Florida is searching for a new head football coach, one who ideally is capable of winning national titles. It can be difficult to see beyond the recent past in relation to championships, however, so here is some perspective on it.
Today I am looking back to 1996, the year Steve Spurrier broke through to win his national title. Why? Well, have you seen the name of this website? Plus, because the 1997 national title was split between Nebraska and Michigan, it makes an even 30 national titles won since then. I will not, however, be splitting the 2003 championship between BCS champ LSU and AP Poll No. 1 USC because by then there was a unified title-crowning system that didn’t exist yet in 1997, and the Tigers won it.
Competition is fierce
In the pre-2012 expansion SEC, there were six programs that believed they should win national titles with some regularity: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, and Tennessee. All of them have won a title at least once since 1996, and in fact those six teams have won more than half (16) of the 30 title claims I’m going over today. Four of them have won multiple in that span.
In the last two rounds of expansion, the SEC added three more teams that also think they should win titles periodically in Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M. The former two have actually done it in living memory, while the latter spends money like a program capable of doing it. And who knows, they might pull it off this year.
That is nine teams right there, and they only give out ten national championships per decade. If more than one school wins multiple, or teams from other conferences win titles, or some combination of that happens, then at least one of those nine will be disappointed from coming up empty in any given decade.
Side note: this factor is why I think UF made mistakes with hiring coaches like Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain, and Billy Napier. It’s not only that they didn’t win titles; dozens, if not hundreds, of guys get to be power conference head coaches in each generation, and almost none of them ever bring home the big one. Sports are entertainment products, and those coaches’ preferred brands of football just aren’t that entertaining for fans in seasons when they inevitably aren’t winning it all.
Anyway, beyond those SEC teams previously mentioned, the other programs to win a title in the last 30 are Clemson, FSU, Miami, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State, and USC. Only the Huskers among them have resigned themselves to the idea that they’re not really going to be national title contenders anymore, though their fan support (read: donation potential) is such that they could conceivably pull it off with the right head coach. Plus, Notre Dame, Oregon, and Penn State all have reasonable title aspirations, and Washington’s been to the playoff (2016) and national title game (2023) twice in the last decade. It’s a crowded field.
Heck, it’s conceivable that Indiana could win the title this year. Indiana! The program that, coming into this season, had the most total losses of any FBS program in history. It is absolutely unreal what Curt Cignetti is doing there. He’s proof that all you need is the right coach.
The right coaches
If Cignetti, and to a lesser extent Mike Elko, completely reframed how people think about how long it takes to make a national championship contender these days, then Nick Saban did the same for actually winning the things. He personally skewed all perspective on the topic.
Saban won seven national titles, all within the last 30. The next-highest guy is Urban Meyer with three, which is fewer than half of Saban’s total. Kirby Smart and Dabo Swinney each won two, and then no one else won more than one in this span. AP Poll fans can go ahead and credit Pete Carroll with a second if they’re so inclined.
“In this span” matters here, because both Bobby Bowden and Tom Osborne won titles before my cutoff of 1996. But still: they’re indisputable all-time greats, and neither topped Meyer’s total. In the post-WWII era, only four coaches have bested the three championships of Meyer and Osborne (and Bud Wilkinson, Darrell Royal, and Barry Switzer): Saban, Bear Bryant, Woody Hayes, and John McKay. And all four of those guys, including technically Saban, had at least one split title where the AP and UPI/Coaches’ Polls put different teams at the top.
I know it’s hard, but you have to put Saban out of your mind when judging the difficulty for coaches to win national titles. It’s very hard. As discussed in the prior section, lots of programs have the resources and potential to win it all. Plus, sometimes you get accidental champions like Gene Chizik and Ed Orgeron, or guys who hang out near but not at the top of the rankings getting just the right mix to go over the top like Lloyd Carr, Phillip Fulmer, Bob Stoops, Mack Brown, Les Miles, and Jim Harbaugh did.
Where champions come from
A total of 20 coaches have won or shared a title since 1996. The only ones I haven’t yet mentioned are Larry Coker, Ryan Day, Jimbo Fisher, and Jim Tressel.
Among those 20, only 11 of them had been a head coach prior to the job where they won their championships. It is basically a coin flip. And before you go asking for a Coker exemption, Miami was both his and Butch Davis’s first head coaching job. The numbers work the same either way.
And among those 11 previous head coaches, eight of them had been power conference or NFL head coaches before their title-winning jobs. Who are the three exceptions? You know Meyer is one of them, having come up through Bowling Green and Utah before UF. Another is Tressel, who won four I-AA national titles during a 15-year run at Youngstown State before Ohio State.
The third is Bowden, whose prior experience was at a pair of independents in Howard and West Virginia. WVU wasn’t a technically a power conference gig at the time because it wasn’t in a conference. I don’t know that era well enough to say if West Virginia was a power conference-equivalent independent in the way Notre Dame is now or pre-Big East Miami was, but I lean towards probably not since it was still in the Southern Conference prior to going independent in 1968. Plus there were Mountaineer coaches leaving for places like Texas Tech and pre-Bowden FSU, so it wasn’t holding onto coaching talent all that well.
Whichever way you want to count Bowden here, and it was a very different time when FSU hired him half a century ago, the picture shows that titles generally come from either first-time head coaches or prior head coaches who had experience above the mid-major level.
Meyer is a one-of-one here as a fast riser from a mid-major conference who moved up to the big leagues and won championships. It’s true for the last 30 titles, and it remains largely true going further back. The only other head coach since 1980 to win a national championship without being a first-time head coach or prior power conference/NFL head coach is Don James, who split the 1991 title while at Washington. He’d previously led Kent State. You also have 1984 champ LaVell Edwards, whose first and only head coaching gig was at then non-power conference school BYU.
I can only speculate as to why it’s like this, but I have some strong ideas. A good number of the first-timers were internal hires: Osborne, Carr, Fulmer, Coker, Fisher, Swinney, and Day. Their schools’ leadership already knew these guys well and had an idea they could be winners. Again if you want to discount Coker, Davis had been on the Miami staff previously before a stint with the Dallas Cowboys. Obviously not all internal promotions work — and you must have someone ready to be a head coach in-house already to even attempt this — but ADs know more about current staff members than they do complete outsiders.
It’s also entirely possible that the truly elite coordinators tend to wait for a premier job to open rather than take a mid-major gig. Smart and Day certainly did. So did Muschamp, so again, nothing is for certain here.
I also suspect that you learn a lot coaching in the bigger leagues of a power conference or the NFL to prepare you for winning a title at a premier school. It doesn’t appear necessary to even have been good at your prior job. Carroll was a failure in one year with the Jets and middling in three years with the Patriots, but he applied lessons he learned to excel at USC and later the Seahawks. The two guys who rode star transfers were positively awful before, with Chizik 5-19 at Iowa State and Orgeron 10-25 at Ole Miss (though 6-2 as an interim at USC after Lane Kiffin was fired). Perhaps their past experiences taught them something that allowed them to ride their star players to the top, although it’s entirely possible they really did just get lucky.
Plus, coaching in a power conference helps separate the wheat from the chaff. For example, PJ Fleck started 13-0 and got a New Year’s Six bowl bid in his last year at Western Michigan before getting the Minnesota job. Though he went 11-2 and finished No. 10 in his third year there, it was a mostly senior-led team (with a handful of notable exceptions) that crashed to 3-4 in the Covid 2020 season. Minnesota has been good but not great since, finishing above .500 three of the last four years but not once landing in the final top 25.
His oddball Row-The-Boat shtick was probably as much as anything the factor that kept him out of one of the top programs, but Minnesota also functioned as a filter for them. Fleck is good right where he’s at. He’s made a consistent winner out of that program, but it’s also clear there’s nothing special about him that would make you think he could’ve guided a Michigan or a Florida to a national title. Had a blue blood hired him after that 13-0 run, he probably gets fired after three or four years like so many guys making the G5-to-blue blood jump.
And also, the prior P5 head coaching experience examples generally come in two flavors. One is made of the ones who are ambitious enough to take a lower first job in the non-power pecking order before jumping to a low or mid-level power conference job rather than taking a higher up mid-major job and parlaying that into a blue blood school. Think Mack Brown going from independent and struggling Tulane to UNC before Texas, or Jim Harbaugh going from FCS San Diego to Stanford before the NFL and Michigan. This is in contrast to, say, McElwain taking a job in the Mountain West — then tied with the AAC for the best G5 league — and then going to Florida.
The other flavor is guys whose prior P5 or pro jobs were their first head coaching gigs: Carroll, Chizik, Miles, Orgeron, and Spurrier. They were identified as ready enough for a head coaching gig that they didn’t need to prove it at a lower level first. Because UF burns through so many head coaches so rapidly, there is of course an exception to be found here too in Dan Mullen.
Looking at last year’s College Football Playoff, most of the head coaches involved fit in the championship criteria. In seed order: Dan Lanning, Smart, Spencer Danielson (Boise State), Kenny Dillingham, Marcus Freeman, Day, Rhett Lashlee, and Swinney are all in their first head coaching jobs. Steve Sarkisian and James Franklin previously coached P5 schools. Only Josh Heupel and Cignetti fall into neither bucket, though Cignetti only coaching in FBS before Indiana after James Madison reclassified gives him something of a Tressel-like profile.
Looking at the top of this year’s polls right now, the guys in the top 12 who didn’t make last year’s Playoff are all either on their first head coaching job (Brent Key, Clark Lea, BYU’s Kalani Sitake, Texas Tech’s Joey McGuire) or have prior P5 experience (Elko, Kalen DeBoer, Kiffin, Mario Cristobal).
All of these are patterns and not rules. They all hold until they don’t. It does make me more leery of Jon Sumrall, who’s on his second G5 gig at Tulane after also coaching at Troy, and Alex Golesh, who’s on his first head coaching gig at USF. It also makes me less concerned about Key, who’s on his first head coaching gig at Georgia Tech.
Regardless, it’s still more likely than not that Florida’s next head coach won’t win a national title because so many coaches just never do. However with Saban gone from the game, there probably will be more of them to go around. Florida should focus on finding someone either with power conference or NFL head coaching experience or from the coordinator ranks. UF fans are intuitively tired of trying to hire G5 risers after McElwain and Napier, and this data backs up the idea that Meyer was a once-in-a-lifetime pick that isn’t worth trying to repeat.