Pate's Case Against The 'What Has He Won' Test
Pate argues the loudest disqualifier in coaching debates is actually the surest predictor of a first-time champion.
Pate has a problem with the way college football talks about hype. Specifically, he has a problem with the assumption baked into a viewer question about Marcus Freeman, Steve Sarkisian, Dan Lanning, and Mario Cristobal: that none of them has won it all, so maybe the hype is overdone.
Pate's answer is not a defense of hype for hype's sake. It is a rejection of the premise itself. The idea that a coach needs a title on the resume before he is allowed to be considered a threat to win one is, in Pate's telling, backwards math.
He supplies the numbers a viewer would need to make that judgment fairly. FanDuel's board does not have a runaway favorite this season — Ohio State, Notre Dame, Oregon, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, and Miami are bunched together, which is Pate's evidence that the hype isn't as reckless as the question assumes.
The case
Pate starts with recent history, and it does the heavy lifting. As he put it: “five of the last seven national championship teams were led by coaches who had never won a title”. Kirby Smart's first one. Jim Harbaugh. Ryan Day. Curt Cignetti gets a mention too. The pattern isn't an outlier. It's closer to the rule.
From there Pate reframes the entire question coaches get asked every autumn. As he said: “the more important question here is what could they win, not what have they won”. That's the whole Film Room of it, boiled down. The task isn't proving a resume. The task is proving proximity — can this staff get a loaded roster to the final rung with the ball in a position to take a shot. Freeman and Cristobal already have. Freeman played in the last national title game. Cristobal's Miami team was at midfield with under a minute left with a chance to win one. That's not absence of accomplishment. That's arrival, minus the finish.
Pate credits the skeptics before he swings back. He concedes there's a fair version of the doubt aimed at Lanning and Sarkisian specifically — neither has been on that exact stage yet, and Pate says as much. But he draws the line at applying the same doubt to Freeman and Cristobal, who have already done the hardest part: getting there.
His logic on the broader premise is blunt: “if history was the perfect indicator towards the future, nobody would ever win a national title”. Somebody always breaks the streak. That's not a loophole. That's the sport working as designed.
Smart people sometimes say casual things, Pate's rule goes, and treating a coach's blank trophy case as disqualifying is a casual read of a complicated game.
The prediction
Pate doesn't stop at defending the four coaches. He turns the argument into a wager on himself. His words: “if I had to submit a bowl prediction, how about this? The entire Final Four this year is coaches who have never won a national title”.
Freeman's Notre Dame, Lanning's Oregon, Sarkisian's Texas, Cristobal's Miami — four of the sport's most hyped teams, zero championship rings between the head coaches. If that field arrives, Pate gets exactly what he wants: several weeks of every bookmarked take about a coach who "will never win the big one" sitting there, waiting to be proven wrong.
His broader philosophy on the coaching profession, delivered almost as an aside, doubles as the thesis: “just because you have not does not mean you cannot”.
Getting to the sport's biggest stage, Pate argues, is its own separate skill from winning once you're there — the ladder-climb before the title shot. Ryan Day does it virtually every year. Kirby Smart did it before he won. Saban did it constantly. Reaching the top rung is the hard part. The putt itself is just the last inch of a much longer walk, and Pate's argument is that Freeman, Lanning, Sarkisian, and Cristobal have all already proven they can make that walk.
The honest complication
Here's where Pate's own numbers cut against him a little. Five of seven is a strong run, but it's still a sample of seven — not exactly a large enough set to call it destiny. And the counter-argument writes itself: if proximity is truly the biggest predictor, as Pate insists, then the coaches worth trusting are specifically the ones already loaded and already close, which is a much smaller, much more exclusive club than "anyone without a title." That's a subtler point than "give first-timers a chance," and it complicates the tidy bumper-sticker version of his own take.
Pate isn't asking anyone to ignore résumés. He's asking them to read the right line on it — not the championships column, but the how-close-did-you-get column. Go watch the segment where he lays out the FanDuel board and count how many of those seven contenders are led by a coach who has never held the trophy. It's not close, and neither is his prediction.
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Articles are drafted from Josh Pate's College Football Show under the site's editorial standards and monitored by the editorial team — corrections are timestamped, never silent.