Every FBS head coach and the lineage that shaped them. Pick a tree to trace the coaching DNA — who worked for whom, how far it branches, and where it ends up.
A coach earns a tree only when at least one of their assistants went on to become an FBS head coach after working under them. Coaches whose staffs never produced an FBS head coach — or whose former assistants were already head coaches when they joined — don’t appear in this list. Branch counts reflect unique descendants down the tree, not raw staff-stint rows.
Coverage is comprehensive from 2000 to the present, when staff records became reliably available across every FBS program. For earlier decades the dataset is selective — marquee programs and their staffs (Bear Bryant, Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden, Bo Schembechler, Hayden Fry, Earle Bruce) are traced back to the mid-1960s, but smaller programs and many assistants from that era aren’t documented well enough to enforce the methodology rules. As a result, rankings tend to favor coaches with longer documented careers.