25 best college football coaches never to win a national title
- Head Coaching Record: 177-93-13 at Kirksville State 1926-34, Missouri 1935-42 and 1946-56, Iowa Pre-Flight 1943 and NAS Jacksonville 1944
- Closest He Came to Winning a National Championship: 1943; 9-1 at Iowa Pre-Flight, No. 2 final ranking
- Notable: Seven MIAA conference championships (1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1933 and 1934), College Football Hall of Fame (1961)
Since 1972, the Missouri Tigers have played their home football games at Faurot Field at Memorial Stadium, named to honor Don Faurot. Faurot led the program in two separate stints from 1935-1942 and from 1946-1956, as part of a head coaching career that began at Kirksville State in 1926 and lasted three decades before he retired to concentrate on his duties as athletic director, which Faurot held in an official capacity until 1967.
During the interruption of his tenure at Mizzou, Faurot led the teams for Iowa Pre-Flight (the US Navy pre-fight school) in 1943, a team with whom he beat the likes of Illinois, Ohio State, Iowa, Iowa State, Missouri and Minnesota, and whose only loss was a 14-13 decision to No. 1 Notre Dame, and the Naval Air Station Jacksonville. The season Faurot spent with Iowa Pre-Flight wasn’t only Faurot’s closest brush with a national championship, it was also influential because one of his assistant coaches, Bud Wilkerson, learned Faurot’s Split-T option offense, which he would later use to dominate college football as the head coach at Oklahoma.
A Missouri native that played football, basketball and baseball for the Tigers from 1922-1924, Faurot won 101 games as the head football coach at Missouri, which made him the school’s winningest football coach until Gary Pinkel passed him in 2013. He also spent time as the school’s head basketball coach and compiled a record of 92-74.
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