From Mike Price to Charlie Weis, we count down the 25 worst college football coaching hires in history.
College football programs rise and fall with their head coaching hires. The right coach can wake a sleeping giant. Howard Schnellenberger saw the potential of the University of Miami in 1979, and turned the Hurricanes into national champions.
The wrong coach can damage the reputation of an entire academic institution, or even set in motion a series of events that eventually leads the elimination of the football program. We don’t yet know what the full impact of the rape and sexual assault scandal of the Art Briles era will have at Baylor, but we know that recruiting violations and improper players to players during Ron Meyer and Bobby Collins’ tenures at SMU led to the Death Penalty.
The pressure to win has always been high, but as college football grows into a larger and more profitable business, we’ve seen school administrations make quicker decisions to fire a head coach for failing to win enough games. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. For every Urban Meyer or Nick Saban there’s at least one J.B. Whitworth or Charlie Weis.
College football coaches have been, and continue to be, fired for a variety of reasons. Some don’t even make it to the sidelines. Ask Mike Price, George O’Leary and Mike Haywood.
And sometimes a coach and program simply don’t mesh. Think of Rich Rodriguez’s three painful years at Michigan, or Charlie Strong’s three years at Texas.
It’s difficult to compare one coaching tenure to another, and rank the reasoning for one coach’s firing or resignation ahead or behind another, but we tried. And with all that in mind, we explore the 25 worst head coaching hires in college football history.
Note: In the following pages, “career head coaching record” refers to each coach’s collegiate record at all levels, but does not include wins or losses for time served as an NFL or high school head coach.
25. John Pont, Northwestern
- Hired: 1973
- Resigned: 1977
- Record at Northwestern: 12-43 (.218)
- Career head coaching record: 107-141-4 (.425)
It’s not really John Pont’s fault that Northwestern set a Division I-A (FBS) record for consecutive losses. After all, Pont left the Wildcats sideline for to become full-time athletic director two seasons before the 34-game losing streak even started. Plus, when Pont left Indiana for its Big Ten rival, his predecessor at Northwestern, Alex Agase, had guided the team to seven losing seasons in nine years from 1964-72, so it’s not as if Pont torpedoed the program on his own.
However, Pont earned his spot on this list because he took over a once proud college football program that fell into mediocrity, and instead of breathing life it, allowed it to fall into further disrepair.
Northwestern won the Rose Bowl in 1948. The Wildcats spent time ranked in the AP Top 10 in five of Ara Parseghian’s eight seasons at the helm from 1956-63. Agase guided Northwestern into the Top 20 during both the 1970 and 1971 seasons before leaving for Purdue, so each of the three head coaches to lead the program prior to Pont found some level of success on the football field. Pont did not.
A wunderkind that was named the head coach at Miami University in Ohio in 1956 before he turned 30, Pont posted a 43-22-2 record and won two conference titles in seven seasons in Oxford. He won 12 games in two years at Yale, and guided the Hoosiers to the 1967 Rose Bowl, winning the Big Ten title and multiple coach of the year awards.
But Pont could do no better at Northwestern than the 5-6 record his Wildcats posted in his first season. After back-to-back 10-loss campaigns in 1976-77, Pont (who took over AD duties in 1975) removed himself from the job.
Pont then hired Rick Venturi, who was 1-31-1 in three seasons (including 20 straight losses from 1979-80) before Dennis Green (yes, that Dennis Green) finally beat Northern Illinois in the fourth game of his second season as head coach.
But neither Green, nor Francis Peay could stop the bleeding, and Northwestern didn’t produce another winning season until the miracle 1995 Rose Bowl campaign finally helped the program turn the corner.