Not even the Greatest College Football Coaches Could Win ’Em All

I enjoy corresponding on a semi-regular basis with John Mackovic. This man had a long career as a college football coach at Wake Forest, Illinois, Texas and Arizona (not to mention a stint with the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL). He’s interesting, with educated opinions on a wide array of issues, and I do not deny that I hold him in high regard. Not long ago, however, he indicated mild displeasure when I asked a few questions about UT’s 66-3 drubbing at the hands of UCLA in 1996. It is the nature of big-time sports that a game can get away from you. Other coaches, even the best of the best, have suffered mortifying losses. Here, in alphabetical order, are some examples:

• Bernie Bierman. He had lifted Minnesota to three national titles, but that was a decade past in 1950 when the Golden Gophers went 1-7-1 and lost 48-0 at home to Ohio State. Bierman was either fired or eased out the door at the end of the season.
• Red Blaik. The 1950 Army Black Knights finished No. 2, but the next year’s team dropped to 2-7. They closed with a 42-7 loss to Navy in Philadelphia in which the Middies scored two touchdowns before Army could run an offensive series. This precipitous fall can be traced to an academic cheating scandal that decimated the football program.
• Bobby Bowden. The 1981 season ended badly for Bowden and his Florida State team. They lost 58-14 to Southern Mississippi in Tallahassee, followed by a 35-3 thrashing by Florida in Gainesville.
• Frank Broyles. People remember, for good reason, the 1969 Texas-Arkansas game in which the Longhorns edged the Hogs 15-14 in Fayetteville. The next year, they played in Austin. The orange and white took no prisoners in a 42-7 victory; Texas gained 464 yards on the ground and Arkansas just 20.
• Bear Bryant. A young coach, he left Kentucky for Texas A&M and was not pleased with what he found—a bunch of weak, scraggly and undisciplined players. Shortly before the 1954 season started, he took them to a sun-baked town called Junction and put them through workouts no coach would dare try today. Books have been written and movies made about Bryant’s so-called Junction Boys. Their first game was a 41-9 loss to Texas Tech in College Station, with just 16,500 fans in attendance.
• Woody Hayes. His most memorable defeat as Ohio State’s head coach, in the 1978 Gator Bowl, was not his worst. That may have been when the Buckeyes fell 32-3 to Southern Cal at Los Angeles Memorial Stadium in 1963.
• John McKay. An 8-11 record his first two seasons at USC did not seem to augur well, but McKay knew what he was doing because the Trojans would later win three national championships under him. As with Mackovic and his 66-3, I doubt McKay appreciated people inquiring about a 34-0 home loss to Washington in 1960.
• Urban Meyer. This guy, recently retired, was a big winner, so finding a devastating loss is not easy. Meyer’s 2010 Florida team went 8-5, and fell to Alabama 31-6 and Florida State 31-7.
• Bob Neyland. “General” Neyland’s Tennessee Volunteers went 21-1 in 1938 and 1939 with one national crown, then he went off to war. Coming back to Knoxville, he had to start over. UT took it on the chin 43-13 against Ole Miss in Memphis on November 8, 1947.
• Tom Osborne. The model of consistency at Nebraska, Osborne never won fewer than nine games or lost more than three in his 25-year career. A 27-0 road loss to Oklahoma in 1973 is the closest he came to getting his butt kicked.
• Joe Paterno. The first game of the 1983 season had defending national champ Penn State facing off against Nebraska in East Rutherford, New Jersey. When it was over, Osborne practically apologized for his team’s resounding 44-6 victory over the Nittany Lions.
• Eddie Robinson. He won 406 games at Grambling between 1941 and 1997. It would have been nice for his final contest, against Southern in New Orleans, to be victory number 407. Alas, Robinson’s Tigers lost 30-7 for their sixth straight defeat. Having stayed a little too long, he retired soon thereafter.
• Knute Rockne. Notre Dame’s master motivator was 105-12-5 in his 13 seasons, an .881 winning percentage—the best in the history of college football. Of those 12 losses, two were to Carnegie Mellon. Who knew Carnegie Mellon even had a team or that they were so good? The Tartans beat the Irish 19-0 in 1926 and 27-7 in 1928.
• Darrell Royal. One of Mackovic’s predecessors at Texas, his team was spanked by Oklahoma 27-0 on October 14, 1972. I was there in the upper deck at the Cotton Bowl, watching Greg Pruitt make mincemeat of our defense. The next day’s Dallas Morning News had this headline: “Oh, You Sooners Too Much!” Dishonorable mention: UT’s 39-7 loss to Mississippi in the 1958 Sugar Bowl.
• Nick Saban. Since Saban’s recent Alabama teams seldom lose (and never by a large margin), I have go to back early in his career to find a game where somebody put a knot on his head. I will choose the opener of the 1995 season in which Michigan State hosted Nebraska. It was Cornhuskers all the way, 50-10.
• Barry Switzer. Coach at Oklahoma between 1973 and 1988, Switzer had a winning percentage of .837. His teams won and won. The only thing close to a blowout they suffered came in the 1978 Orange Bowl against Arkansas. The Razorbacks were missing three key players (police raided their dormitory room and found them and six other black male students consorting with a partially disrobed European-American female student), and 12 more threatened to boycott the game before changing their minds. In spite of all that sturm und drang, Arkansas took a 31-6 victory.
• Bud Wilkinson. His Oklahoma teams won 47 straight games between 1953 and 1957, but the Sooners’ mojo had begun to ebb by 1960. They went 3-6-1 and bottomed out with a 41-19 home loss to Missouri. So what if that was one of the best teams in Mizzou history? Wilkinson’s boys were accustomed to being on the winning end of 41-19 scores.
• Fielding Yost. This man coached at six schools but is best known for his exploits at Michigan. In his 25 seasons in Ann Arbor, Yost had a losing record just once—in 1919. November 22 was homecoming day (back when such things mattered) and the Wolverines lost 34-7 to Minnesota.