MGo Call For Help: Coaching History

Submitted by The Mathlete on

I am trying to build a database of all the head coaches, OC’s and DC’s for D1 teams since 2003. Starting digging in and the head coaches are done but the coordinators are going to take more time than I have. Anyone who is interested I created a public Google Doc that has what I have and anyone who has some time to kill and interested in supporting it would be much appreciated. I have completed all the head coaches and the coordinators available readily on Wikipedia for the Big Ten and Big 12. Everything else is missing.

A couple notes for how to update. Every team and year is listed at least three times, one for head coach, one for OC and one for DC. If there is are multiple OC or DC for a given team, just add a new line with the coach team, year and position. If a coordinator role is held by the head coach, just change the coordinator note for the head coach from “No” to “Yes,” do not add a new line. For any mid or late season changes, list only the coordinator most responsible for the season, do not list both.

Thanks again for anyone who is willing to spend a bit of time and start to fill in blanks. Wikipedia team season pages have most of them listed for bigger schools and more recent years, but some of the older years and smaller schools will take a bit more digging, I’ll take whatever the Mgocommunity can provide.

Comments

909Dewey

January 6th, 2012 at 1:53 PM ^

All fields are either dates or text - how is this actionable?  Who coached where when isn't too interesting.  Shouldn't you at least include wins and losses?

beenplumb

January 6th, 2012 at 2:27 PM ^

I would recommend creating a primary key for this table that is some concatenation of team, year, and coaches. You could even make it some arbitrary digit, so long as it was unique. That way in the future, if you begin to collect statistics on individual seasons (wins/losses, post-season play, total yards, points, etc), you can easily join it to other tables in your database.

A second suggestion would be to make the assistant coaches their own fields on the table, so the fields of the table would be 'Team', 'Season', 'Coach', 'Assistant1' (or OC), 'Assistant2' (or DC). That way you get a unique observation for every team for every season, and the records would be be unique by that combination of fields. If you wanted to expand it to include other position coaches, you could just tack on extra fields for that. If you don't know what the assistant coaches are for that team, that year, you can just leave them as null values and update them later. It just helps your data look cleaner.

As an example, the records for the last two years for Michigan would look like this:

Michigan, 2011, Brady Hoke, Al Borges, Greg Mattison

Michigan, 2010, Rich Rodriguez, Calvin Magee, Certain Death

If you were completely opposed to that, and are content to have duplicate rows for a single season, using 1's and 0's for yes and no within the Coach, HC, and DC columns might be more helpful than 'yes' or 'no' if you ever want to quantify those fields. You may not want to now, but you never know in the future. It's not terribly difficult to remember a 1 means yes, 2 means no, or vice versa.

Just a suggestion from someone who works with databases.

beenplumb

January 6th, 2012 at 2:43 PM ^

In the instances of co-coordinators, you could create fields for a co-offensive and a field for a co-defensive coordinator. For most records these would be null values, but for the records representing seasons with co-coordinators, you'd be able to tell who the co-offensive / defensive coordinator was. I would recommend putting these fields to the far right because 90% of the records for them would be null.

Example:

Michigan St, 2009, Mark Dantonio, Don Treadwell, Pat Narduzzi, null_value

Michigan, 2009, Rich Rodriguez, Calvin Magee, null_value, null_value

Minnesota, 2009, Tim Brewster, Jed Fisch, Kevin Cosgrove, Ronnie Lee

Seth

January 6th, 2012 at 3:06 PM ^

I think I've got the Big Ten done, which is the extent to which I trust myself to remember all the interplays of coordinators and co-coordinators.

I remember Ron Turner was his own OC initially but did that extend to 2003? What was Harry Hiestand, an OC in all but name or just a OL coach with a fancier title?

Anyone wanna doublecheck me?