Jimbo Fisher, national championship head coach, is now doing his head coaching in the league that lives to win national championships. Keep an eye on this. (Not that, with the SEC’s ceaseless promotion of itself, anything involving a member school ever passes without notice.) If you’re looking for the next SEC program to pull a Georgia and get really good really fast, it’s Texas A&M.
Know how many times the conference where It Just Means More has added a coach who won a consensus title at another major school? Three, and one bears an asterisk. Johnny Majors left Pittsburgh for Tennessee, his alma mater, after taking the Panthers to the 1976 championship. Lou Holtz, who won with Notre Dame in 1988, exited retirement to join South Carolina in 1999. The asterisk: Danny Ford, who won with Clemson in 1981, wound up coaching Arkansas, although he was brought to Fayetteville as Joe Kines’ assistant.
(And yes, Steve Spurrier and Nick Saban took national titles elsewhere before landing at South Carolina and Alabama, but those previous championships were won at other SEC outposts.)
Jimbo Fisher won it all with Florida State in 2013, beating Auburn in Pasadena and snapping the SEC’s streak of BCS titles at seven. The conference has since taken two more national championships, both by Alabama. In January, the Crimson Tide shaded Georgia in overtime at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which sits across the street from the College Football Hall of Fame, site of the conference’s first non-Birmingham Media Days. MBS was also the site of the Seminoles’ season-opening loss to Alabama, which saw quarterback Deondre Francois lost for the season.
For FSU, matters deteriorated from there. Once the toast of the town, Jimbo took to sparring with disgruntled fans. It was no great surprise that left, especially when you considered the destination.
Texas A&M brought Fisher back to the league where, in his words, he cut his teeth. He worked six years as Terry Bowden’s Auburn assistant, seven under Saban and then Les Miles at LSU. He moved to Tallahassee in 2007 and became Bobby Bowden’s coach-in-waiting, and he didn’t wait long. There he built an ACC colossus that – ACC folks will cringe at this – was SEC-like in its combination of speed and heft.
"I know this is as good a league as there is in college football," Fisher said Monday, speaking of his latest home. While employed by FSU, he occasionally chafed over the national fealty paid the SEC. When his 2014 Seminoles, who hadn't lost in two years, were ranked No. 3 by the College Football Playoff committee behind once-beaten Bama, he said: "It's amazing how you can brainwash somebody."
The next year, speaking on his call-in show, he said of the SEC: "It's a great league. But they didn't invent football."
At the risk of being barred entrance for the final three days of this SEC-palooza, I’ll offer this: No, it didn’t. Fisher and FSU got past the SEC and won it all. Dabo Swinney and Clemson got past the SEC and won it all. (Although not last January.) “The ACC’s progression is because of the SEC,” he said, and there’s truth to that.
The ACC – the SEC’s nearest geographic neighbor, if the map of college football can be said to have any sense of geography – got bigger because it wearied of being made to feel small. FSU and Clemson were two places that could go head-to-head with King Crimson and its ilk and not be embarrassed – not in crowd size, not in facilities, not in recruiting. And, regarding Jimbo, the bigger point is this:
If he could do it in the ACC, he can do it in College Station. The dynamics that existed at FSU are in play at A&M – rabid fans, a massive state as a recruiting base and, not incidentally, enough money to spend $75 million over 10 years on its new coach.
Granted, he’s in the harder division. One reason Georgia won the SEC in Year 2 under Kirby Smart was that the Bulldogs didn’t run into Alabama until Jan. 8. (They did face Auburn twice in three weeks.) The Aggies get Alabama and Auburn and LSU every year. But Ed Orgeron isn’t winning anything in Baton Rouge, and Auburn remains an entity until itself, not necessarily in a good way.
LSU was long rumored as Fisher’s next stop, but the Tigers bungled the Miles firing and erred in letting Orgeron become anything more than Mr. Interim. A&M was the beneficiary of this hemming and hawing, though the Jimbo who’s coming off an awful farewell to FSU isn’t quite so bright and shiny as the Jimbo who led the Seminoles to 29 consecutive wins over 25 majestic months.
Until last year, he would have ranked among the nation’s top five coaches. The guess is that new environs will serve as a tonic. (And FSU should be fine under Willie Taggart.) Fisher knows how to pick a staff – two of his former defensive coordinators, Mark Stoops and Jeremy Pruitt, are SEC head coaches – and he’s good with quarterbacks, having been one himself. Oh, and he’s 11-2 against SEC teams.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt Jimbo will do very well at Texas A&M,” Stoops said Monday, and there isn’t. Five SEC schools have new coaches. The Aggies bought the best of the lot.
About the Author
