CC: Coaching Tenure at Power 5 Conferences Schools is Low

Submitted by alum96 on

One theme I've read in a lot of CCs is one of age and duration.  While in a perfect world of unicorns and rainbows we get a Bo/Bowden/Paterno/Bryant candidate this is definitely not the current reality of modern football.  In fact there is only 1 (2*) coach of that ilk out there.

Most candidates will come with an issue of duration whether due to age (Miles being the obvious one) or outside interest (if Harbaugh comes here we will be subjected to Saban like NFL rumors every offseason).  A unicorn candidate would be one that is relatively young, and did well - but not well enough to ever attract interest from the NFL or ...say Alabama.  Heck even Kelly is getting NFL rumors.   So I'd encourage us not to get so infatuated with the ideal of someone being here 10+ years - while ideal, this is not the current landscape. 

Here is some data.  With Bowden and Paterno leaving CFB the past half decade the number of super long tenured coaches in FBS Power 5 conferences is down to 1* - Beamer.  He has been at VA Tech since 1987.

*Bill Snyder is an outlier at Kansas State having been there in 2 stints - 89 to 05 then back again in 09-current.  So he would be the 2nd.

After that there is a decade long drop to #2 - Bob Stoops who has been at Oklahoma since 1999. Ferentz joins him at that level. 

There are only 4 other Big 5 conference coaches who have been around for more than a decade - and one (Gary Patterson) has only been in the Big 12 for 3 years.  Richt (Georgia), Pinkel (Missouri), Riley (Oregon State) are the other 3.

That is not even 2 handful of coaches across all the power 5 conferences that have lasted > decade.  You get 7 more in the 8 to 10  year range : 

  • 2005 hire - Gundy (alma mater), Miles, Whittingham (BYU grad coaching in Utah), Spurrier
  • 2006 hire - Fitzgerald (alma mater)
  • 2007 hire - Dantonio, Saban

There are now 64 schools in Power 5 conferences, so that is 8 schools with a coach >10 years (12.5%), and 7 other schools with a coach with 8 to 10 years (11%).

Long story short - you have a 1 in 9 chance of landing a coach who will be here 10+ years, and a 1 in 10 chance of one who will be here 8 to 10 years.  Most Big 5 schools have had their coach for 7 years or less (76.5%).   We should not disqualify people who might be here "only" 6-8 years because we want to find a unicorn.  And as important, seeing what type of people they spin off in their coaching tree is probably quite important because rather than trying to find 1 man to coach 15+ years the most likely situation for a successful "era" is 1 man handing the baton off to another.

 

 

Since this is a shorter than usual diary I will end this with a video of the opposite end of the spectrum - one of the youngest "football" coaches in the world, who is coaching in Croatia at age 24. ;) Enjoy.

 

Comments

jshclhn

October 24th, 2014 at 9:01 AM ^

Informative.  The theme is correct as well as the general conclusion - it's very unlikely our next coach is going to have a Bo or even Carr length career at Michigan.

However, there is a logic gap in your extrapolation.  A current coach who has been at a program for less than 10 years could still possibly remain at the school past the 10 year mark.

If I had to guess, I would say out of the current NCAA football coaches about a third of them will stay at their resepective program past that 10 year mark.

turd ferguson

October 24th, 2014 at 9:43 AM ^

I'll take the under on that. 

Basically, in American sports, we can't reach some kind of equilibrium where fans of most / almost all teams think that their teams are doing well enough to keep the same coach around for awhile.  For example, if you added up what fans of different NFL teams "expect" their team to do, you'd get an impossible number of wins.  We're just in an era when coaches either need to exceed reasonable expectations, and fast, or else likely lose their jobs.  And there's no conceivable world in which most coaches are exceeding expectations simultaneously.  Throw in the natural tendency for coaches to look for better jobs, and you get a ton of instability.

funkywolve

October 24th, 2014 at 12:21 PM ^

and in this day and age it's all about what have you done for me lately.  You can be a coach that has a nice run for a few years but as soon as you string together a few bad years you're probably going to be on the 'hot seat'.  You look at some of the coaching legends: Bryant, Hayes, Schembechler, Paterno, and they all had a run of 4-5 years where the results weren't nearly as good as what they had previously done.  In this day and age, they might not have survived those downturns.  Back then though the media pressure wasn't nearly as big as it is today.  All of those coaches were able to right the ship and string together another run of really good years.

turd ferguson

October 24th, 2014 at 12:38 PM ^

Yup.  Here's a list of NBA coaches who have been with their current team for more than the past six seasons: Gregg Popovich.  Hell, only six coaches have been with their teams for more than three seasons (Popovich, Spoelstra, Carlisle, Brooks, Thibodeau, Monty Williams).

The NHL isn't much different, where about half of the coaches (14) are in either their first or second year coaching their team, and Mike Babcock is easily the longest-tenured coach.

 

Yeoman

October 24th, 2014 at 4:15 PM ^

It makes some sense to me that tenures would be shorter in the pros, where new players are delivered to you via the draft, than in college where you have to build up relationships with players and families and coaches to get anyone in the door. There's no equivalent in the pros to the recruiting hit you take when you change coaches in college.

Another factor is the different power relationship between player and coach. In college the coach is in charge and every player is going to be gone in a few years regardless. In the pros certain players are the primary assets of the business and if they want a new coach they'll probably get their way.

turd ferguson

October 24th, 2014 at 9:49 AM ^

I think this is insightful and particularly relevant to this coaching search.  We're not in a position to roll the dice with a guy who could become our next Bo but more than likely will flop.  This seems like the time for a hire who's very likely to get the ship headed in the right direction, even if he isn't here for 20 years.  I thought the same about our basketball program when it hired Beilein, which seemed like an excellent, safe hire (and turned out to be even more excellent than anyone expected).  

If we could get 5-10 very good years from a coach who then heads to the NFL or retires, I'd be thrilled with that.

maize-blue

October 24th, 2014 at 9:58 AM ^

Schools that usually have winning seasons year in and year out usually have long tenured coaches. This makes sense because if you win, then you stay. I think year 3-4 for a coach is a pretty good indicator of how the rest of his career will go at a particular school or even if he will continue to be their coach.

If you take a look at guys who have been around at a certain school for any length of time you can see that by year 3-4 they have usually been able to get things rolling. There are obviously some guys who have jumped right in and started winning (*Mark Richt) or guys that took 4+ years (*It took Spurrier at South Carolina awhile), but usually if things haven’t started happening by year 4ish, they don’t get much more time.

A short tenured coach is much more common than a 7+ year guy. By taking a quick look at all the 120+ FBS head coaches, less than 30 have been at their programs for over 6 seasons.

Tater

October 24th, 2014 at 11:26 AM ^

From 2001-2011, Florida had four coaches: Spurrier, Zook, Meyer and Muschamp.  They won two National Championships.   Moving that timeframe to 2015, they will be at five coaches.  It's definitely a new paradigm in the college football world.

turd ferguson

October 24th, 2014 at 3:48 PM ^

That makes sense.  That's probably mostly a story about pressure to win.  At non-Power 5 schools, the fans generally don't care as much, so you probably see more guys survive with mediocre results but an otherwise stable, clean, happy program.  

alum96

October 24th, 2014 at 4:26 PM ^

Yep, completely different sample group.  Look at our own Hoke as an example.  His first 4 years he did nothing at Ball State - that performance at just about any Big 5 conference school outside of maybe Wake Forest would get him canned.  Kansas fired Weiss for better.   He probably could have put in 10 years at Ball State even if after year 6 he reverted back to years 1-4 in years 7-10.

A lot of those schools are not going to fire their coaches unless something really goes south.  More often than not if they have a truly good coach with any potential he is going to be lost to a bigger school within 3-5 years.  So if they can find a mediocre coach who is not a hot commodity they at least have stability. 

But its apples to oranges.

 

BlueSpiceIn SEC.hell

October 24th, 2014 at 5:10 PM ^

Would you be satisfied with this record over 4 years?

6–5–1

6–6

7–5
6–6
Point being fan bases get unhappy with good coaches.
 
This was Nick Saban's first four years at MSU.  Is he a good coach?

F5

October 24th, 2014 at 9:19 PM ^

That was Bowdens first years at West Virginia. Which, I find it funny you left out the next season he had which was 9-3. His start with FSU was much, much different. 5 wins followed by 10 then 6 I think, then 11... So you cherry picked a little bit there I think.

Yeoman

October 25th, 2014 at 12:02 AM ^

What do you think people thought at WVU in year 5?

That record, now, would have "who's going to replace Bowden" on every ESPN talk show. It's possible year 6 would never have happened, in which case FSU would probably never have happened.

My point was that there was nothing in the win/loss record those first five seasons that would have let you predict success the next year. It's exactly the kind of record that most people here would think was bad--downward trend, only won with his predecessor's players, etc.

And we now know that anyone making a prediction on that basis would have been as wrong as wrong can be.

alum96

October 24th, 2014 at 7:05 PM ^

He had some big wins in that time including beating #1 OSU 28-24 in Columbus so you look for shards of evidence outside of pure win/loss.  That was year 4 of his regime - can you imagine Hoke fielding a team going into #1 Missisippi State and winning?  He also smoked #10 Notre Dame that year by 20.  2 of his losses that year were by 1 pt for example.

Similar to Harbaugh's 8-5 Stanford team in year 3 making USC look like horse turd, a week after beating #7 Oregon.

W/L is not the end all, be all - this is why I like to look at the games won and lost and offensive and defensive metrics.   Saban had more glamour wins in his first 4 "mediocre' years at MSU than Dan Mullen had in his first 5.

Jevablue

October 25th, 2014 at 9:54 AM ^

Scholarship caps and the resulting parity are no doubt at the root of all this.  The inability to hoard talent has driven college to be more like the pro game with its frequent coaching turnover.  Saban, for all his awesomeness, is playing fast and loose at the margin regarding talent hoarding with his scholarship management practices, that does at some level give him a leg up.  But nothing like Bo / Woody were able to do their peers in the days of the Big 2.

 For a coach to make a really long run anymore, they have to meet expectations sufficiently in the early going and build up some serious capital to tide them over for the occasional down trend.  For me with Hoke, it is all about the trends and the sense that mediocrity is the ceiling for this staff.  If the case can be made that he is buiding the foundation of something worth waiting for, I would listen.  One has to squint really hard to see a glimmer of that now.  Meanwhile, I hope a Harbaugh brother comes here, rights the ship, and retires from Michigan at the age of 75 or so...