Those of you who watch out for developments with rivals may have noticed that FSU offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn announced his retirement from coaching last Monday. Like fellow one-time offensive savant Chip Kelly, Malzahn chose to drop down from the head coaching ranks to the OC level to do more simple ball coaching and less of the overhead that head coaches have to do these days. Unlike Kelly, who is two years his senior, Malzahn decided not to make a third career act of it and instead will enjoy his wealth and family.
Malzahn never won a national title as a head coach, but he made an indelible impact on the sport. When Houston Nutt called him up to the college ranks from high school, he brought with him a series of plays called Wildcat. Though time has eroded it down to a single play where a running back takes a direct snap, fakes a jet sweep handoff, and runs into the back of the line for a two-yard loss, Wildcat was a revelation 20 years ago. It has become a generic term at all levels for plays with running back direct snaps or quarterbacks who are much better running than throwing (i.e., a “Wildcat quarterback”).
Malzahn’s play-calling powered 2010 Auburn, one of the most unlikely champions ever given the talent level outside Cam Newton and Nick Fairley. Gus was also part of several of the most memorable games of the 2010s, from the Camback to the Prayer in Jordan-Hare to the Kick Six. Two of those wins were over Nick Saban’s Alabama, and as a head coach, no one had more wins against the Nicktator’s Crimson Tide than Malzahn’s three. Les Miles had three but also had two additional losses.
This piece is not a hagiography of Malzahn but rather a discussion about how the times are changing. The 2000s as a decade was the last big coaching revolution in college football, when the rise of spread offenses brought in a new generation and washed the old one away. Not all of the dominant figures were spread people — Miles certainly wasn’t, and Saban took a while before he begrudgingly converted — but that was largely the trend that sent the old guard permanently to the sidelines.
The first national championship for the spread revolution was Urban Meyer’s at Florida in 2006. Texas had won with a mobile quarterback who ran a lot of shotgun the year before, but Meyer was the first true spread guy to bring home a title.
The year after in 2007, there were a dozen active head coaches who’d won national titles. In order of year of first title won, here’s the list:
- Joe Paterno, 1982 and 1986
- Dennis Erickson, 1989 and 1991
- Bobby Bowden, 1993 and 1999
- Steve Spurrier, 1996
- Lloyd Carr, 1997
- Phillip Fulmer, 1998
- Bob Stoops, 2000
- Jim Tressel, 2002
- Nick Saban, 2003
- Pete Carroll, 2004
- Mack Brown, 2005
- Urban Meyer, 2006
If Larry Coker had made it one more year at Miami, it’d have been a baker’s dozen. But, 2007 was Carr’s last year, and Fulmer’s finale was the next. Bowden bowed out after 2009, and Paterno and Erickson last coached in 2011. Age caught up with some of these guys, and the then-85 year old Paterno died of cancer in January 2012, but the game had passed them all by.
Carroll returned to the NFL after 2009, and the Tattoogate scandal, which seems awfully quaint now in the NIL era, bounced Tressel in 2010. The dominance of Saban and Meyer, who won a combined nine national titles in the 15 seasons from 2006 to 2020, and the lack of ability to get over the hump for guys like Kelly, Malzahn, post-2000 Stoops, Mark Richt, and others meant that the number of reigning champion coaches shrank considerably.
By 2014, the number of active head coaches with a ring was down to five, following Mack Brown’s ouster at Texas. It went down to four after Steve Spurrier’s abrupt retirement in the middle of 2015: Saban, Meyer, Miles, and Jimbo Fisher. The 2016 season was Miles’s last at LSU, but Dabo Swinney replaced him to keep the count at four by winning a title that year. The number got back to as high as six in 2020 after 2019 saw Brown’s return to UNC, Miles come to Kansas, and Ed Orgeron won a title. But then Miles was fired after ’20, and Orgeron was too after ’21. Kirby Smart winning his first the latter year kept it at five.
The number got down to three in 2024 after both Saban retired and Fisher was paid the GDP of a small island nation to leave Texas A&M. It would’ve been down to two if Georgia or Clemson won the ’24 title instead of Ryan Day. We’re now at four with Swinney, Smart, Day, and Curt Cignetti, but Swinney’s reluctance to play the NIL and portal game makes him look perhaps not long for the profession, or at least not his plum job at Clemson, and Cignetti’s already in his 60s.
The shape of the new generation is still being formed. Smart is something of a transitional figure given his close ties to Saban. He’s beginning to look a lot more like a Bowden, Spurrier, or Stoops like figure who will be in the hunt every year but not win titles at the rate Saban did. That’s much more normal in the history of the sport than Saban’s streak of dominance. Lane Kiffin is a transitional guy as well, given how his prominence goes back to Carroll’s USC days, though we’ll have to see if the experiment with him at LSU goes splendidly or blows up the lab. Sark at Texas is in this boat too.
Day isn’t going anywhere for a while. It’s hard to bet against Cignetti in the short term, at least. Dan Lanning has things going well, but it won’t be long until he faces the same annual questions about his ability to break through as his Oregon predecessor Mario Cristobal gets. Lincoln Riley could be back near the top if he can ever figure out defense for more than one random year a decade.
Florida caught a star on the way up in Meyer, but even back in those days it wasn’t clear to everyone that such had happened. His becoming the original BCS Buster at Utah was certainly impressive, but there were plenty of naysayers predicting his offense wouldn’t work in the SEC. And it didn’t, as it turned out. However, he began adjusting to the realities of power conference life during the open date of his first year at UF, and the rest was history.
There is room for the Gators to have done it again with Jon Sumrall, if he is up to the task. There’s nothing stopping him from taking a spot near the top away from, say, Marcus Freeman. The Notre Dame head man reached the doorstep a couple of years ago, but he’s not even as entrenched in the hierarchy as Lanning is.
Since Spurrier left for the NFL, all but two of Florida’s hires have been in no small part because they came off of a title-winner’s tree: former Spurrier assistant Ron Zook, former Meyer assistant Dan Mullen, and former Saban assistants Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain, and Billy Napier. The exceptions are Meyer himself and now Sumrall.
It’s far too early to know if Sumrall will take a spot among the new elite of college football, but there are finally some chairs open up there now. The pecking order in the sport is as unsettled as its been in two decades.