You’re Hiring a New Head Coach in the MAC. What are the Chances You get it Right?
Can S&P+ ranking history tell us how quickly a MAC team is going to stink again and vise versa? It’s a mixed bag but, actually, it can.
The coaching carousel. The wonderful time of year where everyone takes to message boards to find out which coach everyone is going to hate or love in the next few years. People tweet out wish lists, most of which are completely absurd, which is all part of the fun.
Rod Carey appears to be the next head coach of the Temple Owls, finalizing what should be the only MAC coaching loss to another school in this cycle. That’s quiet by MAC standards, but don’t expect it to stay that way next year. Jason Candle, Chris Creighton and Lance Leipold could be on the move next season based on the fact that they are doing damn good jobs.
Now NIU, like Bowling Green, Akron and Central Michigan this cycle, has to hire another coach, and like any fan base hiring a new coach it’s going to wonder what’s next for the new guy. Will it all come crashing down to Earth? Will it ever get better? If so, when? MAC fans are used to asking this question a lot — the carousel comes for us all, eventually.
So how long, really, does it take for MAC programs to come back down to Earth after losing a coach? This was the question posed by Bill Connelly on a late-season episode of SB Nation’s “Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody,” and it’s what got me thinking about this question initially. With the carousel finally coming to a close, I figured this to be a good time to revisit it.
I used Bill C’s S&P+ rating system to assess the damage when a dream coach skips town and how long it takes for that impact to solidify. Additionally, I explored the impact in the opposite direction — what are a school’s prospects after firing/not renewing a coach or losing one to retirement?
First, the Data
I took the final S&P+ rankings for each MAC school since 2005 (which is as far back as Football Outsiders allows me to go) and put them in a table along with each program’s average in that span. I also included the MAC average in each season.
Red flags are years where a coaching change was made for any reason, green numbers are seasons above the 14-year S&P+ average for the program, bold numbers are division titles and underlined numbers are conference titles.
I also defined a set of coaching changes to look at when exploring the impact of a departing coach. I settled on this highly scientific definition:
Any coach that left for a bigger job, but not Dan Enos and Pete Lembo.
I also defined what crashing to Earth looks like:
Recession: Consecutive below-average seasons compared to the program S&P+ average.
For the purposes of this article, the fallout from coaching departures is complete when the program sees a “recession”.
Finally, to assess the impact in the opposite direction, I made a list of coaching changes brought on by firings/non-renewals or retirements.
I used these tables to get a rough idea of a team’s prospects after undergoing a change at the top.
The Good Football Coach is Gone. What’s Next?
Intuition tells us that things are obviously going to get worse when a good football coach leaves. This is largely correct, but it’s a mixed bag.
First, the bad news. Of the 13 coaching changes identified, seven resulted in a program in recession within three seasons. For all programs that ended up in recession eventually, it took about 3.1 seasons to get there on average. This makes sense. That’s about the time when a coach’s first recruits are making the primary contributions on the field.
The most extreme cases of immediate disaster are the tenures of Mike Jinks, Dan Enos, Stan Parrish and Jeff Quinn. Each of these coaches entered their programs into recession right away. Not surprisingly, each were shown the door at some point aside from Enos who, let’s be honest, probably had it coming.
Jinks is the ultimate cautionary tale for making hires in these situations, especially if you’re fresh off winning championships like Bowling Green was. The new fear in the MAC is that you’ve just hired the next Jinks. Although, you’re probably okay if you didn’t select your coach by Googling good offenses (the adjacent to Kliff Kingsbury thing is working out for Jinks on a personal level though, as he now coaches as an assistant with the Arizona Cardinals).
Jinks’ tenure was so bad that Bowling Green was in recession just four years after losing Dave Clawson to Wake Forest. Bowling Green WON A MAC TITLE two years after Clawson.
Unfortunately, even if the first season of a new coach is better than average, doom is still lurking. Paul Haynes succeeded Darrell Hazell in 2013 and went 4–8 that season. That was Haynes’ best S&P+ season of his entire tenure.
Don Treadwell is an amazing case. One could argue Miami is where it is now because they got this hire wrong following Mike Haywood’s championship season. Treadwell led a team that was nearly 30 spots better in S&P+ but went 4–8. The rest is (painful) history.
Bottom line: replacing championship level coaches is really damn hard, and mostly everyone sucks at it.
Now for the sunnier picture. If a program is already consistently dominant, its floor tends to be a lot higher. So even if there’s a noticeable decrease in overall quality, the results are still pretty damn good. This is the Rod Carey Problem.
Carey was a member of Dave Doeren’s staff and coached the Huskies in the Orange Bowl when Doeren left for NC State. His tenure at NIU, which includes two MAC titles, would be considered the gold standard at the lion’s share of G5 programs, but because of lofty expectations his reception has been underwhelming, perhaps unfairly. The good news is if you’ve just hired the next Rod Carey, you’re going to win a ton of football games.
Toledo‘s in this category too. The Rockets haven’t had consecutive below average seasons since 2009, which is also the last time they had a losing record. Since then Toledo made two in-house hires of Matt Campbell, following Tim Beckman, and Candle, following Campbell.
Even Central Michigan was able to extend its dominant run in the late 2000’s by replacing Brian Kelly with Butch Jones, a former assistant on Kelly’s staff at CMU. Are you sensing a theme yet?
While in-house hires usually mean you’re sacrificing the opportunity to get a program transcending rising-star in favor of someone who actually wants to stay at your program, it seems to work for the dominant teams of the last decade and a half in the MAC. Basically, if you have a culture or formula you like and it seems to work, it’s probably a good idea to keep it.
A word of caution though: It didn’t work with Stan Parrish.
The Bad Coach is Gone. Is it Going to Get Better?
What should Akron, Central Michigan and Bowling Green expect going forward? Once again, the intuition is largely correct on this one. Things get better when the bad or inadequate coach is gone or retires. How much things improves varies by program (diminishing returns for good ones, more noticeable impacts for bad ones), but the prognosis is, generally, good.
14 coaches were fired or retired in the MAC since 2005. Eight of their replacements went on to win division titles and three won MAC titles. For those seven it took an average of 3.6 years to do it. This makes sense for the same reason it takes about three years to destroy a program — the first recruits are contributing significantly at that point.
Six replacements didn’t win division titles (I’m not counting shared titles. If you didn’t play in the title game, it doesn’t matter). Three of those are current head coaches. Sean Lewis is brand new at Kent State, so who knows just yet how that will turn out.
Chuck Martin started slow but has Miami’s two highest S&P+ finishes since 2005 so far, and EMU’s Creighton has the Eagles’ three highest S&P+ finishes since 2005 and it’s not particularly close.
Two coaches were fired, so it’s not always a rosy picture. Rob Ianello and Ron English just couldn’t cut it at Akron and EMU. And one coach left for an assistant coaching position at Maryland. That coach was Pete Lembo and he had one of the best three-year runs to start a MAC coaching career of anyone in this span. It’s sad that Ball State just has a Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl loss to show for it.
Only twice has a school had to fire two coaches in a row since 2005. I’d say those are pretty good odds for anyone that added a new coach this season, though one of those programs is Akron, who has now fired three coaches in 14 seasons.
What’s the Big Idea?
When do you know if things are going sour and vise versa? There’s plenty of variables, but when you think about a new coaching hire in the MAC, think about these four things:
1: Ignore year one, no matter the result. Years 2–3 tell the story.
16 coaches since 2005 produced a season where their team finished above the MAC average in S&P+ in either their second or third year. Only one of those coaches, Terry Bowden, was fired. The rest either landed bigger jobs or are coaching at EMU, Toledo, NIU or Buffalo currently.
2: Don’t worry about getting the next Urban Meyer. Butch Jones will do.
Now, don’t ever say this to anyone in a power five conference. This only works in the MAC. You can get a perfectly good Jones, Carey or Clawson and collect some trophies. Your next guy doesn’t have to be the G.O.A.T.
3: Pretty much everyone in the MAC ends up getting their shot
Only EMU has not made it to Ford Field since the MAC Championship Game moved there (and depending on how long Creighton sticks around that should change soon). At least one of CMU, Bowling Green or Akron is going to field a division title contender in the next three years.
4: If you’re not NIU or Toledo, you’ve probably screwed it all up
But everyone does, so it’s all good. Just relax for three or four years until you hire your next dream coach. It all works out in the end.
Here’s a Graph for Ohio, Where Frank Solich has Coached For 100 Years
