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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/obamaluvr on 2025-08-02 17:34:30+00:00.
In any given year, if you’re given 5 choices of programs to win the title from the preseason, you’ll usually pick the eventual winner in that group. However, that isn’t to say that the coaches who’ve never been part of those groups haven’t coached elite players across their tenure as coach of a school, just never enough of them in a close enough window to get into the conversation.
Now lets change that script and pose a question that rewards those coaches - Which of them could realistically win a national championship this year if they were given the opportunity to coach their all-tenure team?
What that means is: Their entire roster would be composed of the best players in a season that player played in and the coach was the head coach of that team.
Theres some rules I feel are important:
- Coaches can only get a player from a team in the year that they were head coach of. If a player was more successful or finds more success later on but not under the head coach, the coach cannot use that player from those more-successful years. Cristobal doesn’t get to use UGA Carson Beck.
- For great players who got injured, their injury history would roughly match reality. If they miss half the games in the season they represent, they’d miss half the games in this hypothetical. If they were healthy in previous seasons, those previous seasons (at the respective skill of the player in that season) can be used instead.
- non-consecutive tenure players count. Scott Frost and Richrod can augment their team with players they had in the past.
- Head coach means being top employed coach at some point prior to bowl season/coaching carousel - either having the title or being interim head coach. Sherrone Moore can’t claim players from 2023 Michigan because he was merely acting head coach, not interim.
- Players can be switched positions