Top coaches, Part Deux

As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been thinking long and hard about who the best coaches are in college football right now.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t as easy a task as I thought it might be. There really are more good (or at least mediocre to above average) coaches than bad ones right now, at least roaming the sidelines for BCS schools.

So with that in mind, I thought of a few different ways to do this.

One would be to rate coaches simply on Xs and Os and game management, and see who came out on top there. Also, the coaches who can be perceived to be doing more with less would be high up this list, as well.

Second would be to rate the top coaches right now in terms of the total coaching package — coaching, recruiting, delegating to quality assistants, maintaining a program, being an ambassador for the program, etc. Because just being a good football coach doesn’t guarantee you big-time success, just as being good at only one of these other criteria won’t get you very far.

And I would also be remiss if I didn’t take a look at the career achievement awards — the coaches who have done the best job over the long haul, even if they aren’t necessarily at the top of the heap these days. I’m just going with BCS conferences, because at this point I’m not as familiar as I should be with non-BCS coaches.

So, here are the coaches who, in my opinion, are near the top when it comes to just coaching football.

1. Jim Grobe, Wake Forest
Grobe has an unusual style when it comes to practice and preparation, but what he’s done at Wake Forest has been incredible. He’s compiled a 46-39 record in seven years, which might not be all that impressive until you consider they were 24-54 in the seven years preceding his arrival. I think it’s safe to say there’s only one school in the ACC where it’s more difficult to win in football (Duke) so what he’s done there is pretty special, highlighted by the 2006 ACC Championship.

2. Jim Tressel, Ohio State
Tressel arrived in Columbus to a team that had been long on talent but short on coaching and discipline during the John Cooper era, and promptly won a national championship in his second season. He has since won two more conference titles and played for two more national championships, and has the Buckeyes poised to dominate the Big 10 unchecked for another couple years until Rich Rodriguez gets things rolling at Michigan.

3. Steve Spurrier, South Carolina
Sure, he’s slipped a little bit since returning from the NFL and has finally relinquished play-calling duties, but the Ol Ball Coach still knows how to get it done. The fact that he was able to win at Georgia and beat Kentucky last season with the team he has (not to mention some of the other big wins and near-misses he’s had there) shows you what he can do.

4. Frank Beamer, Virginia Tech
All coaches pay lip service to winning with defense and special teams, but Beamer has lived it. While he’s never exactly had a dynamic offense, it hasn’t mattered because he’s always been so strong everywhere else. Just watch this season when ESPN does one of its obligatory Virginia Tech practice look-ins.

5. Bob Stoops, Oklahoma
Stoops took an Oklahoma program that had fallen on hard times and immediately turned it back into a national powerhouse. There have been plenty of slips over the years, but his time as a defensive coordinator at Kansas State and Florida showed he could coach, and he hasn’t shown any different in a decade as a head coach.

6. Nick Saban, Alabama
The man was able to beat Michigan a few times at Michigan State and nearly won a Big 10 title in his last year there (and had the good sense to get out while the getting was good) won a national title at LSU and brought in most of the major contributors to the team that won this year and has Alabama poised to be a national contender by the 2009 or 2010 season.

7. Rich Rodriguez, Michigan
Yeah, there have been some questionable losses, and he’s not exactly the most high-character guy, but he’s a master of the spread offense. Whether it be as offensive coordinator at Tulane and Clemson or as head coach at West Virginia, he gave teams that didn’t have as much talent an equalizer. He’ll struggle this year at Michigan, but that was a program that needed a change and he was about as good a change (at least in a pure football sense) as they could hope for.

8 (tie). Butch Davis, North Carolina, and Urban Meyer, Florida
Davis built Miami back into a powerhouse before leaving for the NFL, and took North Carolina from laughingstock to competitive laughingstock in just his first season there. He’s a sharp mind, and he’ll have the Tar Heels rolling before long.

10. Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State
Croom is limited by a lot of factors where he is, which is why he will, ultimately, fail there, but there’s no denying he’s a first-class coach and person. He got Mississippi State back into a bowl game on the strength of a strong defense and a few sharp moves, and they’ll be competitive from here on out in an SEC that just keeps getting tougher.

Just missed the cut: Greg Schiano, Rutgers; Mike Bellotti, Oregon; Brett Bielema, Wisconsin; Brian Kelly, Cincinnati; Houston Nutt, Ole Miss; Tommy Tuberville, Auburn; Mike Leach, Texas Tech; Mark Mangino, Kansas; Jim Leavitt, South Florida; Jeff Tedford, California

So there you have it. As I’ve said, this is just one man’s opinion. I’m sure I’m forgetting someone (as I probably will with the other lists).

So now, we try to rank the top current coaches using every factor.

1. Pete Carroll, USC
Carroll isn’t the sharpest football mind in the world (see his time with the Jets and Patriots, in case you need evidence), but he can recruit, he’s a great ambassador for his program, he’s hiring fantastic assistants and he’s doing nothing but winning. The Pac-10 has gotten better in recent years, making things a bit tougher on him, but right now there’s not a guy running a stronger program.

2. Tressel
Has positioned himself at the top of his conference, with little resistance other than from Michigan (who will be a non-factor this year and probably next), and knows how to win.

3. Stoops
Has recruited like a madman and brought himself to the top of the Big 12,  and then watched all potential resistance (Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas State) other than Texas die painful deaths. This program is at the top for as long as he’s on top of his game.

4. Mack Brown, Texas
Another coach not incredibly high on the football IQ level, but knows how to pluck away sharp assistants (as Alabama and Auburn fans found out this year) and recruits unbelievably well. Brought Texas back from the doldrums.

5. Saban
Assuming he sticks around and stays interested (and hopefully avoids some of the snares his predecessors at the Capstone ran into), he’ll have Alabama right up there with the perennial contenders.

6. Meyer
Assuming he stops making up new recruiting tricks for the NCAA to ban, he’ll keep on recruiting well. I kind of question how long he’ll be able to maintain what he’s doing since he seems to be burning a lot of bridges, though.

7. Beamer
Right now has the destination spot in the ACC, and as long as he’s around (which I can’t imagine will be too much longer) the Hokies will be a force to be reckoned with nationally.

8. Mark Richt, Georgia
Took a program that seemed destined to always be an also-ran and has won two conference titles and looks to be preseason No. 1 this year (much more on that as we get closer to the season). Strong recruiter, great guy, can’t do much better.

9. Dennis Erickson, Arizona State
Has won everywhere he’s been. Already has Arizona State poised to challenge USC in the Pac-10, won two national championships at Miami.

10(tie). Rodriguez and Grobe
Rodriguez will struggle this year, but he’s at one of the two Big 10 schools that can actually win and win consistently, and assuming he recruits the kind of players he has been will run roughshod over everyone in conference other than Ohio State, and most everyone out of conference. Grobe won’t win any national titles, but the fact that he can build a competitive program at Wake Forest says a lot about him.

Just missed the cut: Leavitt; Randy Edsall, Connecticut; Tuberville, Les Miles, LSU; Gary Pinkel, Missouri

Sure to be on or very near this list by 2010: Davis; Bo Pelini, Nebraska; Bobby Petrino, Arkansas; Rick Neuheisel, UCLA

And as far as the career achievement award goes, I don’t really want to try to rank them, but at the top would obviously be Penn State’s Joe Paterno and Florida State’s Bobby Bowden.

I’m only including coaches I haven’t mentioned so far, so that only leaves Phil Fulmer of Tennessee and Joe Tiller of Purdue that I can think of, although you could certainly mention current N.C. State coach Tom O’Brien for the job he did while at Boston College.

As I’ve said, I’m sure I left someone out. By all means, let me know about it.

Top coaches

A couple of my co-workers pointed out this coaching power poll by Rivals.com to me the other day, and I was initially aghast to discover they had ranked Les Miles No. 4.

That was largely due to the fact that they didn’t tell me it was a power poll.

Here was his Top-10:
1. Peter Caroll, USC
2. Jim Tressel, Ohio State
3. Urban Meyer, Florida
4. Miles
5. Bob Stoops, Oklahoma
6. Mark Richt, Georgia
7. Frank Beamer, Virginia Tech
8. Jim Grobe, Wake Forest
9. Tommy Tuberville, Auburn
10. Mack Brown, Texas

I, as a guy not particularly interested in recruiting, have never been a regular reader of Rivals, so I’m not too familiar with the criteria they use for determining such things, but overall I can’t argue with it too strongly.

However, it got me to thinking about who the top coaches in college football are.

Obviously, you could easily find half (or more) of them in the SEC now with Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Steve Spurrier (again) and Bobby Petrino having joined the ranks in recent years.

But there are plenty of fabulous coaches in other parts of the country as well.

For my money, it’s hard to find two better pure football coaches than Tressel and Grobe.

Tressel built a I-AA powerhouse at Youngstown State before moving on to Columbus, and has since won one national championship and played for two more.

Grobe, on the other hand, might get more out of less than any coach in the country.

He took a Wake Forest team coming off a 3-8 season (and just one bowl appearance in eight years under Jim Caldwell) and went 6-5 in his first year with a terrible football team (and that’s being generous).

Since, he has led the Deacons to two more bowl appearances and an ACC Championship.

My disenchantment with Miles is well-known by regular readers of my column (or anyone who listened to me rant throughout last season), and I certainly wouldn’t put him among the top football coaches.

Anybody who watched LSU play last year could see they weren’t particularly well coached, but they were talented enough to overcome mistakes most of the time and lucky enough to have started the season ranked highly in an unbelievably wild season.

If we’re talking about the total package (coaching, recruiting, public relations, overseeing the program, etc.), then Miles and other coaches who aren’t quite as strong in the X’s and O’s department (such as Carroll) move up quite a bit.

I had planned on doing my own top-10, but have since decided I might need a little more time to think about what my criteria would be and study up a bit more on everyone before leaving someone out. Look for it some time in the next week.

But I’d love to hear who you think is the best (or worst) coach out there.

SEC Eternalment

If you had given me 200-1 odds I don’t know that I’d have taken Ole Miss making it all the way to the final.

It’s been a wildly entertaining four days in Hoover so far, but man have these games been taking forever or what?

If you ever wanna see a desk guy such as myself sweating bullets, just stop by the office on a night like tonight when a game he has to get in in time for an 11 p.m. color deadline is in the top of the seventh at 10 p.m.

And of course, last night Alabama’s game, which started just a tinge before 7, didn’t end until right at 11, causing us to be a few minutes late.

I haven’t been able to pay close enough attention to what’s happening to cause these games to last so long (outside of the obvious, which has been a lot of scoring), but it’s pretty ridiculous.

The fact that Alabama’s game Wednesday night was supposed to start at 8 p.m. and didn’t start until 10:45, with only one game having gone into extra innings (and just one extra inning at that) is absurd.

Unless I’m just way off base here (and by all means, let me know if I am) the SEC needs to take a look at speeding the action up a bit next year.

A better way to be a couch potato

This is something I wanted to write a column about during the preseason last year, but never could figure out how to make it coherent enough to fit inside a newspaper.

That’s why they make blogs.

I alluded to the fact in yesterday’s column that I’m not a fan of college football’s TV presentation, and let me try to illustrate that.

It’s true that more games are available for viewing than ever before, but unless you have the money for expanded satellite or cable packages or the Pay-per-view package, it’s difficult for the average person to get a chance to form an opinion on everyone.

To wit, two of the top conferences in the country — the Pac-10 and Big 12 — are virtually inaccessible to anyone east of the Mississippi due to ABC’s virtual monopoly on the major conferences.

If all you want to watch is the SEC, you’re in fine shape with their contracts with CBS, ESPN and Raycom, but in an era when if you’re in the national title hunt you have to pay attention to everyone, the current system makes it difficult to do so.

ABC has its regional games every Saturday at 2:30, usually featuring the ACC, Big East, Big 12 and maybe the Big 10 if one of them dares kick off after noon. So if you’re sitting at your house in Opelika, you’re most likely getting the ACC game in that time slot.

So what if the Big 12 game is huge? And the ACC game is trash (as many were last year)? Unless you have Gameplan or go to a sports bar, you can’t watch it.

And the Pac-10 is an even bigger problem. With their time zone issue, most of their games kick off around 5:30 our time to a West Coast-only audience. ABC’s prime-time package over the last couple years has addressed this to a degree, but quite often after the first few weeks of the season you’re just watching USC beat up on one of the weak sisters of their conference, or some random Big 12 game that doesn’t mean much.

A perfect example of this is Oct. 6 of last year. While SEC fans had little to complain about with a CBS doubleheader of Tennessee-Georgia and LSU-Florida, there was another little game that goes by the name of the Red River Shootout happening in Dallas.

Could viewers here on the East Coast watch it if they so chose? Nope.

While the vast majority of the country west of Montgomery or so got Oklahoma-Texas, parts of the Southeast (the Opelika-Auburn area included) were stuck with Florida State-N.C. State, and the northeast got a Penn State-Iowa stinker.

And things like that happen all the time.

Despite all its problems, this is one area I feel the NCAA should address (when I brought this up to my dad, the biggest NCAA hater this side of Mark “No NCAA” Townsend he nearly disowned me).

For one, if FOX is going to show college football’s biggest games of the season, including the national championship game, it should at least show some games during the regular season to allow its broadcast, studio and production crews to have some idea what’s going on (and if you didn’t notice over the last two years that it was the opposite at times you weren’t paying attention).

NBC can’t possibly be making as much money as before with Notre Dame, so what would stop them from picking up something?

So here’s my plan:

CBS can keep its exclusive SEC deal, but the time has come for ABC to give up a couple of conferences, and I think this could work perfectly.

Let FOX take the Big 12 and Big East (they could use regional doubleheaders and work games around their fall baseball and playoff schedule), and let NBC take the Pac-10 (to run in the 6 p.m. slot after their Notre Dame games, and in doubleheaders when Notre Dame isn’t at home).

That leaves ABC with the Big 10 (whom you’d have to pry out of their cold, dead hands) and the ACC, which is plenty good for ratings purposes.

So if you do that, college football fans will have four games to choose from every Saturday in the regular 2:30 p.m. timeslot when deciding what games to watch, and a much better chance to be informed about every team as the BCS race heats up over the course of the season. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.

BCS

ESPN’s Mark Schlabach has an interesting column up ranking the 10 BCS national champions.

I wish I’d thought of it first, because I’d have it virtually the same. Here were his rankings:

1. 2001 Miami
2. 2004 USC
3. 1999 Florida State
4. 2005 Texas
5. 2000 Oklahoma
6. 1998 Tennessee
7. 2003 LSU
8. 2006 Florida
9. 2002 Ohio State
10. 2007 LSU

I guess the only question you could have would be his criteria. If we’re going by sheer dominance, the only real change I might make would be moving Texas (who destroyed everyone in the regular season except Ohio State and a mini-scare at Oklahoma State) ahead of Florida State (who had close calls against Georgia Tech and Clemson, plus tough games with good Miami and Florida teams). My main changes would be from 5-10 (and I apologize to fans of 2003 LSU and 2006 Florida, I was in situations those years that prevented me from paying close attention to what they were doing, so I could be a little off on them).

1. Miami (this is the best team ever, or at least the second best)
2. USC (probably the third best team ever)
3. Texas (the funny thing is if Vince Young had played as well the year before that might’ve been the best team of all-time)
4. Florida State (a superb team that kind of left a bitter taste in your mouth for some reason or other, maybe the fact that so many Seminole teams before them should’ve gone undefeated)
5. Tennessee (I still dislike this team immensely, and they wouldn’t have beaten Ohio State that year - or Florida State if they had had Chris Weinke in the game - but that was a very good team that knew how to win close games, and got some luck along the way)
6. Oklahoma (they had probably the most impressive three-game run of wins in the history of college football during October of that season (over top 10 Texas in the Cotton Bowl, at Top 5 Kansas State and at home over No. 1 Nebraska, but they coasted to the finish line, nearly losing to Texas A&M and Oklahoma State and won an obscenely boring title game over Florida State - when they should have been playing Miami)
7. Ohio State (Say what you will, but that team played defense and ran the ball as well as anyone, save for maybe the 98 Vols)
8. 2007 LSU (I don’t like the fact that they won the title with two losses, but this team was as talented as any on this list and won in spite of bad coaching)
9. 2003 LSU (Underwhelming offensively, but their defense was fantastic. Without that weird home loss to Florida in midseason would’ve avoided at least some of the controversy that season)
10. 2006 Florida (Would put them higher, but as far as I’m concerned they were only the third best team in the SEC - behind LSU and Auburn - and benefitted from an Ohio State team that hadn’t played anyone that could run and came into the game overconfident)

Disagree? Let me know.