College Football Bowls 2016: 10 best big game head coaches

The New Year’s Six has some outstanding head coaches in the college football ranks. Here are the 10 best big game head coaches playing in meaningful bowls.

When it comes to success in holiday season bowls, never underestimate how important a head coach is. The better the head coach, the better prepared his team will be play in big bowl games.

We’re very lucky this season to have so many great head coaches leading teams in meaningful New Year’s Six bowls. How do they stack up among each other? Here are the 10 best big game head coaches playing in meaningful bowl games this holiday season.

To think only a few months ago were we trying to run Clay Helton out of a job at USC. His Trojans were a terrible 1-3 to start the year and could not have looked more uncompetitive in their Week 1 loss to Alabama.

Helton has certainly turned it around, and his 2016 Trojans are 9-3 and playing Penn State in the Rose Bowl. Good coaches usually pop at a traditional power halfway through their second season at the helm. Helton has definitely done that at USC in 2016.

So how does he shake out as a big time coach? Well, Helton is 15-7 at USC, gone 12-3 in the Pac-12, has won one division title, and has gone 1-1 in two career bowl games. It’s not a large sample size, but for a guy that has only been a head coach at a program for 22 games, Helton projects as a possible big time coach.

Since taking over mid-season 2015 for Steve Sarkisian, Helton has had to deal with chaos and dysfunction while at USC. It was a violent storm of ineptitude at USC for a while and Helton survived it all. He will have his first real big game as a head coach when he takes on Penn State in the Rose Bowl.