College football coaches who get hired to their old jobs

Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast

Your Repeat Coach Hire Probably Won't Work

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Your Repeat Coach Hire Probably Won't Work

A comprehensive history of college football teams running it back with the guy who won there before, now that WVU and UCF are trying it.

Alex Kirshner

Richard Johnson

, and

Steven Godfrey

Jan 06, 2025

∙ Paid

Hundreds of college football teams have hired head coaches back to their old jobs. There’s a whole Wikipedia list and everything, dating to the 1800s. But most of these situations are many decades old. The most common time for a retread coaching hire was around World War II, when a coach started at a school, left to join the war, and then came back. Most also aren’t in FBS.

We found 19 head coaches (before recent re-hires Scott Frost and Rich Rodriguez) who meet the following criteria:

They were twice the head coach at the same school
Long after World War II
At an FBS program (or at least a program that was in FBS by the second time they got the job)
Neither tenure was as an interim coach

We were interested in learning lessons. Which coaches succeeded in a second go-around, and which didn’t? Here’s a rough overview of how they did:

Head coach Team Tenures Win%: First Tenure Win%: Second Tenure Age at Start of Second Tenure Jeff Tedford Fresno State 2017–2019, 2022–2023 65.0% 69.2% 60 Jim Sweeney Fresno State 1976–1977, 1980–1996 63.6% 65.8% 51 John Robinson USC 1976–1982, 1993–1997 82.7% 63.8% 58 Bill Snyder Kansas State 1989–2005, 2009–2018 66.7% 61.7% 70 Brady Hoke San Diego State 2009–2010, 2020–2023 52.0% 60.5% 61 Chris Ault Nevada 1976–1992, 1994–1995, 2004–2012 72.6% 60.3% 57 Bobby Petrino Louisville 2003–2006, 2014–2018 82.0% 58.1% 53 Mack Brown North Carolina 1988–1997, 2019–2024 60.0% 57.1% 68 Mike Riley Oregon State 1997–1998, 2003–2014 36.4% 56.3% 52 Bill Walsh Stanford 1977–1978, 1992–1994 70.8% 50.0% 62 Gary Andersen Utah State 2009–2012, 2019–2020 52.0% 43.8% 55 Greg Schiano Rutgers 2001–2011, 2020–present 50.4% 43.3% 54 Dennis Franchione Texas State 1990–91, 2011–2015 59.1% 41.7% 60 Don Fambrough Kansas 1971–1974, 1979–1982 43.2% 41.5% 56 Dennis Erickson Idaho 1982–1985, 2006 68.1% 33.3% 59 Mark Whipple UMass 1998–2003, 2014–2018 65.3% 29.4% 57 Johnny Majors Pitt 1973–1976, 1993–1996 71.7% 27.3% 58 Don Brown UMass 2004–2008, 2022–2024 69.4% 17.6% 67 Randy Edsall UConn 1999–2010, 2017–2021 52.6% 15.8% 59 Average 63.8% 53.3% 59

Many caveats are in play! Several of these schools were at one level when the coach left, then played at a different level when he returned—either in a new conference or a move from FCS to FBS. In the attached podcast episode, we talk about these coaches in detail and try to learn some lessons, like:

Why do win percentages in aggregate drop by 10 percent in a coach’s second go-around at a school?
What are the common threads between successful retread hires? (Put another way: Is there just something in the water in Fresno?)
How about commonalities between failures?

And, of course, we try to apply these lessons to recent retread hires. Are we bigger believers in WVU RichRod 2.0 or UCF Frost 2.0?

Producer: Anthony Vito

Hosts: Richard Johnson, Steven Godfrey, Alex Kirshner