He moved to the triple wins (as in only 3 wins per year). Which included losses to the Citadel, Northern Illinois, and Temple and he capped off his last full year with back to back shut outs for a combined 100-0.
It’s absolutely baffling how he ruined our public image so much that I’ve unironically seen some people say they thought we were a historically mediocre-to-subpar program. Like, we’re certainly no blue blood, but we’re a historically great program and it’s insane that Collins was so bad he was able to erase a lot of our history in people’s eyes.
I mean, certainly no legendary coaches have coached at GT. Nope, just can’t think of one. Couldn’t have been any guys who have awards named after them.
GT and Wofford both moved away from the triple option at about the same time. Neither one has had great success since but it really killed the program for Wofford it seems
I really hate seeing the demise of the Triple Option, but now that CFB is officially just a minor league for the NFL I don't expect a revival anytime soon. Which is a shame because it could still work.
It would work like gangbusters at a school like Iowa. Even at GT (which already has built in recruiting limitations) it was successful in spite of some serious institutional disfunction.
Willingham crated the program, went 11-47 including a winless season. Seemed to go out of his way to drain any iota of hope or enthusiasm. He was the coach when I was a student, it was awful.
Jimmy Lake has an argument, just because he took over from Petersen fresh off of 3 NY6 bowls, went 4-8 including a loss to Montana, and then his successor immediately went 25-3
It didn't seem surprising at the time because it was Willingham, but looking back, it's absolutely effing wild that a program as good as Washington went 0-12. It really takes a special brand of awful to pull that off.
Mike Riley actually. I've still never seen an O-line as terrible as Riley's last year on any team in my life. Bishop Sycamore had a better showing.
Mother fucker lost by 30 points and gave up 6 sacks to a 3-man rush from 4-5 Minnesota. Finished the year with a -128 point differential playing mostly B1G West teams.
Not just any 20 players! Most of them were on the 2 deep including a good chunk of their lines. We got pushed around like a high school team. That was also the game Frost was more concerned about looking hard in the cold temps rather than playing football. I didn’t think he was the guy already at the point but that game removed all doubt. It’s a shame we had to tolerate two more seasons of the guy.
>That was also the game Frost was more concerned about looking hard in the cold temps rather than playing football.
[Ummm....](https://j.gifs.com/yw1dR1.gif)
My gut was to say Riley, because it was clear in year one it was a mistake, but when you look at who left the program in worse shape at the end of their tenure, it was Frost. The talent and development of his final roster is so shockingly bad.
Pruitt fucked over Heupel so bad. Lost us like 28 scholarships, 36 official visits, 40 WEEKS of unofficial visits, can't host recruits for TEN games, and made it to where our coaches have to go no contact with all recruits for SEVEN MONTHS over a 5 year period.
Couldn't tell you. I just know that there's a 28 week ban on any communication (texts, calls, visits, tweets). That's a massive uphill battle. All this considered, I'm pretty happy with our recruiting classes. #10-12ish with 2 5 stars every seasons pretty good. I expect recruiting to really take off in 2026 when these restrictions are over
Came here to find this. My gut reaction was Dooley. That guy was in over his head.
But then I thought about Pruitt. That guy was just incompetent. I mean, the first thing he did was tell Trevor Lawrence that he wouldn't fit Pruitt's system and he needed to look elsewhere.
How many times did we have to see the graphic saying Lawrence grew up a Tennessee fan and idolized Peyton Manning? 🙄
Thanks Pruitt.
Edit - it was Butch Jones that screwed it up with TL. But I'm leaving it as is. All 3 of them sucked! It was like one long nightmare that never ended...
Yup. You're right, it was Jones.
Good Lord we've had such a bad run of coaches they just all run together into one continuous nightmare.
Can we just lump those 3 together and call it a day?
Crazy that one school has legitimate claim to the least competent coach(es) and the most competent in history. Gotta go way back for the former. Unbelievable how much Snyder changed the program's/university's future.
> Crazy that one school has legitimate claim to the least competent coach(es) and the most competent in history
Hardly anyone outside Kstate truly realizes how bad the former part of this is. Yeah some big 8/12 fans do, but outside that, extremely little.
We were *worse* than KU has been the last (barring the last few years) 20 years.... but for over twice as long.
All time it’s probably Stan Parrish, who went 2-30-1 with us. My dad was a walk-on on the team at the time, and he had a few stories of that incompetence on display. Parrish was a solid QBs coach and OC after he resigned, but was never cut out to be a head coach.
The one story I tell a lot was from my dad’s freshman season and the start of the year meeting. One player was going to be late because his car broke down, and he called ahead to the secretary what was going on and that he would find a way to get to the meeting. When the player got there, Parrish made an example out of him for being late and kicked him out of the meeting, not sure if the player was kicked off the team at that point, but if he wasn’t, he left on his own accord. He ended up playing at Coffeyville Community College before transferring to Nebraska, where he was an All-Big 8 player (I believe a linebacker). I wish I remember the player’s name, but my dad said he was the most talented player on the roster at K-State.
Edit: Tim Jackson was the player, and he was a safety. He ended up playing six or so years of professional ball, whether in the CFL, NFL practice squads, or other leagues.
Let's stick with that lol.
But if I had to choose *just* one all-time, I'd pick Doug Weaver (Stan Parrish is a close second). Weaver went 8-60-1 with *three* winless seasons in a tenure that somehow lasted seven years. Also got shut out SIX years in a row by KU. Not by Nebraska. Not by Oklahoma...KU.
The cherry on top? He said on the record that he flat-out didn't believe in recruiting. Give him any warm bodies and he legitimately believed he could just simply will elite performances out of them. If that doesn't define all-time incompetence, nothing does.
I'm just waiting for Ohio State fans to name the 90's coach who won 70% of his games, finished a season 2nd, had a Heisman trophy winner, but went 2-10-1 against Michigan and that is why he is the scum of the earth.
I remember the era well and I'd argue Cooper was better than Earle Bruce. Ohioan's hadn't moved en mass to the south in the 1980s and local high schools were pumping out talent at the same level as most southern states. Bruce had a who's who of coaches come through every year but could only manage 9-3 year after year. When he was fired, he left Cooper a bunch of 'slow white guys'.
Cooper revitalized recruiting. He looked nationally, bringing in good talent year after year. We all know his struggles against Michigan and in Bowls but he left behind a program that allowed Jim Tressel to win a national championship in his second year. If we had another Bruce at the helm, the modern Big Ten might look very different.
As a human being, there is no contest. Cooper wins over Bruce easy. If you aren't aware, let's just say Urban learned his behavior somewhere. Bruce was his mentor.
Cooper was not a bad coach. He just couldn’t beat Michigan.
If you want to find a bad coach you’d probably have to go back to the beginning of the football program at OSU.
It's David Edwards. 1-7-1 in his only season in 1897.
Edit: in the "modern era", it probably is Coop. He has the lowest winning percentage since Woody took over in 1951, excepting Fickell's one year as interim. He has the worst record against Michigan. He has the worst bowl record. He has no national titles. It's him or Earle, and Earle has him beat in several key metrics.
Edit #2: and he finished #2 twice, in 1996 and 1998. His run from 1993-1998 was incredible, only missing a title. But the beginning and the end of his tenure were really bad.
Once again here to say that Willie Taggarts was incapable of running football practices. So ignoring records, I would vote that makes him all time terrible. Love the dude. Great guy. Horrible HC.
In hindsight I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between Fran and Jimbo. Praised like gods upon their arrivals. Stubborn and refusal to change. Bad offenses that only work if your defense can keep the game within a TD. Baffling assistant coach hires.
Literally the only positive out of his 2 years was recruiting KJ, Boyd, and Burks And I have no doubt he'd have wasted them too if given another season.
Ears Whitworth is the only Bama coach to go winless since the 1800s.
He's the only Bama coach since 1917 not to have at least one 10-win season.
(Not counting our 1918 coach, because he didn't coach a game because of WWI, and not counting Mike Price, since he didn't coach a game because of idiocy)
It was a super odd hire for Auburn that never made any sense. And this even a hindsight thing, even at the time when he got hired everyone collectively was like “…wtf?”
According to AD Allen Greene at the time, him and Harsin “hit it off” in the hot tub at a function years prior and kept in touch until the Auburn job opened.
Other than that, yeah, zero ties to the University or region in general. The hire came from out of nowhere, I remember getting the notification that he was a new candidate the same day that we hired him.
I think it was also Greene trying to show he wasn't giving in to the boosters. He was trying to make a statement but it blew up in everyone's faces, including his own...
Not many in Boise were really surprised to see Harsin fail at Auburn, but I just expected he would struggle on the sidelines and not on the recruiting trail. Recruiting was the one thing he did really well at Boise State. 7 of the program's 10 best HS recruits were guys Harsin got, so to see the minimal effort (if you want to call it that) he put in recruiting at Auburn was really surprising.
Idk if it was just a southern/culture thing, or hurt feelings over the rumors about him and the staffer that came from Boise, or whatever. But I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as abrasive and seemingly checked out at a higher end program….
He and his wife were known assholes in the Boise area. People fucking hated them, especially his wife who would pull the “do you know who my husband is?” card.
Not surprised he failed and was disliked at Auburn.
Two bad seasons plus ruining and driving away the best QB Auburn has had in a long time.
Say what you will about Bo Nix but he was the best QB prospect Auburn has had in a while.
Well that's easy - Herm Edwards is the only one who burned our program to the ground and did damage that outlasted his tenure. To add insult to injury, he's still cashing paychecks because his close friend, the AD, wouldn't fire him with cause.
worst winning percentage in Texas history. One of two coaches with a losing record at Texas. I was optimistic when they hired him that he would bring a change in attitude the program needed but he was pretty full of shit.
Nazi Germany was hosting the Olympics the last time a Texas head coach finished their stint with a losing record. Strong was abominable. My favorite—if you can call it that—part of his tenure was when the players came out in support of Strong after that debacle in Lawrence, only for TCU to smack them around the very next game. That was the all-time low point for Texas football during the last 15 years of mediocrity.
I was not opptimistic at all when they hired him. He had shown at Louisville that yes he could put a nice record together against inferior opponents, but he couldn't win the big games and he vastly under utilized the talent he had on offense. It seemed like more of the same from the later Mack years but with better PR.
Real talk tho Strong’s guys are the only reason Herman had one good season. My mildly hot take is strong recruited some good guys that needed half decent Xs and Os, which they finally got. But Herman couldn’t recruit and field a competent team when it was all on him.
He was in over his head. Definitely not cut out for this type of gig. I remember Tom Herman expressing disbelief when a reporter asked if Texas could make a bowl game.
Pretty amazing to hold this title for two schools. Apparently the man is the walking embodiment of horns down. For the love of God, Buffalo, NEVER HIRE THIS MAN!!!
I think most Texas fans were happy with the hire—I know I was excited about it after Strong's last two seasons with Louisville, and I thought Texas needed a defensive-minded head coach at the time. I felt like the team went soft after Muschamp left. It ended up being a match made in hell.
Absolutely embarrassing. That's a leadership problem. Easy to blame players for stupid decisions but some of those decisions only happen due to poor leadership.
I saw that and good for him honestly. He’s a good guy and a good Coug thrust into a bad situation that he was I’ll equipped to handle. I’m glad he’s getting a shot at Cal Poly
Honestly, probably Taggert. He just didn’t stick around long enough to get exposed on our dime.
But Oregon has had a long track record of solid coaches, even pre-Belotti/Brooks, it was mostly solid guys just outgunned by the bigger schools.
I mean, Taggart while only here for a year still improved the program from where Helfrich left it.
Add on something like the absolute fumble of the fact that Helf didn't recruit Tua *at all* the sheer incompetence from that dude is wild.
Embree gets the dishonorable mention.
But Dorrell took a suffering irrelevancy of a program and turned it into a joke. He gave us the worst season in program history. He couldn’t recruit. He couldn’t develop. He couldn’t game coach. And he couldn’t pick assistants who could do any of the above either.
Willingham and Bob Davie can do some Billy Madison style Decathlon to decide.
A lot of people will say Willingham quickly or even Weis, but those Bob Davie years were fucking painful.
Somehow there was still hope with Weis and Willingham.
There was never faith in Bob Davie.
Probably Richard Voris, who coached 3 seasons (1958-1960).
He lost his 1st game, won his 2nd, and then lost his final 28 games for a 1-29 record across 3 seasons. Yes, UVA had major admin issues at the time. But he was also 6 years removed from a 4-year stretch of 31-7 when he started.
He was so bad that the next coach won ACC COTY for going 4-6 in 1961
For Rutgers, it’s absolutely Chris Ash. Just a total dud in every sense of the word. I personally knew a high 4 star kid who played 10 minutes away from campus, and Chris Ash never once visited him. He’d send assistants, but he told the kid that he has to come to campus to see him. Meanwhile Urban Meyer and Greg Schiano who were at OSU each went to his HS three or four times.
I will forever be confused about that hire. His one really good season at Southern Miss was when he had a guy named Favre at quarterback. The only thing I can think of that makes sense is that we beat y’all and your AD was like “We gotta get that guy.”
Johnny Griffith didn’t have two Super Bowl MVPs on his roster and a slew of other future NFL talent. I get where you’re coming from but few coaches in the history of college football have done less with more than Ray Goff and thats my pick.
Based purely on wins and losses you could give it to a handful of coaches pre-Spurrier. Post-Spurrier, I’d probably give it to Muschamp. If Napier goes 5-7 or worse this year, it’ll be him, though.
I'd go with McElwain. I hated Muschamp's on-field coaching, but we were still mostly decent. Shark fucker had our players going to personal trainers because he apparently didn't care about strength training at all
Tucker was a disaster as a person but a pretty mediocre coach. I’d say it’s John L Smith. His teams got worse every single year and he cratered a program that had already struggled under Bobby Williams.
I'd argue Tucker is impossible to quantify because he wasn't here for very long. In hindsight, it's easy to say he just got lucky in 2021, but Walker is what allowed him to call plays a certain way. You could tell MSU had practiced plays for critical moments. That was worth something. We'll never really know how 2023 would've went. I still think 2023 was a bridge year to get back into a bowl game and 2024 would be "do or die." But we'll never know.
If anything, the incompetence lies with him sexually harassing a team vendor, not with anything that's actually football-related.
Darrell Hazell. Bro has the worst multiseason win percentage for ANY Purdue coach. And that is saying something considering Purdue is more of a basketball school lol
To be fair to Johnelle, he had 4 wins (2 SEC wins) in his loan season as "coach", something it took Morris 2 seasons to reach (with 0 SEC or P5 wins). The last 12 years have not been fun.
Clay Helton-He had many problems. He let recruiting fall off, he stuck around too long, his teams were undisciplined, he kept bad assistants too long, the same problems repeatably came up, , he gave the same excuses every lose, and he was overall mediocre. Even the wins weren't good enough because you could always tell they required more effort than they should every single week. The worst thing he did though was he made USC fans stop caring. It is a special kind of hell to have a coach not win enough to make you happy but not lose enough to get fired.
Clay was a veritable genius in comparison to Paul Hackett. Paul literally said upon being fired after year three, “It takes 4 years to learn my system”. How could that ever work for a college and who is stupid enough to think that would be a plausible excuse.
I can't decide what was worse about Miami football 2013. A winless record or the uniforms they debuted.
https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/7/24/4554258/miami-ohio-redhawks-football-new-uniforms
For "recent" history, it's probably Howard Schnellenberger. I've always known him to be a complete buffoon growing up, so it's always strange when I see Miami people talk so glowingly about him. Because whatever he had down there didn't make it up to Oklahoma.
There might be some other coach more deserving of that title for Oklahoma, but I'll leave that to a historian of the program to figure out.
This is one of the wildest things in CFB to me, the fact that a coach that built and put one program on the map (Miami) was a complete disaster for another program (OU).
Ellis Johnson. Southern Miss was a perennial success and was coming off of eighteen straight winning seasons (the fifth longest streak in FBS history), a 12-2 finish that saw them ranked in the top 20, a program that was on the rise at the right time for realignment, and a football team with a long and proud history of being one of the best mid major programs to ever exist with two Division II national championships before moving up to Division I as an independent and having decades of success playing as a de facto SEC team in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, including fielding two future NFL Hall of Famers. Then Ellis Johnson was hired in 2012. Southern Miss went 0-11 in his first season, and then went 1-10 in 2013. He single handedly ruined a once proud program and they have never recovered.
Tyrone Willingham.
Agreed
Only coach in this thread for two different schools
Tommy Tuberville has a strong argument
[удалено]
Add Congress to the list
Same
I don't think anyone can top him for you guys lol
Oh, that's an easy one.
We've had some bad coaches record wise here and there but Geoff takes the cake for incompetent.
Is that the guy who took over for Paul Johnson and moved on from the triple option?
He moved to the triple wins (as in only 3 wins per year). Which included losses to the Citadel, Northern Illinois, and Temple and he capped off his last full year with back to back shut outs for a combined 100-0.
GT usually isn't in a top comment here in r/CFB but I had a good feeling about this one.
Was wondering how far down I would have to scroll. …not far!
I will never get a to go drink from Waffle House.
It’s absolutely baffling how he ruined our public image so much that I’ve unironically seen some people say they thought we were a historically mediocre-to-subpar program. Like, we’re certainly no blue blood, but we’re a historically great program and it’s insane that Collins was so bad he was able to erase a lot of our history in people’s eyes.
I mean, certainly no legendary coaches have coached at GT. Nope, just can’t think of one. Couldn’t have been any guys who have awards named after them.
He was crocs with socks personified. I have no love for tech, but I want to at least have a competitive team to play against.
Don’t you insult crocs like that
GT and Wofford both moved away from the triple option at about the same time. Neither one has had great success since but it really killed the program for Wofford it seems
I really hate seeing the demise of the Triple Option, but now that CFB is officially just a minor league for the NFL I don't expect a revival anytime soon. Which is a shame because it could still work.
It would work like gangbusters at a school like Iowa. Even at GT (which already has built in recruiting limitations) it was successful in spite of some serious institutional disfunction.
He made Bill Lewis look good.
Idk, I thought heisman was a good coach
Why did I have a feeling a Georgia Tech flair would be one of the top posts
Who are you referring to? Geoff Collins?
We don't speak his name, but since you did, yes.
Willingham crated the program, went 11-47 including a winless season. Seemed to go out of his way to drain any iota of hope or enthusiasm. He was the coach when I was a student, it was awful. Jimmy Lake has an argument, just because he took over from Petersen fresh off of 3 NY6 bowls, went 4-8 including a loss to Montana, and then his successor immediately went 25-3
I see you, fellow willingham enjoyer
Willingham was the worst coach of all time
I was also there for 0-12. Dark times.
It didn't seem surprising at the time because it was Willingham, but looking back, it's absolutely effing wild that a program as good as Washington went 0-12. It really takes a special brand of awful to pull that off.
🤝
Do I really need to say it?
Best 3-9 team ever!
Don’t say Scott frost…don’t say Scott frost….
Mike Riley actually. I've still never seen an O-line as terrible as Riley's last year on any team in my life. Bishop Sycamore had a better showing. Mother fucker lost by 30 points and gave up 6 sacks to a 3-man rush from 4-5 Minnesota. Finished the year with a -128 point differential playing mostly B1G West teams.
Frost lost to a Minnesota team that was missing like 20 players to Covid.
Not just any 20 players! Most of them were on the 2 deep including a good chunk of their lines. We got pushed around like a high school team. That was also the game Frost was more concerned about looking hard in the cold temps rather than playing football. I didn’t think he was the guy already at the point but that game removed all doubt. It’s a shame we had to tolerate two more seasons of the guy.
>That was also the game Frost was more concerned about looking hard in the cold temps rather than playing football. [Ummm....](https://j.gifs.com/yw1dR1.gif)
Mike Riley was a huge head scratcher of a hire.
By win percentage alone in the modern era it's frost and it's not even close
No buddy we won’t make you say it- you’re safe now.
Bill Jennings perhaps?
Not Callahan or Riley. They at least won 9 games once. Frost is the answer.
My gut was to say Riley, because it was clear in year one it was a mistake, but when you look at who left the program in worse shape at the end of their tenure, it was Frost. The talent and development of his final roster is so shockingly bad.
...he's a politician now...
“We had trouble throwing because it’s too windy in Lubbock” - senator incompetent head coach
The stock trader?
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
Thanks I hate it
There are scum bag politicians, then there is Tommy T.
Jeremy Pruitt. Derek Dooley was also a poor coach, but Pruitt even sucked at cheating.
Pruitt fucked over Heupel so bad. Lost us like 28 scholarships, 36 official visits, 40 WEEKS of unofficial visits, can't host recruits for TEN games, and made it to where our coaches have to go no contact with all recruits for SEVEN MONTHS over a 5 year period.
I know we're down 2 recruits this year and next year. That's finally the end of scholarship reductions. How much no contact time do we have left?
Couldn't tell you. I just know that there's a 28 week ban on any communication (texts, calls, visits, tweets). That's a massive uphill battle. All this considered, I'm pretty happy with our recruiting classes. #10-12ish with 2 5 stars every seasons pretty good. I expect recruiting to really take off in 2026 when these restrictions are over
That’s frankly incredible given those restrictions…
Jesus Christ wtf did he do? Pruitt must've hated yall for that to happen, almost like sabatoge
Gave recruits $20k in McDonalds bags. Many times.
*chick fil a bags
Ah so totally cool now… just ahead of his time is all… 😀
He cheated and failed to win while cheating. You would be hard pressed to fail harder than he did.
Almost like he was an Alabama coach or something…
Came here to find this. My gut reaction was Dooley. That guy was in over his head. But then I thought about Pruitt. That guy was just incompetent. I mean, the first thing he did was tell Trevor Lawrence that he wouldn't fit Pruitt's system and he needed to look elsewhere. How many times did we have to see the graphic saying Lawrence grew up a Tennessee fan and idolized Peyton Manning? 🙄 Thanks Pruitt. Edit - it was Butch Jones that screwed it up with TL. But I'm leaving it as is. All 3 of them sucked! It was like one long nightmare that never ended...
Pretty sure it was Butch Jones that botched Lawrence’s recruitment to TN, not Pruitt.
Yup. You're right, it was Jones. Good Lord we've had such a bad run of coaches they just all run together into one continuous nightmare. Can we just lump those 3 together and call it a day?
Modern era? Ron Prince lol
All time Prince doesn't even crack the top 20
Crazy that one school has legitimate claim to the least competent coach(es) and the most competent in history. Gotta go way back for the former. Unbelievable how much Snyder changed the program's/university's future.
GoatSnyder
> Crazy that one school has legitimate claim to the least competent coach(es) and the most competent in history Hardly anyone outside Kstate truly realizes how bad the former part of this is. Yeah some big 8/12 fans do, but outside that, extremely little. We were *worse* than KU has been the last (barring the last few years) 20 years.... but for over twice as long.
All time it’s probably Stan Parrish, who went 2-30-1 with us. My dad was a walk-on on the team at the time, and he had a few stories of that incompetence on display. Parrish was a solid QBs coach and OC after he resigned, but was never cut out to be a head coach.
Story time :)
The one story I tell a lot was from my dad’s freshman season and the start of the year meeting. One player was going to be late because his car broke down, and he called ahead to the secretary what was going on and that he would find a way to get to the meeting. When the player got there, Parrish made an example out of him for being late and kicked him out of the meeting, not sure if the player was kicked off the team at that point, but if he wasn’t, he left on his own accord. He ended up playing at Coffeyville Community College before transferring to Nebraska, where he was an All-Big 8 player (I believe a linebacker). I wish I remember the player’s name, but my dad said he was the most talented player on the roster at K-State. Edit: Tim Jackson was the player, and he was a safety. He ended up playing six or so years of professional ball, whether in the CFL, NFL practice squads, or other leagues.
Let's stick with that lol. But if I had to choose *just* one all-time, I'd pick Doug Weaver (Stan Parrish is a close second). Weaver went 8-60-1 with *three* winless seasons in a tenure that somehow lasted seven years. Also got shut out SIX years in a row by KU. Not by Nebraska. Not by Oklahoma...KU. The cherry on top? He said on the record that he flat-out didn't believe in recruiting. Give him any warm bodies and he legitimately believed he could just simply will elite performances out of them. If that doesn't define all-time incompetence, nothing does.
I'm just waiting for Ohio State fans to name the 90's coach who won 70% of his games, finished a season 2nd, had a Heisman trophy winner, but went 2-10-1 against Michigan and that is why he is the scum of the earth.
You gotta go back to before the forward pass to find an answer other than him lol.
I remember the era well and I'd argue Cooper was better than Earle Bruce. Ohioan's hadn't moved en mass to the south in the 1980s and local high schools were pumping out talent at the same level as most southern states. Bruce had a who's who of coaches come through every year but could only manage 9-3 year after year. When he was fired, he left Cooper a bunch of 'slow white guys'. Cooper revitalized recruiting. He looked nationally, bringing in good talent year after year. We all know his struggles against Michigan and in Bowls but he left behind a program that allowed Jim Tressel to win a national championship in his second year. If we had another Bruce at the helm, the modern Big Ten might look very different. As a human being, there is no contest. Cooper wins over Bruce easy. If you aren't aware, let's just say Urban learned his behavior somewhere. Bruce was his mentor.
Cooper was not a bad coach. He just couldn’t beat Michigan. If you want to find a bad coach you’d probably have to go back to the beginning of the football program at OSU.
It's David Edwards. 1-7-1 in his only season in 1897. Edit: in the "modern era", it probably is Coop. He has the lowest winning percentage since Woody took over in 1951, excepting Fickell's one year as interim. He has the worst record against Michigan. He has the worst bowl record. He has no national titles. It's him or Earle, and Earle has him beat in several key metrics. Edit #2: and he finished #2 twice, in 1996 and 1998. His run from 1993-1998 was incredible, only missing a title. But the beginning and the end of his tenure were really bad.
I mean, we have not had too many bad coaches in the modern era- I guess it might be Earl Bruce? Who still had a winning record I believe.
Hard to choose just one
Gotta be Charlie Weis, right? He stocked the team with transfers then you couldn’t even get back to 85 scholarships because of class size limits.
Weis inherited the mess from Turner Gill. Gill would be my vote.
Once again here to say that Willie Taggarts was incapable of running football practices. So ignoring records, I would vote that makes him all time terrible. Love the dude. Great guy. Horrible HC.
I mean he did try to kill multiple Oregon players during summer work outs.
Not just practice recruits showed up for camps/ OVs and the doors to the Moore were *locked*. Just an all around blunder of a hire.
Seems like Willie Taggart leaving a program is a path to a great coach. Just have to embrace the suck first. 😂
Dennis. Franchione.
Don’t even need a flair lol
In hindsight I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between Fran and Jimbo. Praised like gods upon their arrivals. Stubborn and refusal to change. Bad offenses that only work if your defense can keep the game within a TD. Baffling assistant coach hires.
Gifted Reggie Fn McNeal and didn’t do squat
We really lucked into our best coach ever with Bama taking him off our hands
Chad Morris
Fuck Chad Morris. Even worse than Jack Crowe.
Hell yeah brother
Literally the only positive out of his 2 years was recruiting KJ, Boyd, and Burks And I have no doubt he'd have wasted them too if given another season.
I would argue it’s Cam Cameron. Imagine having Antwaan Randle El and going 18-37 with zero bowl games.
Penn State and Iowa fans don’t understand the question
Oh we’ve got some doozies but it’s been close to 50 years since they coached.
J.B. Whitworth
877-CASHNOW Wait, shit….
I was thinking it, so was glad you executed it.
more incompetent than mike price?
Ears Whitworth is the only Bama coach to go winless since the 1800s. He's the only Bama coach since 1917 not to have at least one 10-win season. (Not counting our 1918 coach, because he didn't coach a game because of WWI, and not counting Mike Price, since he didn't coach a game because of idiocy)
I thought about going Mike Price, but he never coached a game so I went with Ears
Harsin was one of the most incompetent coaches I’ve ever seen regardless of program.
It was a super odd hire for Auburn that never made any sense. And this even a hindsight thing, even at the time when he got hired everyone collectively was like “…wtf?”
According to AD Allen Greene at the time, him and Harsin “hit it off” in the hot tub at a function years prior and kept in touch until the Auburn job opened. Other than that, yeah, zero ties to the University or region in general. The hire came from out of nowhere, I remember getting the notification that he was a new candidate the same day that we hired him.
I think it was also Greene trying to show he wasn't giving in to the boosters. He was trying to make a statement but it blew up in everyone's faces, including his own...
You should see him in a hot tub though.
Just subscribe to his OnlyPotatoes
Not many in Boise were really surprised to see Harsin fail at Auburn, but I just expected he would struggle on the sidelines and not on the recruiting trail. Recruiting was the one thing he did really well at Boise State. 7 of the program's 10 best HS recruits were guys Harsin got, so to see the minimal effort (if you want to call it that) he put in recruiting at Auburn was really surprising.
Idk if it was just a southern/culture thing, or hurt feelings over the rumors about him and the staffer that came from Boise, or whatever. But I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as abrasive and seemingly checked out at a higher end program….
He and his wife were known assholes in the Boise area. People fucking hated them, especially his wife who would pull the “do you know who my husband is?” card. Not surprised he failed and was disliked at Auburn.
It's quite telling when the majority of a fanbase is happy to see their HC get hired away
And one that played QB for the university at that. 😭
Two bad seasons at Auburn, but he was a good coach at Boise State. Cracks were beginning to show by the end of his tenure there though.
Two bad seasons plus ruining and driving away the best QB Auburn has had in a long time. Say what you will about Bo Nix but he was the best QB prospect Auburn has had in a while.
Rick Venturi went 1-31-1.
Well that's easy - Herm Edwards is the only one who burned our program to the ground and did damage that outlasted his tenure. To add insult to injury, he's still cashing paychecks because his close friend, the AD, wouldn't fire him with cause.
Insane how much damage one man can do. 😢
Charlie Strong - all mottos and mantras with no substance or leadership.
worst winning percentage in Texas history. One of two coaches with a losing record at Texas. I was optimistic when they hired him that he would bring a change in attitude the program needed but he was pretty full of shit.
Nazi Germany was hosting the Olympics the last time a Texas head coach finished their stint with a losing record. Strong was abominable. My favorite—if you can call it that—part of his tenure was when the players came out in support of Strong after that debacle in Lawrence, only for TCU to smack them around the very next game. That was the all-time low point for Texas football during the last 15 years of mediocrity.
Texas' only other coach with a losing record also literally won one for the Gipper as a player. That's how long ago it was.
I was not opptimistic at all when they hired him. He had shown at Louisville that yes he could put a nice record together against inferior opponents, but he couldn't win the big games and he vastly under utilized the talent he had on offense. It seemed like more of the same from the later Mack years but with better PR.
Turns out he made a lot of us miss Mack
Real talk tho Strong’s guys are the only reason Herman had one good season. My mildly hot take is strong recruited some good guys that needed half decent Xs and Os, which they finally got. But Herman couldn’t recruit and field a competent team when it was all on him.
He was in over his head. Definitely not cut out for this type of gig. I remember Tom Herman expressing disbelief when a reporter asked if Texas could make a bowl game.
Pretty amazing to hold this title for two schools. Apparently the man is the walking embodiment of horns down. For the love of God, Buffalo, NEVER HIRE THIS MAN!!!
It's crazy how well he got Louisville going and how great of a resume he had. Then he couldn't cut it in Texas and was never the same
I think most Texas fans were happy with the hire—I know I was excited about it after Strong's last two seasons with Louisville, and I thought Texas needed a defensive-minded head coach at the time. I felt like the team went soft after Muschamp left. It ended up being a match made in hell.
Guess which 3 years I was at Texas 😎
Remember when his team chose to kick in both halves?
Absolutely embarrassing. That's a leadership problem. Easy to blame players for stupid decisions but some of those decisions only happen due to poor leadership.
[удалено]
Tuberville DOMINATES this conversation. Every UC Bearcat fan spits on him!
Fuck TT
Incompetent is too nice.
actively evil
Straight up asshole
An astonishing mix of evil and incompetent
Wdym incompetent, his withholding of military promotions is *super* beneficial to geopolitical rivals
He verbatim said Putin was “on top of his game”
Elite (inside) trader though! lol
Paul Wulff. Full stop
Weird fact: they finally found his mother's murderer!
I saw that and good for him honestly. He’s a good guy and a good Coug thrust into a bad situation that he was I’ll equipped to handle. I’m glad he’s getting a shot at Cal Poly
John Mackovic
Honestly, probably Taggert. He just didn’t stick around long enough to get exposed on our dime. But Oregon has had a long track record of solid coaches, even pre-Belotti/Brooks, it was mostly solid guys just outgunned by the bigger schools.
“Do Something”. I still cringe
FSU had a coach go winless one time and I'm pretty sure Taggert is still probably our worst coach.
I mean, Taggart while only here for a year still improved the program from where Helfrich left it. Add on something like the absolute fumble of the fact that Helf didn't recruit Tua *at all* the sheer incompetence from that dude is wild.
Either Karl Dorrell or Jon Embree.
Embree gets the dishonorable mention. But Dorrell took a suffering irrelevancy of a program and turned it into a joke. He gave us the worst season in program history. He couldn’t recruit. He couldn’t develop. He couldn’t game coach. And he couldn’t pick assistants who could do any of the above either.
Willingham and Bob Davie can do some Billy Madison style Decathlon to decide. A lot of people will say Willingham quickly or even Weis, but those Bob Davie years were fucking painful. Somehow there was still hope with Weis and Willingham. There was never faith in Bob Davie.
Gerry Faust?
Probably Richard Voris, who coached 3 seasons (1958-1960). He lost his 1st game, won his 2nd, and then lost his final 28 games for a 1-29 record across 3 seasons. Yes, UVA had major admin issues at the time. But he was also 6 years removed from a 4-year stretch of 31-7 when he started. He was so bad that the next coach won ACC COTY for going 4-6 in 1961
We've had some bad ones, by Ty is by far the worst, I have no clue how he had multiple winning seasons at Stanford.
For Rutgers, it’s absolutely Chris Ash. Just a total dud in every sense of the word. I personally knew a high 4 star kid who played 10 minutes away from campus, and Chris Ash never once visited him. He’d send assistants, but he told the kid that he has to come to campus to see him. Meanwhile Urban Meyer and Greg Schiano who were at OSU each went to his HS three or four times.
Steve Adazzio, the DUDE is a MORON
Curley Hallman
I will forever be confused about that hire. His one really good season at Southern Miss was when he had a guy named Favre at quarterback. The only thing I can think of that makes sense is that we beat y’all and your AD was like “We gotta get that guy.”
Johnny Griffith, Georgia head coach from 1961-1963. The only Georgia head coach in the last 100 years to not have a winning record with us.
Johnny Griffith didn’t have two Super Bowl MVPs on his roster and a slew of other future NFL talent. I get where you’re coming from but few coaches in the history of college football have done less with more than Ray Goff and thats my pick.
Based purely on wins and losses you could give it to a handful of coaches pre-Spurrier. Post-Spurrier, I’d probably give it to Muschamp. If Napier goes 5-7 or worse this year, it’ll be him, though.
I'd go with McElwain. I hated Muschamp's on-field coaching, but we were still mostly decent. Shark fucker had our players going to personal trainers because he apparently didn't care about strength training at all
Recently, it’d be Mel Tucker. Historically, he actually has a better W-L record than over half of MSU’s former coaches, even Nick Saban.
Tucker was a disaster as a person but a pretty mediocre coach. I’d say it’s John L Smith. His teams got worse every single year and he cratered a program that had already struggled under Bobby Williams.
John L. is the answer for us. Nothing about the program said competence under him.
I'd argue Tucker is impossible to quantify because he wasn't here for very long. In hindsight, it's easy to say he just got lucky in 2021, but Walker is what allowed him to call plays a certain way. You could tell MSU had practiced plays for critical moments. That was worth something. We'll never really know how 2023 would've went. I still think 2023 was a bridge year to get back into a bowl game and 2024 would be "do or die." But we'll never know. If anything, the incompetence lies with him sexually harassing a team vendor, not with anything that's actually football-related.
Willie Taggart. The reverse line up. The turnover backpack. Darkest of days.
Darrell Hazell. Bro has the worst multiseason win percentage for ANY Purdue coach. And that is saying something considering Purdue is more of a basketball school lol
Ty Willingham, aka He Who Shall Not Be Named. I suspect Notre Dame fans will agree.
Chad Morris. He might be the worst hire in college football history.
To be fair to Coach Morris, you guys also hired John L Smith. Yeah - you win.
To be fair to Johnelle, he had 4 wins (2 SEC wins) in his loan season as "coach", something it took Morris 2 seasons to reach (with 0 SEC or P5 wins). The last 12 years have not been fun.
Fran. He set us back so far and ruined the careers of some incredibly talented players.
Clay Helton-He had many problems. He let recruiting fall off, he stuck around too long, his teams were undisciplined, he kept bad assistants too long, the same problems repeatably came up, , he gave the same excuses every lose, and he was overall mediocre. Even the wins weren't good enough because you could always tell they required more effort than they should every single week. The worst thing he did though was he made USC fans stop caring. It is a special kind of hell to have a coach not win enough to make you happy but not lose enough to get fired.
Clay was a veritable genius in comparison to Paul Hackett. Paul literally said upon being fired after year three, “It takes 4 years to learn my system”. How could that ever work for a college and who is stupid enough to think that would be a plausible excuse.
Recency bias on this one, but yes. Historically it's Paul Hackett by a *mile*.
I can't decide what was worse about Miami football 2013. A winless record or the uniforms they debuted. https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/7/24/4554258/miami-ohio-redhawks-football-new-uniforms
Tim Brewster, far and away.
Pail Wulff crated the program. If you eliminate his 4 year tenure, WSU was solidly middle of the Pac-12 the last 40 years.
Tommy West is the obvious choice for Clemson in my lifetime
For "recent" history, it's probably Howard Schnellenberger. I've always known him to be a complete buffoon growing up, so it's always strange when I see Miami people talk so glowingly about him. Because whatever he had down there didn't make it up to Oklahoma. There might be some other coach more deserving of that title for Oklahoma, but I'll leave that to a historian of the program to figure out.
This is one of the wildest things in CFB to me, the fact that a coach that built and put one program on the map (Miami) was a complete disaster for another program (OU).
What’s wild is Howie built two programs from scratch before flaming out at OU. He truly worked miracles at Louisville.
I would argue he was the worst coach in recent history, with the most incompetent coaching honor going to John Blake.
Gary motherfrakin’ Anderson 😡
Steve Kragthorpw, just yeeeesh
Richard Bell for the Cocks and Ray Goff for the Dawgs
Ellis Johnson. Southern Miss was a perennial success and was coming off of eighteen straight winning seasons (the fifth longest streak in FBS history), a 12-2 finish that saw them ranked in the top 20, a program that was on the rise at the right time for realignment, and a football team with a long and proud history of being one of the best mid major programs to ever exist with two Division II national championships before moving up to Division I as an independent and having decades of success playing as a de facto SEC team in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, including fielding two future NFL Hall of Famers. Then Ellis Johnson was hired in 2012. Southern Miss went 0-11 in his first season, and then went 1-10 in 2013. He single handedly ruined a once proud program and they have never recovered.
Karl Dorrell…
John L Smith slapped himself in the face while I was in school
Nobody can challenge Chad Morris for the worst ever. FCM
The guy at KU that took over from Mangino. Turner Gill went 3-9 with a team that had won the Orange Bowl.
Willie “War Daddy” Taggart
DJ Durkin....don't think I need to say why...