I have seen some of you say you don't want anyone you can't say for sure would win an NC. Right now, there are only 4 coaches in football who can say they have(Swinney, Meyer, Fisher, Saban). Unless you want Dabo, you are likely going to at least somewhat roll the dice on someone who has not yet shown they can pull it off (or go with someone who has won on another level, like the NDSU coach).
As for the whole debate about awful coaches in our history, I don't think it fair to call any of them terrible hires. In retrospect, they ended up being so. But making the hire at the time they did wasn't necessarily a terrible call. I wish we had gone with Beamer back when Coach Stallings left, but we didn't. I didn't want Dubose, but thought maybe he would be ok. He had one good year, at least. I was fully on board with the Fran hire, and that didn't work out. We were in a bad predicament when it came time for the Price/Shula hires. Both worked out badly for different reasons, but I was not mad at either of them nor am I convinced we could have done better in either case. Bad in retrospect, yep...all of those were. I couldn't say any were bad given the landscape at the time.
Let me explain myself (others can if they wish).
Whoever came after Coach Bryant was going to have problems. It just happened to be Ray Perkins, who just happened to come across as one of the most arrogant people you could ever see. I'm not saying he was arrogant, I don't know. But he looked so arrogant on TV and so standoffish about everything that he made his own problems. Perkins did draw a bad hand in that he was up against Pat Dye, a guy who had no scruples about telling high school kids, "Bayuh ain't gunna be thay-uh when you get ole 'nuff." That and Bryant's staff royally botching the Bo Jackson recruitment. Shula got away with it for years just looking like one of those "ho hum, no big deal" guys on TV, swell feller. It wasn't reality, it was how he looked. Perkins LOOKED arrogant at every turn. I don't know the man, and the TV can be cruel to folks - but how he looked under the circumstances he was in didn't help matters.
I would hasten to add that Perkins was, in fact, Bryant's choice to replace him, as has been covered ad nauseum on this board.
Bill Curry had the misfortune to see the guy we should have hired hit his stride right about the time Curry was losing to Memphis. He made it worse with his seeming to chicken out playing ATM when Hurricane Gilbert never arrived. He was also here when the Iron Bowl got moved (again - what was he supposed to do about it?), and when Ted Bundy threw a nuclear warhead through his window or something lost to history. Then, the bonehead reverses history by leaving UA for UK, which would have been OK if he was a basketball coach.
Perkins was hired with Bryant's endorsement, so it's hard to attack that as a poor choice, but Curry was a poor choice when whatever drunk member of the coaching search team said, "Hey, haw 'bout Bell KUR-ree?"
Stallings was not the best choice in 1990, Bobby Bowden was. And I'll admit I was wary of the hire given his record as head coach. Bowden took himself out of the running so Stallings wasn't a bad choice, and he DID have college coaching experience.
Mike DuBose was the Gene Chizik hire at Alabama. There is NO WAY to justify giving an immature teenager with no driving experience the keys to the stick shift Ferrari, but we somehow did it. I knew it was awful the day I heard his name, and he needs to thank Shaun Alexander for that SEC title ring every night he prays.
I opposed Franchione, but I'd warn everyone that that hire - far more than the later ones - was where we were more up against it than at any other time. I've heard tell that Butch Davis had a handshake deal only to find out we were going to get hit with a bomb (and he'd just been through that at Miami), so he backed out. You have to remember that Franchione came along after Davis and Frank Beamer and Tommy Bowden used us for big raises and Mickey Andrews came out saying he wanted it. It was basically between Fran and Walt Harris. Hell, Jackie Sherrill called a local press conference in Mississippi and pulled a Houston Nutt, declaring that he was not interested in a job he had no chance at getting in the first place.
Franchione was probably the best available under the circumstances - as the NCAA revelations hit the paper just over a week before he took the job.
When you look at the list of names with Price, you have to really wonder who he slept with to move to the front of that line. It was - apparently - an omen. And Shula, well, I threw in with Shula because firing Croom, which was likely inevitable regardless who we hired, was going to bring out some sociological wrath. Hell, we got enough grief when we didn't hire Croom after Notre Dame hired Willingham.
So I'd say Curry, Price, and Shula were bad hires.
Franchione was a "best under circumstances" hire (which everyone thinks of Shula but isn't true).
And DuBose was the worst hire since Mr Lippman hired George Costanza after hearing the latter's favorite author was Art Vandelay.