Champion Coaches

Soon the highly anticipated firing of Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis will come to pass. Of course this creates the highly anticipated hiring of the next head coach for Notre Dame.

Here are the last ten final AP poll championship teams and their coaches:

• 1999 Florida State: Bobby Bowden (in his 24th year with this program)
  
• 2000 Oklahoma: Bob Stoops (2nd year)
  
• 2001 Miami: Larry Coker (1st year)
  
• 2002 Ohio State: Jim Tressel (2nd year)
  
• 2003 USC: Pete Carroll (3rd year)
  
• 2004 USC: Pete Carroll (4th year)
  
• 2005 Texas: Mack Brown (8th year)
  
• 2006 Florida: Urban Meyer (2nd year)
  
• 2007 LSU: Les Miles (3rd year)
  
• 2008 Florida: Urban Meyer (4th year)
  

Looking at prior position these 8 coaches held prior to becoming head coach for the program they won the championship with:

• Bobby Bowden coached 6 six years at West Virginia, had a 42-26 record and one bowl victory.
• Bob Stoops was Defensive Coordinator at Florida for three years where he helped the program win three bowl games and one championship.
• Larry Coker was Offensive Coordinator for Miami for six years before being promoted to Miami's Head Coach, and helped the program win three bowl games.
• Jim Tressel was Head Coach for 15 years at Youngstown State University, a Division I-AA program, had a 135-57-2 record and won four Division I-AA national championships.
• Pete Carroll was Head Coach of the New England Patriots for three years in the NFL, amassing a 27-21 record and two playoff appearances.
• Mack Brown was Head Coach for UNC for ten years, had a 69-46 record and won three bowl games.
  
• Urban Meyer was Head Coach at Utah for two years, had a 22-2 record and two bowl game victories.
  
• Les Miles was Head Coach at Oklahoma State for four years, had a 28-21 record and won one bowl game.

Lumping these 8 coaches into broad categorization of experience prior to championships:

• 2 successful at a different level (Tressell at Div I-AA & Carroll at NFL)
• 2 successful Coordinators that were not Head Coaches (Stoops with Florida & Coker with Miami)
• 2 successful in longer stints at other programs (Bowden with West Virginia & Brown with UNC)
• 1 extraordinarily successful in a short stint at another program (Meyer with Utah)
• 1 moderate performance in a brief stint at another program (Miles with Oklahoma State)

It's interesting that only Bowden and Brown took longer than 4 years to win the championship (18 years until Bowden won his first championship in 1993). Perhaps coaches with long stints at one program have a harder time recruiting talent to follow them to new programs. The other six coaches were successful in short order and four were not even Division 1-A Head Coaches previously. This suggests a pathway towards accelerating success is to look beyond the pool of Division 1-A Head Coaches to talented Coordinators and coaches at other levels. Unfortunately, Charlies Weis fit this description when hired in 2005.

Unsubstantiated rumors put former NFL Head Coach of the 2000 Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens, Brian Billick on the top of the potential candidates. He also has experience as NFL Offensive Coordinator (Minnesota Vikings for 7 years), Div I-A Assistant Head Coach (Stanford for 3 years), and Div. I-A Offensive Coordinator (Utah State for 3 years). More importantly, he is not employed as a coach presently and with an impressive resume he will always get mentioned whenever the price is right. Billick and Weis probably both get mentioned in college coach discussions because of the tremendeous success Pete Carroll had moving from an NFL position to a dominant program in college football.

Recent years have put a number of players from Notre Dame football into the NFL. Unfortunately the teams have not been well-rounded with talent on both sides of the ball. NFL coaches may appeal to star players but perhaps there is something more to be said for the coach that pulls together an entire team. Mark me down as in favor of pulling someone from Division 1-AA up and letting them have a chance to build the program up. Appalachia State won three out of the last four championships and as many victories against Michigan since 2007 as Notre Dame, why not Jerry Moore?