In college football's Championship Era -- since the founding of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 -- one coach has reached the national title game in his first year as a head coach.
That was Miami's Larry Coker. Coker led the Hurricanes to a national championship in 2001, a year removed from a 2000 season in which Miami went 11-1 and finished No. 2 in the polls. Coker was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach on that team.
So, the situation could not have been more advantageous for Coker, or more different than new Virginia head coach Tony Elliott's reality, but Elliott is planning to reach the title game all the same.
Elliott is a first-time head coach taking over a UVA team that went 6-6 overall and finished in fourth place in the ACC's Coastal Division. In other words, not at all analogous to Coker's Miami.
What about the last time an outside hire led his team to the title game?
For that, you'd have to go back to 1989, when Dennis Erickson arrived at Miami and immediately guided the Hurricanes to the national championship.
There are two key differences there, though. First, unlike Elliott, Erickson had been a head coach before. He led Idaho to two Division I-AA playoffs appearances, spent a season at Wyoming, and then engineered a 6-win turnaround in two seasons at Washington State before crossing the country to South Beach. Second, like Coker, he inherited a Hurricanes team that went 11-1 and finished No. 2 the year before.
But who cares? Elliott is clearly subscribing to the old John Wooden philosophy that failing to prepare is preparing to fail. If Virginia really does reach the CFP title game this season, their head coach will have clearly out-performed the $1 million bonus his contract dictates, win or lose.
There's just one problem with Elliott's master schedule, though. The 2023 CFP National Championship is at Inglewood's SoFi Stadium, not the Rose Bowl.