NCAA Football: 5 most valuable college coaches

Value — at least when it comes to football coaches — is measured in titles; in wins and losses. You are your winning percentage, oftentimes little more. And that works (for the most part) in the NFL, where there are 32 teams, revenue sharing and a salary cap. In a league where parity is high, rosters can turn over quickly and the draft regulates the influx of young talent — the proverbial playing field is much more level.

NCAA football is not the same. College coaches have it much different. There are plenty of have’s and plenty more have-not’s in college — they all want to win. Money is not distributed evenly, resources are not distributed evenly, talent is not dispersed evenly.

In the NFL if you don’t build well it’s largely through human error. You blew it on your draft picks, you managed your cap poorly, you didn’t sign the right free agents. But those are all things that — to some extent — teams have control over.

In the college ranks — without the right history or geographic location (or sometimes just some luck) — moving up in the world is not easy.

College coaches don’t just have to coach a team, they have to spend nearly every waking moment that they’re not coaching out trying to recruit new players to replace the ones who will graduate or leave early after the season. This means college coaches are no longer just teachers, but evaluators of talent, de facto recruiting coordinators and on some level traveling salesmen.

And then if a coach can manage to juggle all those responsibilities and win — and he’s not at a well-established program — a bigger school or an NFL team can swoop in and sign him away.

In the college ranks, a coach’s value to a school is much greater than just their won/loss record (though that is still paramount) — it’s product of a number of factors.

How does he recruit? How well does he coach? How likely is he to leave the program? How much does he cost the school?

Sometimes the best coaches aren’t the most valuable. Urban Meyer can coach and recruit, but he also costs a lot and has demonstrated no compunctions about bailing on a program when the going gets tough. Butch Davis recruits as well, if not better, than anyone in the country — he has demonstrated this at Coral Gables and Chapel Hill. But he doesn’t always win with that talent and he has committed NCAA violations everywhere he coaches. Both are great coaches, but there are others who are far more valuable.

Here are the five most valuable head coaches in the college game: