Where does Jimmy Johnson rank amongst the greatest college football coaches?

81usaf92

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Since its offseason I thought I would ask a history question..

My friend and I where at a cigar shop talking football. My friend made the comment that CNS is the first coach since CPB that has been this dominant in college football.. Well in walks a FSU fan who takes deep offense to this and says Bobby Bowden had accomplished this feat ( I was thinking "yeah right") and Bowden was the only one to own Spurier in the 90's (even though 96). I said well he was owned by Johnson and Erickson during the Miami run. Well to say the least he wasn't too thrilled about it, and made the comment that Johnson wasn't even in Bowden's zip code at coaching and his Miami teams were flukes. He then made the stance that Johnson wasn't in the top 20 of greatest college football coaches of all time.

My aim isn't to compare CNS to Jimmy, or decide whether Miami's 5 championships are legit. I'm more or less trying to see how good Johnson was at Miami because his time at Miami was before I started watching football. I remember him at Dallas as being a great coach,and if him and Jerry got along then we might be talking 4-5 SBs instead of 3. I was always under the impression that the same thing happened at Miami in which Johnson and the owner (president in this case) couldn't get along even though Johnson was on a significant run. I'm also wondering if this FSU fan was right about Bowden vs Johnson andJohnson not being a top 20 coach.
 
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Bamabuzzard

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He's probably not a top 20 CFB coach but overall he is a great coach. I'm not sure if you watch any of the NFL Network's "A Football Life" documentaries. But they had one on JJ. To say he is HIGHLY respected by some of the greatest to ever coach and play the game is an understatement. He has CEO's of companies come visit him to get strategies on success. Bill Belichick has admittedly reached out to JJ many times over the years getting his advice on football matters.

But to the original question, no, he's not a top 20 CFB.
 

AlexanderFan

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Has anyone had comparable success at both levels that he has? If you judge success on championships he has to be near the top.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

KrAzY3

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I think Jimmy Johnson and Pete Carroll fall in that weird, some of the greatest coaches of all time without really being one of the most prolific college or professional coaches.

You look at Jimmy did during his run at Miami and it is darn impressive. He only lost 4 games in 4 years and won a national championship. If that was his only act, then I could see calling it a fluke, but he goes on to win a couple of Super Bowls. He has to be considered an all time great coach, but he's one of only three coaches to win a NC and a Super Bowl, so it's hard to compare him to other coaches. No question though, he was a great coach and it sure seems like he could have had greater sustained success at either Miami or Dallas.

Then there's Pete Carroll. He wins a couple of NCs in college, has a fairly dominating stretch and then goes back to the NFL and turns Seattle into an annual contender and Super Bowl champions. Things are a little mirrored since Pete had more success in college and so far Jimmy has had more success in the NFL. Overall though, their careers were so split between pros and college that I think they could end up under-appreciated.

The third by the way, was Barry Switzer. He managed to stick around at Oklahoma long enough to really build a legacy though, winning three NCs and coming in at 12 on the list linked earlier. His Super Bowl victory is quite a bit less impressive though, since he just inherited what a well oiled Dallas machine, and if you really think about it, I'm not so sure it is easy to say Switzer was a better coach.

Johnson took Miami to new heights, and got Dallas back on track after they got derailed. Think about it this way, if you needed a coach and it was the late 80s, or early 90s, could you do much better than Johnson?
 

81usaf92

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You look at Jimmy did during his run at Miami and it is darn impressive. He only lost 4 games in 4 years and won a national championship. If that was his only act, then I could see calling it a fluke, but he goes on to win a couple of Super Bowls. He has to be considered an all time great coach, but he's one of only three coaches to win a NC and a Super Bowl, so it's hard to compare him to other coaches. No question though, he was a great coach and it sure seems like he could have had greater sustained success at either Miami or Dallas.
Yeah the Noles fan's emphasis was that Jimmy never had to face Spurrier, and didnt catch Bowden with an elite team. I can get the not top 20 argument, but this particular fan said basically that Jimmy lived off flukes and Schellenberger's recruiting plan. He was basically saying Jimmy's tenure at Miami was overrated,and he got out of town before BB and SS changed UF and FSU.


Again I wasnt watching football in the late 80's,but I remember his Cowboys quiet well in the 90's.
 

bamacpa

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For a brief run, Jimmy's Canes were dominant, the top college program at that time. Your FSU friend is mistaken, the Noles had already ascended but they had a very difficult time with JImmy's Miami teams.
 

crimsonaudio

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Has anyone had comparable success at both levels that he has? If you judge success on championships he has to be near the top.
NFL success (or lack thereof) should carry no weight when ranking the 'greatest college football coaches', imo. I couldn't care less what a coach does or doesn't do in the NFL - what they do in the college ranks determines what I think of their coaching ability.

Pete Carrol has had a similar career to Johnson, though Carrol was more successful in college.
 

KrAzY3

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what they do in the college ranks determines what I think of their coaching ability.
I don't think struggling in the NFL really says many negative things about a college coach. The game is very different, and there's a list of highly accomplished college coaches who didn't do anything amazing in the pros. However, when a guy wins a championship at both levels? I can't help but view that as something special. It's kind of like winning a Heisman and then winning the MVP. You can argue some Heisman winners really weren't that special, but once they've done both it doesn't really leave you with much room to question their abilities.
 

B1GTide

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I think that Johnson could have been one of the greatest ever in college football. Instead he moved on the the NFL and became one of the greatest ever at that level.

If the question is ability - probably one of the best ever - probably top 5. But since he left he can't be given credit for assumed accomplishments that may not have materialized. We have no idea if he could have sustained that level of success year after year in college football. Probably, but it is not a certainty.
 

GrayTide

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After looking at all 100 coaches I think this is a pretty good breakdown, sure saved a lot of search time. I have never liked Miami teams, think they were a very undisciplined lot and some of that is attributable to Schnellenberger, Johnson and Erickson; however, they were a very dominant team with a wealth of talent. For most of those years they were Big East members and later an Independent which offered little competition with the exception of a big game each year like ND or OU or a bowl game. Whether they would have been as dominant had FSU and UF been at their levels of the early and mid 90's we will never know. I do think Johnson is certainly a top 25 coach, but also agree that a coach's success or lack thereof in the NFL should have no bearing on his collegiate ranking.
 

crimsonaudio

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I think that Johnson could have been one of the greatest ever in college football. Instead he moved on the the NFL and became one of the greatest ever at that level.

If the question is ability - probably one of the best ever - probably top 5. But since he left he can't be given credit for assumed accomplishments that may not have materialized. We have no idea if he could have sustained that level of success year after year in college football. Probably, but it is not a certainty.
Best answer.
 

davefrat

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I know this is about college coaching but is it possible for him to not be top 10 at either individual level but top 10 all time regardless of level?
 

GreatMarch

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I think if Jimmy had stayed at Miami for a significant period of time, he would have gone down as one of the greatest coaches in college football history. He knew schemes, understood the identity he wanted in his teams, had very good assistants and could find good assistants, and was outstanding at finding talent whether it was the obvious 5 star recruit or if it was a 3 star that no one had heard of but he knew the talent the kid had. And, he was good at in game adjustments as was his staff. I just do not think he stayed long enough to be considered that high up the list of great college coaches.
I think he made two mistakes while at Miami. He should have saw to it that all of those Jimmy Johnson sighting rumors at Alabama during the Curry years were to be true and he never should have hired Wingnut as a grad assistant. :)
 

TideMan09

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Jimmy Johnson is a hard one to rank for me, the man knew how to win, he knew how to relate to the players he recruited getting more out of them on the football field than most HC's could..His best trait as a HC was hiring the absolute best coaching staff any HC could, he allowed his coaches to coach their style of play for the most part, he was the original CEO type HC in the 80's..

Now the negative about Jimmy Johnson..I hated his football program from top to bottom, I respected his winning record, I despised the "Thug Attitude" that permeated every square inch of Hurricane Football during his time there..Just not a fan of that in your face "Thugatude"..

I love watching our Tide Player's knocking the oppositions on their backside, only to help them back up so they can do it again & then shake their hands after the game..That's Bama Football & how the game should be played..
 

selmaborntidefan

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Well to say the least he wasn't too thrilled about it, and made the comment that Johnson wasn't even in Bowden's zip code at coaching and his Miami teams were flukes. He then made the stance that Johnson wasn't in the top 20 of greatest college football coaches of all time.
You should have asked him how it felt to have his all-time great coach (Bowden) go 1-4 against Jimmy and basically lose the 1987 national title to him then......or how Bowden lost to Jimmy, 31-0, to start the 1988 season.

My aim isn't to compare CNS to Jimmy, or decide whether Miami's 5 championships are legit. I'm more or less trying to see how good Johnson was at Miami because his time at Miami was before I started watching football.

Since you asked for history, I will gladly oblige.

Jimmy was on a trajectory to be the Coach Bryant or Coach Saban of his generation as far as winning went. The problem is that he did it the dirty way, he didn't teach his players respect for opponents, and when called on for his nonsense, he dealt race cards about the old "white people not understanding black people" argument (set aside for a moment that black players at other schools were not the on-field lawless punks that were tolerated and paid for at Miami).

I can present it cynically or I can present it with hyperbole. I'll try and be objective even though I thought he was a horse's backside back in the day.

Jimmy was a .500 coach at Okie State when the Big Eight was Nebraska, OU, and the Little Six. In his first job in a cheap conference (Colorado was not even that good during JJ's time in Stillwater), he was basically .500. (By contrast, Saban took a team on probation in a tougher conference with Michigan St and never had a losing season. Note that the sanctions actually began AFTER Saban's first year, so he bore the brunt of it).

Lou Holtz got canned after the 1983 season by Frank Broyles, in large part due to politics (by which I mean actually being involved in them - and I'll leave it there). Broyles called Johnson in (he was on the 64 co-title team there along with Jerry Jones) for an interview but didn't tell him that Ken Hatfield had already been hired. It boosted Jimmy's portfolio and when Howard Schnellenberger took a job in the USFL that turned out to not exist (Howard later went to Louisville and smoked us in the 1991 Fiesta Bowl).

Miami hired Jimmy Johnson, who inherited a national championship team. Note that Jimmy was hired on June 5, 1984 - something that would probably never happen today barring a Mike Price type thing. So we probably need to spot Jimmy the 1984 season, when he did not even oversee spring practice.


He also had what Miami would make sure to not have anymore - a rather tough schedule. Take a look:

1984 Miami Schedule
Auburn (Kickoff Classic, defending SEC champions with junior Bo Jackson)
Florida (five days later, only team to beat Miami in 1983 - 28-3 - and generally considered best team of 1984)
Michigan (one week later in Ann Arbor, a contender, lost the 84 Sugar to Auburn by 2)
Purdue (these four games within 20 days)
Florida St (coming off a 7-5 season and on their way to being the Bowden dynasty)

That's their first five games and they went 3-2. Then they blew a 31-0 lead over Maryland, the biggest collapse in college football history, and lost to Frank Reich (who later did that to the Oilers as you recall).

And then Doug Flutie hit them with the Hail Mary.


So Jimmy lost five games in 1984. They wouldn't lose another home game for ten years. (It'll be important in a few minutes).




It was 1985 where Jimmy began to carve out his reputation as a jerk. He did have one point. As the season headed towards the end, Miami was fourth in the polls behind unbeaten Penn State, one-loss OU, and one-loss Iowa. Johnson had a legitimate beef - OU's one loss was to....Miami, 27-14 in Norman no less (Troy Aikman was injured for OU in that game and gave way to wishbone QB Jamelle Holieway). Given that this was the day of polls and teams with bowl game obligations, Jimmy.....intentionally ran up the score on Notre Dame in hard luck Coach Gerry Faust's last game, 58-7.

I'm not going to debate the merits/demerits of that decision. In those days, it was somewhat more defensible given how hard it was to move in the polls with the same record. And let's be honest: it only became an issue because it was Notre Dame and oh, their former coach (Ara) just happened to be calling the game with Brent Musberger on CBS and made an issue of it. (Few Bama fans saw it because that was the day Van Tiffin became the greatest citizen ever of our state).

Besides - even after that moved Miami up to number two in the (then) UPI poll, the consensus was that Miami "had to blow out Tennessee," meaning he was being told to do exactly what he was getting bashed for. However, Johnson made it worse by insinuating that he would blow Tennessee off the field if the opportunity presented itself

Tennessee 35 Miami 7


In 1986, Miami ran the table and wound up meeting Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl. Miami was a huge favorite, and it really was this game that showed us all what the future BCS/playoff title games could be like. The game was moved to January 2 (Friday) and they put on a show.

Miami outgained Penn State, 445-162....and lost, 14-10 thanks to five Vinny T interceptions. Jimmy's inability to show class came out during this insanity. Many of the Canes players showed up wearing fatigues at the joint team steak dinner.....a dinner at which they walked out after an alleged racial remark by the late John Bruno, whose punting kept Penn St in the game. That's the most remembered issue. But several players also showed up at a Fiesta Bowl luncheon in warmup outfits and several of their players were insulting Penn State fans as they prepared to go onto the field for the Fiesta Bowl.


Jimmy came back from Japan and publicly apologized after being threatened by the school President. (With no Internet in those days, he wasn't aware of the ruckus until he returned to the US).

In 1987, Jimmy finally won a national title. But it came with a cost. It was supposed to be their year of shedding the thug image and yet three incidents marred the season. First, Maryland got so angry for what they felt was a run up the score move that they vowed to not play Miami again. Second, in a 24-0 beating of Notre Dame, the Hurricanes got flagged repeatedly for late hits and Heisman winner Tim Brown stated they were "classless."

The third was when South Carolina announced after the game they would no longer schedule Miami due to their cheap shots, including such things as hitting receivers from behind after the play was over.


The problem was that Johnson seemed to give off the vibe that he APPROVED of this....or at least tolerated it.

In 1988, Jimmy did very well, losing only the infamous "Catholics-Convicts" game to Notre Dame. He also went back to his other past time of whining. Heading into the bowl games there were two unbeaten teams: #1 Notre Dame and #3 West Virginia, led by Jeff Hostetler's father-in-law. Just as he did in 1985, Jimmy starting whining before the game that if West Virginia won then #2 Miami should be the national champion.


"'I just want to bring attention to the fact we had a very difficult schedule,' said Johnson, whose team's only loss was to Notre Dame. 'When No. 2 wins and No. 1 loses, Ithink No. 2 moves up. I feel we've got as much a chance to be No. 1 as anybody. I'm just saying that after the bowl games, vote for the best team in the country." Note that at least in 1985, he had a legitimate beef since he'd actually beaten Oklahoma.

He blew out Nebraska in the Orange Bowl in what turned out to be his last game at Miami, although none of us knew it at the time.


How do we rate Jimmy?

The good - he had a 52-9 record in five years and a 44-4 record in the final four years (his first staff was holdover from Schnellenberger, which also caused problems since they weren't his guys). Those are Saban-type numbers over a brief period of time, although we can put the 1994-97 Tom Osborne (49-2) or 1980-83 Vince Dooley (43-4-1) and close to 1961-66 Bryant (60-5-1). He produced a LOT of NFL players. Yes, he inherited a championship team, but he made them better. And he started their long home winning streak.

The bad - set aside the whining, seeming approval of thuggery, and jack ash personality and what's bad about his record? Well, he couldn't win bowl games that weren't home games. His Miami bowl record was 2-3, with two Fiesta Bowl losses, a blowout Sugar Bowl loss in 1985, and two wins in the safe confines of the Orange Bowl against overrated Big Eight teams. In big games, he was 15-9 because he won a lot in his last two years.


Oh - and he did it in a rather dirty way, too......:

A total of 141 football players were reported to have received more than $223,000 in what the committee called impermissible financial aid. Fifty-five football players were among a total of between 60 and 77 athletes to receive $212,969 in Pell Grant funds based on fraudulent applications.

Miami had maintained that the firing of Tony Russell, a former academic adviser, demonstrated that the problem had been isolated and solved. But the N.C.A.A. replied that a lack of institutional control allowed Russell to operate.

The violations also included cash awards ranging from $20 to $200 that football players received in a period from 1986 through 1992, from a pool created by athletes and at least one former athlete. Miami was also found to have violated its own drug-testing policy by allowing three football players to play without facing the disciplinary measures listed in the regulations.


If Jimmy had stayed, he'd have had to leave with a "show cause" most likely. On the other hand, he likely would have won a couple of more national titles, too.


I remember him at Dallas as being a great coach,and if him and Jerry got along then we might be talking 4-5 SBs instead of 3. I was always under the impression that the same thing happened at Miami in which Johnson and the owner (president in this case) couldn't get along even though Johnson was on a significant run. I'm also wondering if this FSU fan was right about Bowden vs Johnson andJohnson not being a top 20 coach.
The problem is that Johnson's body of work is simply too small. He was 4-0 against Bowden when he had HIS staff on board, and I think we'll all agree Bowden was a top ten or certainly top 20 coach. However, if Jimmy had stayed then he would have lost recruits to Spurrier (and vice versa), which would have affected both programs. But I've also stated my view of the Miami teams of that era as well - it was a carefully crafted 'dynasty.'

In 1984, they played five games against teams with nine wins or more and went 2-3.
In 1985, they did the same and went 3-2, both losses coming to SEC schools.
In 1986, they softened their schedule and went 1-1 against such teams.
In 1987, they played three but also played two eight-win teams and did all those consecutively and went 5-0.
In 1988, they went 5-1 against nine wins or better teams....conveniently having a week off before 4 of them (this includes the start of the season and the bowl game).

So he starts 6-6 against good teams and finishes out 10-1. The catch is - we cannot ASSUME he would have kept it going OR that he would not. As much as I hate to say it, they were probably the best team in the country in 1986-87-88 - certainly in 1987.


Here's who I would put ahead of him just off the top of my head (no hate, these are NOT in order)
Bryant
Saban
Urban Meyer
Eddie Robinson
Knute Rockne
Bob Neyland
Bud Wilkinson
Woody Hayes
John McKay
Lou Holtz
Bobby Bowden
Guy Who Let Sandusky Run Loose
Barry Switzer (who was 0-3 against Miami during JJ's run there)

He was a much better in-game coach than either Stoops or Spurrier, neither of whom is worth a damn if they get in a close game. I'd rate him way ahead of Tom Osborne if we don't count his last five years as coach and I think Jimmy was still a better coach.


I think overall he's in the top twenty or damn close to it based solely on what he did do. If he's not in the top 20 (and folks can bring in names like Bo Schembechler, Fielding Yost, or Frank Kush), he's just a cut below it.
 

tidegrandpa

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Jimmy could not sustain what he did in Dallas as he was obsessed with the job when he got there. His second day in Dallas he filed for a divorce from his first wife because as he said in a Dallas Morning News profile on him during the 91-94 run, "he couldn't do both." Be married and revive the Cowboys. IMHO with focus that intense, you burnout instead of rust. 5 years Miami, 5 years Dallas and a retirement emergence for very short uneventful run with the Dolphins. His intensity just could not be sustained (unlike a certain Coach in T'Town for ten glorious years has).
 

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