The SEC Forum at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Only 4 active coaches have won NCs.  To be in a top tier, you have to start there.

To me, to be on the next tier you'd have to win your conference and maybe go to and/or win multiple BCS/Playoff site bowl games.

After that, you have guys like Harbaugh who bring the hype but not the results as of yet.

Eh, I'm not so high on attaching an NC as a must in order for a coach to be recognized as really, really good.  A great coach can get and keep a team in the mix, but there are a lot of outside factors that affect teams winning an NC that the coach/team has zero control over.  It buys into that whole "whoever has the most rings is the GOAT" mentality, which is terminally dumb.  
For me, if a guy can immediately resurrect a floundering blue blood like Michigan and have them in the conversation, can take a perennial joke like Stanford and turn them into a west coast power, and also have NFL success.....you're a very good coach, worth naming on the 2nd tier at least.  
Harbaugh is an odd kind of dick, but we hired one of those anyway, and I can tell you which one I'd rather have coaching here if I had my preference.  

I suspect there will be a higher number than usual of "name programs" with openings in December.  That is a tough time to do a search obviously.  The SEC is going to be on the coaching carousel for a few years I think.

Those were more or less guidelines the way I see it.  It's hard to apply a simple criteria over 120+ coaches.  But if the ultimate goal in a NC, and it is for a helmet school like Michigan, how do you label him elite when he hasn't won or even competed for the big prize?

Shouldn't Harbaugh at least win his division in CFB to be considered elite, or even tier 2?  He has hasn't won a conference division.  At the same time you can have guys like McElwain who have won divisions but nobody would put him on the same level as Harbaugh.  And you can also have a guy like Saban who did average at best in the NFL and is probably the best CFB coach of all time.

It's a case by case basis, and even then there is going to be a pecking order in the same tier.

Mac needs to climb trees, have a sleepover (creepy) with a recruit, take his team to Rome and hold 5,285 camps in a month, among many other stunts.

Then he can be elite, too.

I suspect there will be a higher number than usual of "name programs" with openings in December.  That is a tough time to do a search obviously.  The SEC is going to be on the coaching carousel for a few years I think.

Someone posted some pics on an LSU site a while back, group photos of all SEC coaches, one current and one about 8ish years ago or so.  One is hard-pressed to admit the current group of faces do not measure up to that older group of faces.  And it showed in the conference, then and now.  The SEC was dominant for a while.  Now it's not nearly as tough as it was a few seasons ago.  
You could wonder what happened to all these high-caliber coaches, and it's a fair question.  I'm inclined to agree with one poster who posited that Saban has basically killed the rest of the SEC.  No school's success was good enough in Alabama's wake, and a lot of them have jettisoned coaches, not for not being great coaches, but for not being him.  He's run everyone off from their job for failing to beat him or be competitive with Alabama.  There's some exceptions, but a few of those faces who are good at their jobs definitely got canned because Alabama is wrecking the curve.  

He did at Stanford, no?  At any rate, he's done enough that I'd put him with the tier 2 coaches below Saban/Meyer/whoever.  I'd rather have him than Jimbo, tbh.  Your mileage may vary.  

No is correct. Best finish was #2 (There were no division back then, but Oregon would be in the same one anyway).

Also, let's not pretend that Stanford was a nothing before he showed up. They have the 4th most conference championships in the PAC, behind USC, UCLA and Washington.

They were most definitely nothing before he showed up. Your irrational hatred towards Harbaugh couldn't be more obvious.

Not liking Harbaugh (I never said hate - that word applies only to certain politicians and world leaders) is not irrational at all. It's natural to dislike self-promoting egomaniacs.

The new guy at Minnesota is right there with him in that regard.

RichRod was a terrible hire for a program like Michigan. Talk about square pegs and round holes. That was never going to work. It wouldn't work at a place like LSU either.

Brady Hoke won 11 games in his fist season at Michigan and posted a 31-20 record. He got fired after winning 5 games in 2014. Could he have turned it around? We'll never know.

Lloyd Carr won 9 games in his last season at Michigan, and 11 the year before. The fewest he won in a season was 7. I'm not sure why they pushed him out.

Phil Fulmer and Frank Solich aren't sure why either.