Historical Context

...to Coach Schiano's front paged diary.

Nice quantification of how historically bad these past three seasons have been. (Well, in one sense it's nice).

I thought RichRod deserved a fourth year but I am warming up to Brady Hoke. With that in mind, I haven't really seen data laid out comparing the magnitude of RR's losses in an historical context.

While I think it would have been more useful in December, this is a really interesting breakdown and I really like the way you put it together. Using this data, we definitely don't seem as close as I felt we would be going into next season with RR.

Everybody knows that the last 3 years were historically bad.  You haven't told us anything new here.

When Rodriguez was hired, I looked at his past record, and saw a common pattern of starting slowly then building to something spectacular.  That is what I was expecting to happen here - a few years of misery followed by many years of great joy.

The trajectory of Rodriguez's teams was upward.  It was never about where they were, it was about where they were going.  If we had the nerve to tough out the hard years we'd be richly (pun) rewarded.  Unfortunately, we did not have the nerve and took all the pain for no benefit at all.

I have to assume the Michigan athletic department was also aware of Rodriguez's track record.  If they weren't willing to give him four or five years without question before even contemplating pulling the plug, he never should have been hired.

So Rodriguez ended up being a bad hire - not because Rodriguez was necessarily a bad coach, but because the Michigan athletic department didn't have the patience to ride out the transition to his system.

Great charts. Horrific, even.

And yet, TennBlue's got a good point. No amount of measuring how bad the past 3 years have been (very, painfully, unprecedented, etc.) resolves the debates we have had about how much of the downturn was due to the "bare cupboard" problem combined with the culture/paradigm shift problem. I loved Carr to pieces, but grudgingly came to believe that Rodriguez faced an uphill battle from the beginning, one that was made much harder thanks to the culture clash, which must have made everything from recruiting to everyday operations more difficult. I side with TennBlue: if they weren't willing to give the culture change a full effort both in terms of time and actual support, I don't see why they bothered hiring Rodriguez.

That thought does raise the interesting question, though: what if Martin had stayed? Would RR have gotten another year? Was Martin a believer in the need for a culture change to take UM to the next level? And on the other side, did DB feel he needed to make his mark quickly to establish authority over the program? Or was DB anxious to kill the culture change as soon as he was able?

Hoke provides us a cool natural experiment: now we can compare what it's like to start with a bare cupboard and changing the offensive and defensive schemes while reengaging the dominant culture. Something tells me this will be an easier task.

This is the second "historical context" piece I've read today that shows us the numbers on how bad RR's tenure really was.  Thanks for your work but the numbers without context mean nothing (point in case, thenumber-crunching over the last three years that led all of us to think we were favored or it was a push in most of the games). 

This discussion would benefit from historical context regarding the increase of parity.  Would anyone else here agree with me that OSU in the Tressel era is a little tougher to beat on than during the Yost era, or heck, ever since that guy named Woody.  Or Wisconsin, or MSU, etc.  All of these programs improved over the years (even Purdue!) except for ND.  Parity has to be taken into account.

Could you find out if the newspapers were big meanies to the M head coach in those other years?

Apprarently that is a MAJOR factor!

The guy who made the point that giving Rodriguez credit for 3 wins as a baseline towards an upsurge rather than diminishing him for dropping from 9 wins to 3 was dubious, hits it on the head.

His global mistake was coming in and not hustling to keep the talent we already had and adapting to that talent. We've seen Hoke do that the last 5 days as his job number 1.  Beyond that, as much as everyone rips what Carr left, it was far better then what Rodriguez left on defense.  Arguable on offense, although I think this is a potentially very good offensive line. Yet Hoke knows you have to keep your upper classmen on board, not let them go thus creating a teardown situation.

The question I always had was who let Rodriguez know that coming in and shredding things while making half baked attempts to appeal to the remaining talent was permitted in the first place?

Didn't take the time to go through the entire history of Ball State football, but since 1971:

19 seasons in which Ball State was outscored by its opponents:

1971 (McClain)
1981-1984 (Wallace)
1985-1987, 1992, 1994 (Schudel)
1997-2002 (Lynch)
2003-2005 (Hoke)

10 point losses:

Seasons with four or more 10 point losses:

if i could plus one you for using the oilers in super tecmo bowl i would.  Me and my neighbor used to have epic battles between the 49ers and Oilers.  I always felt he cheated because he could run to the back of the endzone with montana and throw a bomb to jerry rice in the back of the other endzone and 90% of the time it was a TD.  Personaly i would tinker with the playbook and i had a couple running plays that would involve i think ernest givens running the ball.  the only problem was he tended to fumble.  I was also wondering who your defensive player was... mine was childress.

Our football tram is in great hands with coach Hoke. This guy understands what it takes to achieve the highest level of success on the highest stage. The fact that he has a burning passion for this job will begin to reap it's benefits. This trams ceiling is so high it's not even funny.

This is exactly why Rich Rod got canned...not the number of losses, but their magnitude. However, I'd add two more factors into the mix:

1. We lost more, proportionally, in the Big 10 than non-conference play

Though Carr got a lot of flak for those early-season losses, at the end of the day, most alumni care far more deeply about what happens against MSU, OSU or even PSU than the early-season cupcakes and occasional decent non-conference opponent.  ND is the obvious exception, but it's still a distant #3 on the rivalry scale.  The rest of the top 10 are in conference.  Losing to OSU is depressing, but losing to Little Brother year after year is just embarrassing.  Losing to bad Purdue teams 2 out of 3 years is just kinda pathetic.  RR failed miserably in Big 10 play, and did so every year he was the coach.  

2. We got worse as the season progressed, each of the three seasons

2009 constituted the biggest meltdown, considering we were competitive in the first half of most of our Big 10 losses.  But we saw this two out of three years...at least three straight losses to end the season.  This NEVER happened under Lloyd, not even once.   And that one season in which we didn't record 3 straight losses (2008)?  We lost 7 of the final 8.  That meant that most alumni felt, at the end of the season, that things had unraveled.  

So what could have saved RR's job?  I'd say any combination of three simple things: closer games at the end of 2010, one win in 2010 over MSU or OSU (thus giving us a 4-4 record in the Big 10 and a big rivalry win), or a major late-season win giving the sense in 2010 that we were improving over the course of the season, rather than regressing.  

Didn't take the time to go through the entire history of San Diego State football, but since 1973:

20 seasons in which San Diego State was outscored by its opponents:

1978, 1980 (Gilbert)
1982-1983 (Scovil)
1987-1988 (Stolz)
1989, 1992 (Luginbill)
1994, 1997-1998, 2000-2001 (Tollner)
2002, 2004-2005 (Craft)
2006-2008 (Long)
2009 (Hoke)

10 point losses:

Seasons with four or more 10 point losses: