Who is the best college football coach? Who is the best NFL coach?

Making fun, but Belichick is really head and shoulders above anyone else.

 

Riley was sought by Alabama mainly because he's an Alabama grad and they were desperate at the time (after the Mike Price fiasco). And it was Mike Shula that got the job, not Dave.

 

No joke. Pete Carroll has done the recruiting, coached them very, very well and his players look like they're having fun. So does Carroll ... and that attitude is the X-factor that makes him the choice over Nick Saban.

Honorable mention: Jim Grobe (go ahead and laugh ... who outside the ACC knew Wake Forest even had football until a few years ago?), Mike Leach, Paul Johnson, Frank Beamer and Urban Meyer. Turner Gill could be a shooting star.

NFL: Jeff Fisher. Has done more with less than any coach in the league. How come we hear about all the reclamation projects, low-round draft picks and free agents out of Foxboro, yet we don't hear about all the players functioning well in Nashville? Oh yeah ... media machine is closer to major metro areas such as New York.

Honorable mention: Bill Belichick, Tony Dungy, John Fox (yeah, I know ... at least I wasn't the first to bring him up). I suspect Mike Tomlin was ascend this list soon.

 

Either that, or the fact that until this year, New England has been a lot better just about every year. Is Tennessee being neglected this year? Is tehre any reason we should have heard more about them for the last few?

 

I'll narrow it down to two in each
NFL: Belichick and Fisher, Dungy is right there.
College: Stoops and Carroll, Saban is right there.

 

Stoops?

Too bad they play bowl games in college football.

 

No, the Titans aren't being neglected. But Jeff Fisher wasn't getting any credit for his body of work with the franchise until the team's hot start this year.

Fisher was one of the top coaches in the league long before the 10-0 start.

 

OK, and I think his name always came up in these discussions. "One of the best"? Sure. But light years behind Belicheck

 

Here is my top 5:

College:

1. Carroll
2. Stoops
3. Meyer
4. Tressel
5. Saban - his team is No.1 now, but they haven't won it yet. The rest are always top 10 teams. Shit even Paterno garners attention if Saban does.

Pro:

1. Big Bad Bill
2. Jeff Fisher
3. Coughlin
4. Dungy
5. Tomlin

even wisenhunt has been solid

 

If I were picking a coach, my short list would go:

NFL
1. Tony Dungy
2. Bill Belichick
3. Jeff Fisher
4. Mike Tomlin
5. Tom Coughlin

College
1. Mack Brown
2. Nick Saban
3. Pete Carroll
4. Jim Tressel
5. Mike Leach

I think Dungy and Brown are very similar in that they surround themselves with good coaches and let them go to work and their players genuinely seem to love playing for them. I think the New England players play hard and do what Belichick tells them to because they know it will probably work. But Indy players seem to love Dungy because he respects them. Belichick will lose his team during bad times, but I think Dungy would keep his team together.

 

Coughlin has more division titles, super bowl wins and championship appearances than Belicheck?

Please show your work

 

And I am sorry -- Jeff Fisher is a good coach -- you are not a GREAT COACH until you win at least one championship.

The championship argument is debatable in college given the differences in resources but in the NFL, if you are a coach for more than a decade and have zero championships, you cannot be on any serious list of THE best coach in the league.

And as for the argument that "it is easy to win at places like Texas and USC" -- that may be the dumbest shit of all.

The coaching grave yard is littered with guys who COULDN'T win at those places -- and frankly given that recruiting is a major part of a coach's job description -- to punish them because they have good players -- hence they are good recruiters -- is just plain asinine.

And please, Frank Beamer? He's done an admirable job -- but there is no legitimate argument that he took over a program with any less history or any less prestige than Bobby Bowden and only one built an elite, national-championship caliber program while the other has built a nice program, that wins a lot of games and loses just about every big game it is involved in.

Ditto Jim Grobe and Paul Johnson and all these other guys who win more than they lose and because they are nice guys suddenly become legends in the minds of some delusional media members who want to wax poetic about "winning the right way" and stupid shit like that.

None of those guys are a fly on the ass of Nick Saban or Urban Meyer or Pete Carroll in terms of being in the category of great coaches.