Vanderbilt Commodores Tout Top 20 Winningest Coach in College Football History
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, the Vanderbilt Commodores were consistently good at the game of football.
Now, I get it, that is hard to believe with their recent (used loosely) run of outcomes on the football field, especially when you consider that the program has only seen a winning record in four of its last 48 seasons.
While that does look to change this year, there was a time when the Commodores were synonymous with winning.
You just have to go all the way back to the first half of the 1900s to find that time, an era where most of you who are reading this were nowhere close to being born.
ESPN recently released an article breaking down the top 20 winningest head coaches in the history of college football, and Vandy touts a coach who comes in at 19th, Dan McGugin.
McGugin coached in the era where coaches never left a program, no matter how good they performed or what other schools came calling.
He called Nashville home from 1904 through 1934, skipping the 2018 season, but still a span of 30 years for those of you keeping score at home, a run that is all but unheard of in today's athletic landscape for any sport at any level.
In that time, McGugin led the Commodores to a 197-55-19 overall, with a 115-34-13 record in conference play.
That conference play consisted of three different iterations of what we now know as the Southeastern Conference, but his tenure began with it being known as the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, before becoming the Southern Conference, and then the SEC in 1933.
McGugin boasts 12 conference titles in that time, finished second in the conference once, and third in the conference three times.
Oh, and that 2018 season that the coach skipped?
McGugin took time off to work in the mining industry during the First World War.
Can you imagine a head coach at any college football program today decided to just leave and go work in the mining industry?
It was a different era then, now over 100 years ago.
While Mcgugin's tenure as the head coach of Vanderbilt has long come to an end, the wins that he helped lead the team to remain.
And with incumbent head coach Clark Lea in his fourth season with the program, a year that has been very successful to this point, we could be in the early stages of another long and historic run for Vandy.
