re: Best Coaching hire in the BCS Era(95-present)

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And what he's done was started by what Holtz did

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Holtz didnt do shite. He maintained the status quo. He was the last of 4 coaches to get fired after either 5 or 6 seasons.

He has a worse winning % than Sparky Woods at USC. His last three seasons were 5-6, 5-6, and 4-7.

Everything USC is today is bec of Spurrier.

Saban to Bama is a no brainer.

Besides what he has accomplished on the field, look at the financial impact he has had.

No one else is close.

Gus because he's always got in the BCS NC game. Gus also sucks because he's never won a BCS and hell, even Chiznik won a BCS NC.

Saban and Harbaugh were both great. I think people forget how terrible Stanford was before he got there. They were potentially the worst major-conference team in the entire country the season before he was hired, and just four years later, they won a BCS bowl by four touchdowns.

I think Tressel is also a really underrated hire. I was only 9 at the time so I basically didn't follow the coaching search at all, but I think I would have lost my mind if I was older and Ohio State hired a coach that had ZERO I-A/NFL head coaching/coordinator experience. Can any of you guys think of any other top-20 program (and by that I mean program, not team. There's a difference) in the past 20 years that hired someone who was not either a head coach in I-A/FBS or considered a top-notch coordinator at an elite school/in the NFL? Probably the closest equivalent to Tressel today is Craig Bohl. He won the last three FCS championships at North Dakota State and was just hired by Wyoming. Think about that.

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Maybe. Maybe Franklin just benefited from the rise of the SEC as a whole (I don't know the answer, just posing the question).

Lets see what he does at PSU.

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What Franklin does at PSU has no bearing on what he did at Vandy. He took the perennial doormat of the SEC and turned them into a quality SEC team.

Vandy's record before Franklin.....

2006 4-8
2007 5-7
2008 7-6
2009 2-10
2010 2-10

Franklin.......
2011 6-7
2012 9-4
2013 9-4

Again, this is Vandy we are talking about. You have to go back to.........well, I have gone back to 1950 trying to find a 9 win Vandy team....and couldn't find one. In '55 they went 8-3 and in '82 they went 8-4.

Seriously, James Franklin pretty much has to make the top SEC list. What he accomplished at Vandy is unquestionably top 10-worthy.

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9. Gus Malzahn-AU

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To be fair, doesn't Nutt get credit for introducing everyone to Malzahn?

Nutt should be on there for Arkansas in the SEC list. Took over a bad program at the time and won the west 3 times. Impressive.

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Only reason this was a "good" hire was because it got us Eli. Outside of that, not a very good hire.

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I don't really get this. When you look at the next couple of hires after him, he was a super duper good hire. But I know that doesn't mean much considering how things went... Still, he had winning seasons in his first five years. No other Ole Miss coach has ever done that I believe. He went to four bowl games in his first five years too (which I believe no other Ole Miss coach has done - they were bowl eligible in that one year they didn't go too). He won 80% of his bowl games (4/5), brought Ole Miss to their first New Year's Day Bowl in over a decade and coached them to their first 10-win season in 30 years. He won 8 games the year before Eli even arrived and had two bowl wins before Eli stepped on campus. Plus, he was worth getting just to get Eli. If LSU's National Championship D was not as awesome as it was, Cutcliffe would have been the only Ole Miss coach to reach the SECCG. He's the only Ole Miss coach that has come close to making it to the SECCG. Eli was a big help, but he got canned way too fast after one 4-7 season where he was trying to replace a QB that played for 4 years. He was conservative at times and had some head scratchers, but his overall numbers were very good for Ole Miss.