OWH Looks at Results of Coaching Changes

Mavric

Mavric

Yoda
Staff member
Every athletic director would love to hire the next Nick Saban. But A.D.s are much more likely to land the next Brady Hoke or Lane Kiffin.


Or Bill Callahan.

That’s according to a World-Herald look at the 146 college football coaches hired by current Power Five schools since 2001.

Of those 146, 65 — less than half — had higher winning percentages in their most recent seasons than their predecessors did. Of those 65, 54 had better records in their most recent seasons than they did in their first.

More coaches (56) have been fired.

Let’s go further.

Of the 54, 42 truly improved their programs. And of those 42, only 15 won at least 70 percent of their games (Bo Pelini is in this group, by the way). Of those 15, 12 won a conference championship.

That’s the number of new coaches since 2001 to thoroughly improve their programs, average at least 8½ wins a season and collect postseason hardware. Twelve. Out of 146.

Eight percent.
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That 'consistency is key' graph is a typical example of correlation =/= causation, though. The schools with the best winning percentages hire coaches who stick around because they're winning and don't get fired.

Of those 146, 65 — less than half — had higher winning percentages in their most recent seasons than their predecessors did. Of those 65, 54 had better records in their most recent seasons than they did in their first.

Of the 54, 42 (...) of those 42, only 15 (...Bo Pelini...), of those 15, 12 (...)
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I'm also not sure why the first steps in narrowing the numbers for their "statistical analysis" had to be "Coaches' most recent record vs predecessor (overall? final?) and then "vs their own first record". That's a nice way, for example, to exclude Brett Bielema. And Mack Brown. And Les Miles. Urban Meyer at both Florida and Ohio State. And so 12 out of 146 becomes 12 out of 54.

Also worth mentioning, at least two schools with P5 championships in this time period they're looking at (2001+) haven't made a coaching hire: Iowa, Oklahoma.

I don't know how much the numbers change, though. I mean, obviously the batting average for all P5 schools from Florida State down to Illinois isn't high.

But, all of these exclusions? They can't be a mystery to the people who wrote this article. If they dug as deep as they did to produce all those charts, they knew exactly what was being excluded by their criteria.

 
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I hate coaching changes in large part because of this.

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There are fans who, it seems, want a coach fired at the first sign of things not going quite right. Well, sorry, that can lead to your program going farther and farther into the tank.

 
What is the causal direction of the coach/win **correlation**? I stress "correlation" because you can't draw causal conclusions from correlative data. You can just as easily say that programs that are deeper in the crapper hire more coaches. There isn't even a time scale on there.

 
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BigRedBuster said:
There are fans who, it seems, want a coach fired at the first sign of things not going quite right. Well, sorry, that can lead to your program going farther and farther into the tank.
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It's kind of a chicken or the egg argument though. It could be either the lack of consistency in regimes, or a reflection of the quality of the program in general. They seem to go hand in hand.

 
It also depends on if your a football school or a basketball school trying to find some kind of sort of football relevance. If I were going to put a list together, it would also have in mind which schools get majority of its revenue from football and those who get it from basketball.

Those teams on the bottom in the graph are basketball schools, and don't depend on football to make or break the sports departments. In other words, football isn't the end all, be all with those. With these TV deals and schools getting several $millions from it, schools can afford to change football coaches in a shorter amount of time. Don't like it, but thats the issue at hand.

Schools like Michigan and Nebraska need there football programs to be the cash cow. They can be more patient, but when a change is needed, its needed. School like Kansas, Kentucky, and Duke have other resources and tend to pull the plug faster because frankly football doesn't matter as much.

 
Feel like I'm taking my GMAT test all over again trying to read through this thread.

 
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