FanPost

Fun with Numbers: Derek Mason is Not Getting Fired After 1 Year

Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports

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The Associated Press | Vanderbilt head coach Derek Mason looking forward to reading "Fun with Numbers" with his buddy Coach Dorrell. (AP Photo/Brian Powers)

A weekly feature where VandyNOVA does some Googling, reading, and occasionally using a HP 48G calculator, reverse polish notation forever!

Much has been made about how out of place Vanderbilt is in the SEC. So I took it as a challenge to do some research to see how other schools compare to us along with how their football teams are doing. Looking at U.S. News Top 20 School rankings, I identified other schools that are part of conferences that make-up the Football Bowl Subdivision. Only 6 out of 20 schools (~33%), have FBS football programs. Below are the schools I found along with the records of their first year head coaches that led them to be relevant football programs again. You'll notice that I am ignoring Notre Dame because they are not affiliated with any conference. They like making too much money to join one.

  • UC Berkeley (Cal), 1-11 Sonny Dykes, (Pac -12 2013), 36,204 total students
  • Northwestern - Pat Fitzgerald 4-8 (Big Ten 2006), 20,997 total students
  • Stanford - Jim Harbaugh 4-8 (Pac-10 2007), 18,136 total students
  • Duke - David Cutcliffe 4-8 (ACC 2008), 15,465 total students
  • Vanderbilt - 6-7 James Franklin (SEC 2011), 2-5 (Derek Mason), 12,795 total students

Immediately, you can see that Vanderbilt has the smallest student body, undergraduate and graduate combined. Yay for high admission standards and a tiny student body! You'll also notice that each coach had a losing season in his first year. Looks like Derek Mason is following the trend pretty well. The question is can he make it to four wins though? By digging deeper into the records, it took Duke, Stanford, and Northwestern multiple years before they became truly fearsome with Duke taking the longest - 6 years. Interestingly, Sonny Dykes has dramatically changed his fate from going 1-11 in his first year and now already is 4-2. VandyImport knows more about the reasons behind this, and I encourage him to enlighten us in the comments.

After reading last week's poll and the host of comments about how bad the coaching staff is, I'll tell you what you don't want to hear. Looking at how other colleges have handled new coaches, Mason and probably the majority of his staff, including Dorrell, are here for at least 2 years. Finally, if someone wants to be smart and point at David Shaw being an example that breaks the comparisons, Stanford was at a completely different place when Harbaugh left compared to Franklin leaving. Shaw was already on staff, the system stayed pretty much the same, and they did a good job of keeping their recruiting class intact.

Okay, now it is your turn, let me have it in the comments!

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