Gary Patterson and Chris Petersen are among the coaches selected to the 2026 College Football Hall of Fame class, the National Football Foundation announced Wednesday.
Patterson and Petersen were joined by Jim Margraff, who went 221-89-3 from 1990-2018 at Johns Hopkins, and Ken Sparks, who won 339 games at Carson-Newman from 1980-2016. Margraff was still John Hopkins's head coach when he died of a heart attack at age 58 in 2019, and Sparks died four months after his retirement following a 4-year battle with prostate cancer.
Ohio State linebackers coach James Laurinaitis was among the 18-member class for his exploits as a Buckeyes linebacker from 2005-08.
Patterson and Petersen were not only contemporaries, they were also competitors.
Patterson was TCU's defensive coordinator from 1998-00 and promoted to head coach when Dennis Franchione took the Alabama job, and remained in that post until 2021. Likewise, Petersen was Boise State's offensive coordinator from 2001-05 and assumed the head coaching role when Dan Hawkins took the Colorado job; he was Boise State's head coach from 2006-13, and then led Washington from 2014-19.
Patterson went 181-79, winning six conference championships, two New Year's Six bowl wins, and posting 12 AP Top 25 finishes. His 2010 team went 13-0, beat Big Ten champion Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl and finished No. 2 in both polls. Patterson's 2014 team was 12-1 and memorably fell from No. 3 to No. 6 on Selection Sunday of the inaugural year in the College Football Playoff the year, despite beating Iowa State 55-3 one day earlier. In a year where fourth-seeded Ohio State went on to win the CFP, TCU hammered Ole Miss 42-3 in the Peach Bowl and finished No. 3 in both polls.
Most importantly, Patterson elevated the profile of Texas Christian University alongside TCU football. Cast aside upon the breakup of the Southwest Conference in the 1990s, under Patterson's leadership TCU jumped from Conference USA to the Mountain West to (briefly) the Big East and then, finally, to the Big 12, allowing the Horned Frogs to resume once-dead rivalries with Baylor, Texas Tech, Texas (for a time) and, now, Houston.
Petersen went an astonishing 92-12 with four top-10 finishes from 2006-13 at Boise State, and then 55-26 with two Pac-12 championships in six seasons at Washington before retiring at 55. Petersen went undefeated in 2006 and 2009 at Boise State, then took Washington to the 2016 College Football Playoff as well as its first Rose Bowl in nearly 20 years.
Petersen's .795 winning percentage is 10th all-time among coaches with at least 175 career games.
Coach P and Coach Pete squared off three times against each other:
-- a 17-16 TCU win in the 2008 Poinsettia Bowl, where TCU came in at 10-2 with a Mountain West championship and Boise State was undefeated, WAC champions, and ranked No. 9
-- a 17-10 Boise State win in the Fiesta Bowl the following season, where both teams were undefeated and ranked No. 3 and No. 6, respectively
-- a 36-35 TCU win in Boise in 2011. TCU went 11-2 and won the Mountain West in Boise's first year in the league; it was Boise State's only loss all season
The sustained, parallel excellence exhibited from both programs meant that Boise State went 45-1 against everyone else but 1-2 against TCU from 2008-11, and also that a 7-point loss to Boise State was the only thing stopping TCU from a 28-game winning streak from 2008-10.
The 2026 Hall of Fame class will be inducted Dec. 8 at the 68th NFF Annual Awards Dinner in Las Vegas.