it the weight of tradition, but as we have seen in the 21st century there are no inherent advantages to explain the dominance of teams like the Cornhuskers. In sticking with Osborne, the school was able to fend off the inevitable regression to the mean that was bound to take place sooner or later for more than two decades.

A program that feels entitled to title contention, as Nebraska had every right to be in the 1970s, might have shown Osborne the door after failing to even win a conference crown in his first two years. We are seeing those clamors these days at places like Texas A&M, where the tradition of success is far more illusory than the situation into which Osborne stepped in 1973.

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Let’s finish off this week with a look at a far more recent example of a coach who rewarded his program’s confidence with an eventual breakthrough. Yes, Dabo Swinney technically started as the Tigers head coach midway through the 2008 season when Tommy Bowden was relieved of his duties. But it wasn’t until after that season that the school opted to hand Swinney the full-time gig, meaning that 2009 was his first full season at the helm.

That first season without the interim tag started solidly enough, as Swinney led the Tigers to the ACC championship game out of the Atlantic Division. Though they lost to Georgia Tech in the title game, Clemson followed up that disappointment with a win over Kentucky in the Music City Bowl that set them up to dream big in 2010.

Dreams, though, don’t automatically materialize. A three-game losing streak in September and early October dropped the Tigers below .500 in the standings, and bowl eligibility was in question until Clemson knocked off Wake Forest on November 20. Following up a division crown with a 6-6 regular season, the year ended with a losing record after the Tigers dropped the Meineke Car Care Bowl against South Florida.

If Clemson had cut ties with Swinney at that point, there is no guarantee that the new guy at the helm would have brought the Tigers faithful their first ACC title since Ken Hatfield’s crew won the league in 1991. Swinney ended that two-decade drought in 2011 in his second trip to the ACC championship game, blowing out No. 5 Virginia Tech 38-10 in Charlotte as a seven-point underdog.

Four years later, Clemson played for the national championship in a thrilling College Football Playoff title game against Alabama. The Tigers lost that game in January 2015, but a year later Swinney ended Clemson’s 35-year title drought that dated back to Danny Ford and the undefeated 1981 squad.

Without the time to effectively build the program, would Clemson still be the hegemonic force in the ACC and a perennial contender in the national picture?

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What should we take away from this discussion about coaching tenures?

As much as we love to revere leaders like Bob Stoops and Urban Meyer, both of whom won a national title in their second seasons at Oklahoma and Florida respectively, it is an unrealistic expectation to assume that every program can be turned around in two years.

The nature of college football in the 21st century is that only winning can keep coaches from getting a pink slip and a golden parachute from their athletic department. At this point, 20 coaches at the FBS level are in the midst of their second season on the job at their current school.

For every guy like Mario Cristobal or Dan Mullen, who have put Oregon and Florida into the national discussion in their second season at the helm, there are far more stories like that of Willie Taggart at Florida State, Chip Kelly at UCLA, or Jeremy Pruitt at Tennessee.

Yes, these individuals are the highest-paid public employees in the states where they reside. And investing that much in a single employee can feel even more disappointing when it fails to yield championships and elite bowl appearances right out of the gate. But dollars alone cannot guarantee instant success, though, and it is wise to wait and see whether an investment yields dividends once it reaches maturity before opting to cut and run.