Apples, Oranges and Fielding Yost

Another clickbait list tries to rank coaches across a century — and fails. Give me Saban, Meyer, Spurrier, Bowden and let’s talk!

By Buddy Mattin

gatorbaitmedia.com

Sports Illustrated just published a list of the 25 greatest coaches in college football history, and I want to be fair about this, so let me start with the good news: They got No. 1 right. Nick Saban at the top is the easiest call on the whole board.

Seven national championships, spread across two schools and three decades, won under every format, every rulebook and every excuse the modern game could invent. If you want to argue about Saban, argue with the wall.

After that, friends, the list falls off a cliff and keeps rolling. Garbage!

Let me deal with the matter at hand, because it cuts to the heart of everything wrong with these lists.

Somewhere below Bo Schembechler and Lou Holtz, at No. 20, sits Fielding H. Yost. And I have one simple question for the three gentlemen who wrote this thing: Which of you saw him coach?

Yost’s last game at Michigan was in 1926. One hundred years ago. No writer on that byline was alive when Yost coached. They are ranking a man none of them ever watched take a snap, against competition nobody can measure, from an era when there were no polls, no film worth the name, and — for most of Yost’s “national championships” in 1901, 1902, 1903 and 1904 — not even a forward pass.

It was against the rules.

Yost’s Wolverines scored 100 points in a game four times against the likes of Buffalo and West Virginia. And I’m supposed to slot that somewhere between Lou Holtz and LaVell Edwards with a straight face? That’s not analysis. That’s reading old newspaper clippings and typing “30.”

Here’s the problem with all of it, and it’s the same problem I’ve abhorred for more than a half century: You cannot rank coaches across eras any more than you can rank fruit across the produce aisle.

I admire and respect the attempt by younger people to embrace those of different eras, not copping out by saying ‘I don’t know — I wasn’t born yet!” Then again, it has gone too far. Quit pretending you know what you don’t know.

It’s apples and oranges, folks, and I’m begging the list-makers of America to stop pretending otherwise. It’s fake precision. A ranking implies you measured something. You didn’t. You compared a leather-helmet era when the forward pass was illegal to a NIL era when the quarterback has a business manager.

Those two things do not go on the same scale. They don’t even go in the same store.

Want proof of how fake the scale is? Look what happens when you try to use it. Oklahoma occupies three of the top six spots — Wilkinson at 5, Switzer at 6, with Osborne’s Nebraska at 4 for good measure. Fine programs all. But Barry Switzer’s Sooners won 12 Big Eight titles in a 16-year run when that conference had, what, two other teams that mattered?

Meanwhile Bobby Bowden, who built a national power out of a program that went 4-29 before he got there, sits at No. 7 behind him. Urban Meyer — three national titles at two schools, .854 winning percentage — is No. 10, two spots behind John McKay. Steve Spurrier, who took a Florida program that had never sniffed an SEC title, won six of them plus a national championship, and revolutionized the passing game on the side, is No. 15 — behind Darrell Royal, behind LaVell Edwards, behind Ara Parseghian.

The writers didn’t do this because they’re dumb. They did it because the exercise is impossible. When the tool is broken, everything you build with it is crooked.

And now the poison has spread to the present tense. Curt Cignetti is on the all-time list. The ALL-TIME list. The man has been relevant for about two seasons.

Yes, what he did at Indiana is remarkable, and if he keeps it up for 15 years, we’ll talk. But he’s on the same list as Bear Bryant and Eddie Robinson — a coach who spent 57 years at one school and won 408 games under conditions Bryant never had to face, segregation chief among them. That’s not a hot take, that’s a hot mess.

Recency bias isn’t a ranking criterion, no matter what the internet tells you.

Now, before the letters and emails arrive: I’m all for remembering the greats. Yost, Stagg, Warner, Rockne — those men built the house we all live in, and I’ve spent a good chunk of my life writing about exactly that. Stagg invented the huddle. Warner invented half the plays still run on Friday nights. They deserve every plaque in every hall of fame. What they don’t deserve is a numbered slot between coaches whose games we can actually evaluate.

I watched Bear Bryant pace a sideline in person. I covered Spurrier’s Gators, sat in Bowden’s press conferences, saw the eras collide in the 1990s when the SEC grew teeth. I feel qualified to compare the coaches I watched. I am not qualified — and neither is anyone at SI — to tell you whether Fielding Yost’s 55-1-1 run against a schedule of farmers’ colleges stacks up against Saban’s 17-year reign of terror in the toughest conference in America. Nobody is. The men who might have told us died before the people who wrote this list were born.

So here’s the verdict, and I’ll keep it short: Rank each coach against his own era. That’s a fair fight. Yost owned his. Rockne owned his. Wilkinson, Bryant, Robinson, Paterno — measure them against their contemporaries and let them stand or fall there.

If you want to compare decades — the ’60s coaches against the ’60s coaches, the playoff era against the playoff era — fine, have at it. That’s real work and I’ll read every word.

But this business of blending 1902 and 2026 into one numbered list? That’s not history. That’s arithmetic dressed up as insight. It’s fake, folks.

Stop it!

The greatest coach in college football history is whoever dominated his era the most completely, and after that, the argument is a bar argument — which, come to think of it, is the only proper place for it.

Top photo: Michigan vs. Minnesota, 1902, by Benham and Allen. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.