(ThyBlackMan.com) We are on the doorstep of the beginning of the 2018 college football season. Over 120 teams will compete for bowl bids, conference championships, and to be among the four teams selected in the College Football Playoff to conclude the college football season. This year will be filled with talented true freshmen making impacts making names for themselves following their high school careers, Heisman Trophy hopefuls trying to win the most coveted individual award in college football, and college football head coaches trying to outwit their opponents on a play by play basis.
In college football, head coaches always get a lot of attention because of their importance to the program with recruiting, game planning, and being the face of the university in many cases. It now appears that some college football coaches believe that there are college football coaches who receive too much attention and credit based on a recent CBS Sports poll.
The CBS Sports website recently asked over 20 head coaches of the
129 FBS college football head coaches opinions about their head coaching peers. When CBS Sports polled those coaches about the most overrated head coach in college football, the top two head coaches were Penn State’s James Franklin and Florida State’s Willie Taggart, who tied for first with 20 percent of the vote. It is worth mentioning that both Franklin and Taggart are both black in sport where less than 8 percent of Division I head football coaches were black in 2016-17.
There were some interesting anonymous quotes about James Franklin as one coach said, “When [Franklin] got the Penn State job, I thought, ‘Man, he’s a good marketer.’ He did a nice job with that. It’ll be interesting without Saquon [Barkley]. He’s underrated. He turns a lot of no[-gain] plays into 60-yard touchdowns.” Another anonymous coach who voted Willie Taggart as overrated said, “I would say Willie Taggart at Florida State. He was only at Oregon for one year, and it’s not like he really transformed that program — and that’s a place that’s won for a long time. Not that he isn’t good — he’s won. But usually when you get a job like Florida State, it’s because you’ve won some championships or done something really amazing.”
James Franklin is entering his fifth year at Penn State and has had back to back 11 win seasons including winning the Big Ten Championship in 2016. He started his Penn State tenure off “slowly” by winning seven games his first two seasons but context is important because he was getting the program from Bill O’Brien a couple years after the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal rocked the university. Franklin had even proven himself as a quality head coach prior to coming to Penn State by taking Vanderbilt to bowl games in a SEC conference known as the best in the country. Franklin is one of the head coaches that make the Big Ten East division one of the toughest divisions in all of college football.
Willie Taggart being considered “overrated” is interesting because he has had some significant offensive success in his numerous stops as he begins his first season this year at Florida State. Taggart took the South Florida Bulls to some of their best seasons ever including leading the Bulls to a then program-record 10-2 mark in 2016. His last year as the head coach at Oregon, he was able to get the program back to bowl eligibility after a four win season prior to his arrival. Taggart has been a bit of a vagabond in moving from college to college but he has had enough success that the “overrated” label is too much. It is head-scratching that two of college football’s most successful black coaches are seen as “overrated” even though they are getting teams to bowl games, producing double digit winning seasons, and recruiting at high levels.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines