Perfection, Humanity, and Ed Orgeron

I ended up on Wikipedia’s list of current FBS coaches today (looking for median tenure among current coaches for the sake of an upcoming post), and something possessed me to sort the list by win percentage at current school.

It was an unsurprising list, looking something like the following. I’ve re-formatted, but I didn’t add back in any vacated wins and losses—apologies to Brian Kelly, who would be in the David Shaw/Gary Patterson range were Wikipedia not evidently an NCAA-appeasing entity. I also cut it off at 25 coaches, because after that it gets rather boring:

The names up top are who you’d expect, once you filter out the new guy in Shawn Clark (who, if trends continue at Appalachian State, will be a mainstay in the Josh Heupel range for a few years before leaving for South Carolina). Above a certain sample size threshold, Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney are the leaders. Unfiltered, the only things that jumped out to me as a fairly invested college football fan were how successful Paul Chryst has been at Wisconsin and how well Dan Mullen’s first two seasons at Florida have gone.

But then I looked at career win percentage. For a lot of these coaches (just under half of them), this number is the same as current school win percentage—they’ve had just one head coaching gig in the FBS. For most of the rest, there isn’t much difference. Sure, Mario Cristobal lost a lot at FIU, and Jimbo Fisher won a lot at Florida State, but neither of those things is particularly striking at this point in college football history. One thing in that metric, though, does stand out. Here’s an expanded version of the table. Look near the bottom:

Coach O.

I knew Ed Orgeron’s time at Ole Miss was not very successful. I did not realize how unsuccessful it was. Ten wins. 25 losses. In SEC play, an unsightly 3-21 mark, the wins coming over Vanderbilt, Mississippi State, and Kentucky, meaning there were no high points whatsoever for Coach O in Oxford. Not just unsuccessful, but a disaster, one that pulls the man, statistically, out of the ranks of his peers.

Over the last fifteen years, coaches who have won a national championship at the FBS level are as follows: Nick Saban (5), Urban Meyer (3), Dabo Swinney (2), Mack Brown (1), Les Miles (1), Jimbo Fisher (1), Gene Chizik (1), and now Ed Orgeron (1). Brown and Miles make sense—they’re omitted from the above tables because they’re each just a year into rebuilding campaigns and thus have a poor win percentage at their current school, but Brown falls alongside Harbaugh in career win percentage, and Miles is close to Patterson. Fisher’s success has faded, but it’s not outlandish that a man who’s won three quarters of his games as a head coach got a title at some point. Chizik is a wildcard, deserving of credit for the 2010 season, but not as much credit as his colleagues receive for similar feats, judging by what happened to him in seasons without Cam Newton at quarterback. Then, there’s Coach O. A 60% career win percentage, or roughly 8-5 in an average modern season.

Aside from Chizik (who, of course, had plenty of failure, and won a title seemingly not through growth but through Newton and a good defensive performance against Oregon), none of the rest of these coaches have failure on their résumé. Brown had bad seasons at Tulane and UNC, but only at the beginning of his time there, and only missed a bowl once while at Texas. Miles never had a losing season between his first as a head coach, at Oklahoma State, and this current one at Kansas. Fisher’s time at FSU ended with the program in shambles, but he also brought the school a title. Ed Orgeron spent three years at a school that is not historically atrocious and won just three conference games.

In a sport in which perfection is essential, Coach O’s career has not been perfect. He has not been perfect, as a coach or a person. This year, his team was perfect. And in making that team perfect, he, the coach LSU was laughed at for hiring, brought something new to the ranks of national champions:

Redemption.

I bear no illusions about the college football landscape and LSU’s place within it. Baton Rouge is, objectively, one of the most advantageous places in the country for national championship aspirants. The resources are there. The recruiting territory is there. The regular-season schedule is there. The Louisiana State University Tigers have won fewer than eight games exactly zero times since Nick Saban took over at the beginning of the 2000 season. This isn’t a situation where Coach O built a program from the ground up. Nevertheless, he won a national championship in a season featuring two other historically dominant football teams, and his guys knocked off the most powerful program in the sport, on the road, on the way there. His team completed the most impressive perfect season since at least that weird Chizik/Newton 2010, and arguably further back than that. No matter how advantageous the position is, Coach O deserves and receives a massive amount of credit for his performance. But doing a good job in an advantageous position is not what LSU will be remembered for. It’s not what made the populace fall in love with Coach O. It’s not what placed this football team at the front of our collective consciousness from the moment they entered Austin to play Texas until the lights went out last night in the Superdome.

The 2019 LSU Tigers were captivating because of their humanity. Coach O, a barrel-chested, gumbo-loving Cajun radiating uncontained joy. Joe Burrow, a passed-over, cast-aside quarterback from a passed-over, cast-aside part of the country demonstrating a cinematic knack for The Moment while turning in one of the greatest single-season performances in college football history. Two men, 35 years apart in age, endearing an SEC juggernaut to a nation that loathes SEC juggernaut through authenticity, originality, and charisma. And it seems improbable for this piece of this season’s LSU to not go hand-in-hand with redemption. Because Burrow, of course, felt he had something to redeem; and because for Orgeron, redemption is the story even the numbers tell, having stripped away the crawfish and the voice and “Geaux Tigahs;” and because for all the things we, human beings, love about ourselves, redemption is the thing our artists and scribes and prophets have triumphed since the beginning of recorded time.

There may never again be a college football team, in our lifetime, as beloved as this year’s LSU. That’s ok. Humanity and perfection don’t usually go hand in hand, and if their doing so was common, it wouldn’t be so moving. In Ed Orgeron, and in Joe Burrow, they did, and we—college football fans at large—are better for it.