This ranking is a bunch of @)@*$)&%.  Frank the Tank should be somewhere in the top ten given the difficulty of what he had to deal with when he got here and the relatively small budget that he's had to turn things around.  It reminds me of the 1971 COY award that went to Chuck Fairbanks of Oklahoma for having yet another stellar season at a school where you don't have to be a great recruiter to recruit 5-star athletes and you have a budget that would turn some third-world countries into Switzerland.  In 1971 that award should have gone to Jack Lengyel at Marshall for winning two games with team made up primarily of transfers and sophomores who had been ineligible freshman in 1970 and hence not victims of the plane crash.  Everyone, including all the national pundits, expected Marshall to be 0-10 that year.  Two victories were indisputable evidence of great coaching that year.  Doesn't matter what he did before or after that year.  In 1971 he was the COY, despite what the pundits said.  When you're giving out awards of this nature, you've just got to consider the context of each coaching situation.  Otherwise, the Coach of Year award is really the Big-Name School Coach of Year award.  Don't get me going on the BCS ranking system! 

If you don't like that poll, here's an alternate one, from "coaches-by-the-numbers". In that one, he's at #49, but you can change the years included, or the number of years a coach has to have been coach to re-arrange the numbers. As you can see from his "splits", they don't give him much credit for coaching in the years 2005-2008, and those were the critical years where the program was turned around. Without those years, the years 2009-2011 would never have happened. These types of polls are all too much focused on wins and losses, and so you have to take them with a grain of salt.

That short term focus on wins and losses is exactly why so many programs founder, changing coaches over, and over, and over - they don't give enough credit for the small progress that sets the stage for the program you want to have. I'm fairly certain that at a lot of schools Solich would have been fired after the 4-8 record in 2008. With the records from 2006-2008 going 9-5, 6-6, 4-8, after all, were they going the right direction? Interestingly, though, I don't recall even one poster here calling for his head after 2008. It goes to show the outstanding fans that Ohio has, that they were able to see the progress, even though the progress wasn't visible on the final W-L record. And that outstanding fanbase is exactly why I hope Ohio continues to do well for years to come.