Michigan’s national title scrambled some of the narratives about college football head coaching in the 21st Century. There’s been an idea out there for quite some time that if a guy doesn’t win something substantial within his first few years, then it’s never going to happen for that guy at that school.
Jim Harbaugh didn’t win so much as a division title in his first six years in Ann Arbor, and after his sixth, he took a pay cut to be able to stay on the job. He was 0-6 against Ohio State in that span, too. Since then, he’s 3-0 against the Buckeyes with three Big Ten titles and now a national title.
I’m not sure if there’s something universal to be taken away from that situation. Harbaugh very well could be the exception that proves the rule.
His first head coaching stop was three years at FCS San Diego, and he went 11-1 in each of his second and third seasons. He next took over a 1-11 Stanford team and beat then-mighty USC in his first season. In his fourth and final campaign there, the Cardinal went 12-1 with the only loss coming to eventual national title game participant Oregon. From there he tried the NFL, where in his first three seasons he had two end in the conference final and another in the Super Bowl.
If someone was going to break the pattern, a guy who’d revitalized a long-floundering program and been to a Super Bowl already is about as good a bet as any. Harbaugh had shown he had the goods previously, and even his second Michigan team had only a pair of one-point losses and another in overtime. He just couldn’t beat an Urban Meyer-led Ohio State that had years’ worth of a head start, and eventually he caught and surpassed OSU as the toughness Meyer instilled slowly had trickled out of the program for years.
Even if we set Harbaugh aside, we still are in a state of uncertainty about patterns thanks to all the changes of recent years. We probably shouldn’t read too much into the weird 2020 covid season, and then NIL and the one-time undergraduate transfer rule followed right after.
I had the thought to look at the hires of the winter of 2021-22 to see how the guys taking over new spots right in the teeth of all that change are faring. Friends, it’s wildly inconsistent.
This is a list of the new hires in rough order of prominence at the time. I literally haven’t read any of the analysis because it’s grading brand new hires and I’ve never heard of the author. I just needed a list, and there it is.
Top billing went to Brian Kelly at LSU. He took over a program with just 38 scholarship players after Coach O left, so he was always going to need to portal in a lot of help. He did, and it resulted in an SEC West title in 2022 and a Heisman winner in 2023. It may just be that Jayden Daniels papered over a lot, though, as the defense was so bad that Kelly recently fired nearly every assistant on the defensive side of the ball.
Second billing went to Lincoln Riley. He got the ’22 Heisman winner in Caleb Williams, who followed his coach from Oklahoma. Things fell apart a bit in Riley’s second season, however, as the Trojans had a terrible defense just like the Tigers did. Riley has made three defensive hires this offseason of his own.
Third went to Marcus Freeman at Notre Dame. His first season included losses to Marshall and an eventual 3-9 Stanford, and his second season was a three-loss campaign despite nabbing the best available portal QB of the cycle in Sam Hatman. Then in fourth came Billy Napier, who’s 11-14 through two seasons. Mario Cristobal was fifth, and he’s 12-13 with a pair of 3-5 runs in ACC play. That’s a lot of uninspiring results among the biggest names.
You have to get to No. 6 Brent Venables to find someone with a normal-looking progression — from 6-7 in his first year to 10-3 in his second — and even he has lost his playmaking quarterback to the portal. The top ten closes strongly with Dan Lanning, Kalen DeBoer, and Rhett Lashlee. Further down also includes guys who’ve done good work in Jerry Kill at New Mexico State, Mike Elko at Duke, Sonny Dykes at TCU, and Jeff Tedford at Fresno State.
But even among some of those: Kill decided this winter that he no longer wants to be a head coach, Lanning couldn’t beat DeBoer, DeBoer left for Alabama, Elko left for Texas A&M, and Dykes missed a bowl after making the national title game.
Again, there are some fairly normal-looking records like those of Venables and Lanning. But little seems normal for a lot of the coaches on this list. Some had high highs, some had low lows, and some have had both.
Undoubtedly NIL plays some role here, and that’s entirely out of the head coach’s hands. Is the collective well run? Can it fundraise effectively? Does the school’s and athletic department’s administrations market the collective effectively? Who knows, and the head man can’t get too involved under NCAA rules anyway.
The portal has figured prominently for guys like Kelly, Riley, Dykes, and increasingly Napier, and veteran transfer quarterbacks specifically came up big for the all four of those coaches plus for DeBoer, Venables, and Lanning.
I don’t know what to make of all this yet. I’ve never seen a head coaching cycle this chaotic, this early on. It’s madness.
I will continue to hold Napier’s feet to the fire in my own small way because he’s made a lot of avoidable mistakes of his own that have nothing to do with the big changes in the sport. But man, this is wild to look over. If Napier washes out early, he’ll be extremely far from the most interesting story from his own hiring cycle.