Pasadena, Calif. – Former Texas head coach and ESPN college football analyst Mack Brown knows what it takes to be a successful head coach. He’s won 244 games, two outright Big 12 titles and one National Championship.
In his year 15 years at Texas, he did something both Florida State’s Bobby Bowden and Oregon’s Chip Kelly did: he won.
He, along with the rest of the country know what the names Bowden and Kelly have meant to each team’s program. Bowden was there for over 40 years. Kelly transformed the culture at Oregon. It prompted a tough task for each of their incumbents, Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher and Oregon head coach Mark Helfrich.
“Both these coaches have taken over for guys that were winning really, really big,” Brown said Wednesday.
It hasn’t been difficult for either coach to find success though. Fisher comes into this game with a National Championship already under his belt and Helfrich, in his two years, holds a 23-3 record.
“I think both these guys have done an unbelievable job being respectful to the guys that were so successful before them and at the same time, putting their own mark on it and moving forward,” Brown said.
Neither program has looked back. Sure speculation has ran rampant as it always does, but the teams meeting in the inaugural College Football Playoff speaks to where each program is at behind the two.
Fisher took over the Florida State program in 2010. His successor was the winningest coach in college football history. However, Fisher has smoothly transitioned the program into another period of prominence. Now in his fifth season, he has accumulated a record of 58-10 as head coach and the Seminoles are 4-0 in bowl games.
They also bring with them a 29-game winning streak into Thursday.
He says the number one thing that has worked for him as a coach is the fact that he has been “himself.”
A lot of core values stem from his predecessor. However, it would be short-sighted to think that he’s tried to emulate how Bowden attacked coaching.
“I think you learn from people,” Fisher says, “but the key is you’ve got to put your own stamp, your own personality on your own program. If you do it with class and dignity, hopefully success will follow.”
He sees it the same way in Helfrich’s case.
“Mark seems to be himself too. I don’t see him trying to be Chip Kelly or Mike Bellotti or anyone else. I see him trying to be Mark. That’s why he is such a successful coach.”
For the second-year coach though, it’s even simpler. This “dramatic success” is not all that different to past seasons in terms of how he and the rest of his coaching staff have handled their business. The mindset has never changed.
“Our whole deal is we want to be better,” Helfrich said. “We want to be better in every single thing we do, and that certainly starts with me – but that’s nutrition, that’s medicine, it’s how we practice, it’s everything that we try to evaluate on a daily basis and then on a year to year basis.”
Oregon has. Just in his second year as head coach, the Ducks are back to a place that it was last at in 2012. You can point to a thousand different things for why, according to Helfrich.
Though, one reason is obvious for Oregon and Florida State both. The success has stemmed from each coach’s stamp on their respective program. A stamp that hasn’t been emphatic. It’s one that just happened because they’ve been themselves.
Follow Justin Wise on Twitter @JustinFWise