30 best college football coaching hires this century
By Nick Villano
From Nick Saban at Alabama to Dabo Swinney at Clemson, let’s rank the best college football coaching hires of the century.
Between the need for recruiting, representing communities on a national scale, replacing your best players every three-four years, being a college coach is a 24/7 job. That’s on top of, you know, coaching the team on Saturdays.
A coach can turn a struggling program into a powerhouse seemingly overnight. They get transfers to buy into their philosophy. They get five-star recruits to sign on the dotted line without seeing how they fit in the offense. They make the hard decisions on nearly a daily basis. Being a college coach is constant work.
With that said, there are some great hires, and there are some bad hires. Just look at some of the greatest schools in the history of the game. USC has been struggling to find its identity after its championship coach left for the NFL. Texas has been trying for years to find the right replacement for Mack Brown. Michigan is still not sure if they have the right guy, but fans seem pretty certain they are frustrated with the process.
Hiring the right football coach is the number one job of a school’s athletic director. Making the wrong move at that position leads to people getting fired. However, hiring the right coach could be a gravy train that lasts for a decade. These 30 schools made the right decisions at the right time. Sometimes it was getting a slam dunk to sign on the dotted line, while other times they took a chance on a lesser-known name that worked out in spades.
Ranking the 30 best college football coaching hires of the century
30. Greg Schiano – Rutgers
In 1978, the Rutgers Scarlett Knights were led to its first bowl game. It was a Garden State bowl loss to Arizona State. The State University of New Jersey just had a rough go of it after playing the first college football game in history almost a century prior. After Frank R. Burns led them to a 9-3 record that season, Rutgers missed out on bowl games for the next 27 years.
The Scarlett Knights went through Dick Anderson, Doug Graber, and Terry Shea before they finally hired Greg Schiano after he led the University of Miami’s defense that included stars like Ed Reed and William Joseph. He was only in South Florida for two seasons before Rutgers came calling.
He joined Rutgers for the 2001 season, and as with the coaches before him, it started pretty bad. He won three games in his first two seasons. However, it seemed like things started to improve in year three. Most universities wouldn’t celebrate five wins, but most universities aren’t Rutgers.
Fast forward to 2005 and Rutgers was bowl-eligible again. Brian Leonard and Ray Rice provided a one-two punch that was intriguing to most college football fans. The offense was really coming together nicely while Schiano put his stamp on the defense. They lost the bowl game, ironically again against Arizona State, but a foundation was in place.
The next season would be the greatest in the history of the school. They went off to start the season 9-0 in the Big East. They just beat the third-ranked Louisville Cardinals at home, and this seemed like a legit team. They were ranked in the top 10 before an upset loss on the road to Cincinnati. They also had an epic 3OT matchup with West Virginia that ended on a missed two-point conversion.
Rutgers never got the same success after Schiano left for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Schiano never saw the same success away from the Garden State. But, now he’s back and trying to revitalize Rutgers once again.