I liked Charlie Strong, and I think if we would have stuck with him, he would have eventually learned to win games at Texas. Let's be honest though. He never was well liked by a majority of the power brokers at Texas. Steve Patterson wasn't popular, and Strong was a "whaddya mean Saban said no?" stopgap.
I disagree. Trust me, I've seen a lot of
baaad football and severely under performing coaches (see Texas A&M under Dennis Franchione, Mike Sherman, and Kevin Sumlin) over the last 20 years, and Strong was definitely in that category. Undisciplined, finding ways to lose, making the same stupid mistakes over and over. Heck, didn't they lose a game by straight up missing the XP at the end? Franchione almost lost to ARMY, and did lose to Baylor, when Baylor was bad. Sometimes it's not just a talent gap, but that's hard to quantify.
Since I've become a college football fan in the mid-90's I've made an observation: A CFB coach, for the most part, will be all he's ever going to be by year 3. There are a few cases where coaches have been extremely mediocre for 3-5 years and then suddenly broke the ceiling of 9-10 wins, but for the most part if they're not winning big by year 3 they probably never will.
I admit my logic is flawed because so few coaches will stick around, even voluntarily or involuntarily after either a successful 3 year stint at a smaller school or an unsuccessful 3 year stint at a Helmet school. See Herman, Tom and Sumlin, Kevin at UH for the successful part. Or Ron Zook and Charlie Strong for the unsuccessful part.
The stats get even more skewed at the big time programs like Ohio St and OU. But when I think of all the majorly successful coaches most of them were winning 9-10 games by year three and most importantly, consistently winning 9-10 games.
The one exception I'm going to make is for a HC to take over a highly successful program. If a new HC takes over you have to give him 3-4 years to figure out how good he really is because a lot of teams are riding on the skills of the previous HC for a few years after he leaves. For example, Lincoln Riley at OU right now is considered one of the best but he's mostly doing it with players Bob Stoops recruited and developed. Of course he's still got them rolling in year 3 but IMO he hasn't faced real adversity yet because the schedule just isn't that tough. Still, losing to a not-that-great KSU squad showed some kinks in the armor.
