College Football Coaches Less Popular Than Their School's Basketball Coach
The days of a college being known strictly as a football or basketball school are no longer, as many of the most notable athletic programs in the nation manage to have top-tier teams in both sports. Of the 16 schools that have a men's basketball team still alive in the NCAA tournament, 12 of them also saw their football teams play in a bowl game.
But there's a big difference between comparable success and equal levels of popularity. At most schools, when it comes to the hierarchy of coach notoriety, only one person can be at the summit.
It's usually the football coach, since that's the most followed college sport. But for some FBS-level schools, the man in charge of the gridiron is actually working in the shadow of the person holding court on the hardwood.
First-Year Coaches
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When a school hires a new coach, that tends to bring an instant boost of popularity to that person, often because the attention that comes with a coaching change makes it impossible not to know who the new guy is.
Fifteen of the 128 FBS schools have new head coaches this year, and while some of these hires were of the "whoa" variety—Jim Harbaugh at Michigan, for instance—it wouldn't be accurate to consider the football coach to be more or less popular than the men's basketball coach since he hasn't been on the job long enough to garner a true following (or lack thereof).
Once they've had a chance to settle in, though, there are some new football coaches that face an uphill battle to gain the same level of popularity as their hoops counterpart:
- David Beaty, Kansas
- Paul Chryst, Wisconsin
- Lance Leipold, Buffalo
- Jim McElwain, Florida
David Cutcliffe, Duke
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Year at school: 8th
Record at school: 40-48
Duke is having its best run of sustained success since the early 1960s, with 19 wins over the past two seasons and three straight bowl appearances. Yet nothing short of a national championship—or a few—would make David Cutcliffe even remotely as popular as Blue Devils basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.
Being the first Division I coach to 1,000 victories and having multiple national titles kind of makes you a big deal. Same with having an area outside the basketball arena, where students camp out to get good seats, named after you.
There's no such "Cutcliffeville" outside Wallace Wade Stadium, though maybe that would be a suggestion for the current renovations planned to the 86-year-old facility.
Duke hasn't been this relevant in football since the late 1980s, when Steve Spurrier cut his coaching teeth there for three years and won a share of an ACC title before bolting to Florida. The 60-year-old Cutcliffe is more of a lifer, having already had a shot at a bigger school—his 44-29 record at Ole Miss got him fired in 2004—and not looking to go anywhere else.
If he were to somehow outlast Mike Krzyzewski, who is wrapping up his 35th season at the school, maybe then Cutcliffe could ascend to the top spot on the Duke coaching popularity chart.
Bob Diaco, Connecticut
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Year at school: 2nd
Record at school: 2-10
Bob Diaco picked a perfect opportunity to get a start on his head coaching career, but it also happened to coincide with Connecticut's basketball team making another historic run in the NCAA tournament.
Hired in December 2013 after four seasons as an assistant at Notre Dame, Diaco was brought in to turn around a Huskies program that just a few years earlier had been in a BCS bowl game but had fallen on hard times. The job was already going to be a difficult one, and then UConn's hoop stars had to go and win another national title in April.
The basketball championship was completely unexpected, as the Huskies weren't even close to being considered one of the contenders when the NCAA tourney began. But six straight wins later, second-year coach Kevin Ollie was hoisting a trophy inside AT&T Stadium, the same facility that would host the college football title game nine months later.
Meanwhile, UConn's football team stumbled through its worst season since the school moved to FBS.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
Larry Fedora, North Carolina
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Year at school: 4th
Record at school: 21-17
North Carolina has had some well-known football coaches over the years, such as Mack Brown and Butch Davis, yet none of them have ever been able to compete with the basketball coach from athletic department prom king. Whether it was Dean Smith or current coach Roy Williams, hoops has always reigned supreme in Chapel Hill.
Despite this lack of notoriety, though, Larry Fedora still faces pressure to win with the Tar Heels because the school hasn't been consistently good for a while, and the perennial basketball success makes similar achievements on the football field an expectation. It's why the school went after Davis after his failed NFL experience and why it sought Fedora following four solid years at Southern Mississippi.
Yet Fedora has had his teams fare worse each year since his arrival, from 8-4 in 2012 (when the team wasn't eligible for the postseason) to 6-7 this past season. The Tar Heels haven't been at their best in basketball during that stretch, but they've still made the NCAA tournament each year and are back in the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2012.
The only way Fedora has been on par with basketball in terms of attention has been in relation to the ongoing NCAA investigation into UNC's athletic department and accusations of academic fraud. Not exactly the best way to get notoriety, though.
Darrell Hazell, Purdue
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Year at school: 3rd
Record at school: 4-20
As recently as 15 years ago, Purdue was one of those schools that could lay claim to being quite good at both basketball and football. The basketball team reached the Elite Eight under Gene Keady, and later that year Joe Tiller to a Big Ten title and the Rose Bowl.
Both of those coaches have moved on, and while neither program has come anywhere close to returning to that level of success, it's been a far more public journey for basketball coach Matt Painter than any of the football coaches who have been on the job during his tenure.
Darrell Hazell is the latest guy trying to resurrect the Boilermakers' football team, and while he's struggled on the field in his first two years, that pales in comparison to how hard it's been to get recognized away from it.
Or, rather, recognized as himself.
"Darrell Hazell isn't a very popular guy right now, partly because he's the coach of the Purdue football team and people tend to ignore the Purdue football team," SB Nation's Kevin Trahan wrote last summer in reaction to hearing that Hazell was mistaken for President Obama by a first grade class at a Purdue-area elementary school.
As far as we know, there have been no similar cases of mistaken identity for Painter.
Mike London, Virginia
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Year at school: 6th
Record at school: 23-38
Mike London arrived in Charlottesville not long after Tony Bennett took over the basketball program. That's about where the similarities end between the coaches, as Bennett has returned the Cavaliers to national prominence in hoops while London has just one winning record to show for his efforts.
Basketball at Virginia had been on a 15-year downswing before Bennett came on board, while football was good but not great yet still managed to post winning seasons most years. The overall atmosphere at the school regarding these two sports was kind of a 50-50 split in terms of popularity, and it remained that way until Bennett turned the Cavs' basketball team into a juggernaut the last two years.
Virginia won back-to-back ACC titles in basketball, earning high seeds in the past two NCAA tournaments, while London fell short of getting back to a bowl game last fall after the Cavs lost to rival Virginia Tech in their regular-season finale.
Trent Miles, Georgia State
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Year at school: 3rd
Record at school: 1-23
Georgia State's athletic department has made a concerted effort over the last decade to become more relevant, starting with the creation of a football program that began play in 2010 and moved to the FBS level in 2013. At the same time, the basketball teams bounced around conferences until settling in the Sun Belt two years ago.
It was a lot easier for basketball to gain popularity in the Atlanta area, especially with coach Ron Hunter putting together a talented team led by his son that became a destination for transfers from bigger programs like Kentucky, Louisville and USC. That work paid off with the Panthers' first NCAA tournament bid since 2001 this year and an upset win over Baylor last week that turned Hunter and son R.J. into stars.
Football coach Trent Miles hasn't been as lucky, but he's also yet to injure himself in a postgame celebration and then fall off a stool on national television, nor does he have a son playing for him. At this point, Miles is still looking for his first win against an FBS program, his lone victory a Georgia State coming against FCS school Abilene Christian in August.
Paul Rhoads, Iowa State
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Year at school: 7th
Record at school: 29-46
Iowa State's basketball coach is known as The Mayor. Paul Rhoads doesn't have a catchy nickname, but if we were to stick to municipal titles he'd probably be the deputy public works director.
Cyclones fans love their football team and seem to like Rhoads, despite two straight really bad years, and he's got the full support of athletic director Jamie Pollard. As ISU was finishing up a 2-10 last fall, Pollard equated the effort Rhoads is putting forth to that of someone trying to scale Mount Everest.
"It's a place that you've got to have a chip on your shoulder and you've got to try to do something that others maybe are afraid to do or couldn't do or don't want to try to do," Pollard said on his weekly radio show, per Tommy Birch of USA Today. "That's what inspires all of us to be here, and it's to climb a mountain that others have never gotten to the top. I look forward to continuing that journey with coach Rhoads and hopefully getting there."
Pollard was probably referring to how much of a challenge it is for Iowa State to compete with bigger football programs in the Big 12, while also playing second fiddle to Iowa in terms of in-state interest. But he could have just as easily been alluding to how hard it is to succeed when Fred Hoiberg has every Cyclones fan in love with him for his success in basketball.
Hoiberg, a former Iowa State star player who received write-in votes during a mayoral election while in college, has piloted the basketball team to two straight Big 12 tournament titles and four consecutive NCAA tournament appearances.
Rich Rodriguez, Arizona
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Year at school: 4th
Record at school: 26-14
Of all the football coaches on this list, none has had more success than Rich Rodriguez, both at his current school and overall. And while he's slowly making inroads into turning Arizona into a school known for successful football, it's not going to be easy when Sean Miller keeps winning in basketball.
Rodriguez is coming off a 10-4 record in 2014, with the Wildcats winning their first Pac-12 title of any sort (claiming the South Division championship) and then playing in the Fiesta Bowl. It was the program's best season in 15 years, and RichRod has his team trending upward at a breakneck pace.
Yet Miller won the Pac-12 regular-season basketball title for the second straight year, also claimed the conference tournament and has the Wildcats in the Sweet 16 for the fourth time in five years.
To put into perspective how big basketball is at Arizona, compared to football, consider this: After RichRod's team upset Oregon and moved into the top 10 in the Associated Press poll, the following week's home game against USC resulted in the first sellout of the season. Seven days later, the basketball team's intrasquad scrimmage played to a packed house that snatched up all available tickets six weeks earlier on the first day they were available.
Mark Stoops, Kentucky
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Year at school: 3rd
Record at school: 7-17
Big Blue Nation supports all sports teams at Kentucky, and far more of them attend football games in Commonwealth Stadium than go to the men's basketball contests in Rupp Arena. But only because the former holds more than 67,000 seats compared to the latter's capacity of 23,500.
That's about the only scenario where football outweighs hoops in popularity in Lexington, and that's not just because the Wildcats are four wins away from the first perfect college basketball season in 39 years.
It's almost always been this way at Kentucky, a bona fide blue blood in basketball that on the football side probably wouldn't be in the SEC if not for its hoops lineage. During the 1950s, when Paul "Bear" Bryant was still a coaching cub getting his start with the Wildcats, he was completely overshadowed by legendary basketball coach Adolph Rupp.
And even during the darkest period of Kentucky basketball in recent memory, the ill-fated Billy Gillispie era of 2007-09, the success that Rich Brooks was able to have by leading the football team to four straight bowl games from 2006-09 still didn't register nearly as much with the fanbase.
And now that John Calipari has hoops on the brink of basketball immortality, football coach Mark Stoops could go perfect in the SEC and still be a distant second in popularity.
Kevin Wilson, Indiana
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Year at school: 5th
Record at school: 14-34
If not for the obsession with basketball at Indiana, Kevin Wilson might have been sent packing already. But there's so much more attention on hoops than anything else at the school that Wilson's managed to struggle outside of the spotlights that are all directed toward whether the school will part ways with disliked (but wildly popular) basketball coach Tom Crean.
Crean is coming off a second-round NCAA tournament exit after missing the tourney the season before, though prior to that he had back-to-back Sweet 16 appearances. In that same time period, Wilson has won six of 32 Big Ten conference games.
Yet while a Fire Tom Crean website exists, there isn't one for Wilson. And there probably never will be.
Football coaches have been able to fail in relative anonymity at Indiana for decades, not just during Wilson's tenure. He stands to be the 13th straight Hoosiers coach to end his time there with a losing record, whenever that is, because most of those bad seasons have coincided with either really good ones on the basketball side or at least ones that are more interesting than what happens inside Bloomington's Memorial Stadium.
Follow Brian J. Pedersen on Twitter at @realBJP.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
