How College Football Hall of Fame eligibility changes impact Mike Leach, Les Miles, others

New York Times

2 days ago

The late Mike Leach, a legendary and revolutionary college football mind, will soon be eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame.
On Thursday, the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame announced changes to eligibility criteria for coaches to be considered for induction. The NFF has come under scrutiny in recent years for requiring coaches to have a .600 career winning percentage to be considered, but on Thursday it opted to trim the required winning percentage down to .595 starting in 2027.
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Leach, who coached at Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State, went 158-107 in his career for a winning percentage of .596. But he had an outsized impact on the sport through the development of the Air Raid offense and his coaching tree. Leach died in December 2022 at the age of 61 following complications form a heart condition.
The NFF still requires coaches eligible for induction to have served a minimum of 10 years as a head coach and to have coached a minimum of 100 career games. Coaches become eligible three full seasons after retirement or are immediately eligible if they retire at the age of 70 or older. Active coaches who are 75 or older are eligible.
'The NFF is committed to preserving the integrity and prestige of the NFF College Football Hall of Fame,' NFF president Steve Hatchell said in a release Thursday. 'This adjustment reflects thoughtful dialogue with leaders across the sport and allows us to better recognize coaches whose contributions to the game extend beyond a narrow statistical threshold.'
The change might allow for Leach to be inducted posthumously in 2027, but it still leaves questions as to why other prominent and successful coaches remain ineligible. Howard Schnellenberger, who guided Miami to a national title in 1983, will not be able to be considered for induction because of his .511 career winning percentage (158-151-3) that also included stops at Louisville, Oklahoma and Florida Atlantic. He's now a mere four-tenths of a percentage short of the NFF's new required winning clip. Schnellenberger died in March 2021 at the age of 87.
Another national champion head coach may, in theory, be eligible too.
Former LSU head coach Les Miles, who guided the Tigers to a national title in 2007, sued the NCAA, the NFF and LSU last year after 37 of his wins were vacated in the wake of a Level I recruiting violation, dropping his career winning percentage from .665 (145-73) to .597 (108-73). Though the suit was later dismissed, the 71-year-old Miles, who also coached at Oklahoma State and Kansas, could now be eligible for induction anyway.
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The longest-tenured current head coach in college football also has a little more wiggle room.
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, who has been leading the Hawkeyes since 1999, is one win from tying Ohio State's Woody Hayes for the Big Ten career win record of 205. But Ferentz's three-year stint at Maine (12-21) from 1990-92 caused his career winning percentage to hover just below the .600 threshold at .598. Ferentz, 69, is 216-145 overall and 204-124 (.622 percent) in 26 seasons at Iowa.