Conference USA: North Texas
It’s tempting here to go with Florida Atlantic, considering the talent-rich geography and the boost for now-Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin’s career, or even the reconstituted UAB, considering its impressive restart after shuttering the program for several years.
But North Texas takes the prize for Conference USA team. There’s the $78 million, 30,000-seat, gleaming Apogee Stadium, towering over I-35 traffic and the rest of campus. There’s also the relatively low expectations: it takes some horrid football (2-10 and 1-11 seasons) to truly run a coach out of town.
The Mean Green are located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, a hotbed for high school football recruiting for many power conference teams. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that coach Seth Littrell is the C-USA’s highest-paid coach, making $1.865 million per year.
Mountain West: Boise State
Sure, it’s not the same as the playing the waves in Hawaii, or even San Diego, for that matter. You may not have the national following of Air Force, but, you can’t deny that the Mountain West’s best head coaching job is Boise State.
NFL teams have drafted 25 Bronco players in the last decade while the team won four MWC titles in that same span. Since 2006, Boise State has failed to reach double-digit wins only twice, and the squad has won three Fiesta Bowls.
It’s an astounding level of success for a plunky program from Idaho that played in the Big West in the 1990s, and it makes the Broncos an easy choice for the Mountain West.