What the Data Tells Us About Hiring a Defensive Coach

At the beginning of Vanderbilt’s search for a new head football coach two weeks ago, Athletic Director Candice Storey Lee said that she was looking for an offensive-minded coach with head coaching experience.

And then she went out and hired Notre Dame defensive coordinator Clark Lea, who’s neither of these things. And everybody who was looking forward to an exciting offense was disappointed.

But! Is hiring a defensive-minded coach really such a bad thing? Well, let’s try to see what some data tells us. I looked through every SEC head coach since 2000 (that’s counting head coaches who were employed in the league in the year of our Lord 2000 even if they were hired prior to that) and found 58 non-interim head coaching tenures — not 58 head coaches, with seven different coaches leading two different schools during this time period (plus an eighth, Tommy Tuberville, whose Ole Miss tenure predated my arbitrary cutoff.)

Of these 58 tenures, I looked at the background of each head coach (source: Wikipedia) and determined three things: whether they’d been a Power 5 head coach before (this involved a judgment call with the former Big East and 2004 Utah, neither of which I deemed to be “Power 5,” but also a judgment call with the old SWC, which I did, in fact, deem equivalent to a Power 5 conference), whether they’d been an FBS head coach, and whether they’d ever been a coordinator. Then, I assigned a side of the ball to each head coach based on where they spent the majority (or, in most cases, the entirety) of their pre-head coaching experience.

That gave me 20 defensive head coaches, 37 offensive head coaches, and one unknown, because Lou Holtz is so fucking old that Wikipedia has no idea which side of the ball he was coaching in his assistant coaching days in the 1960s. And then I had to get to the subjective part of this: what is successful?

I settled on a very simple measure: were you fired after five years on the job or less? If the answer is “yes,” you failed. If the answer is “no,” then you passed. The only exception to this is that if you weren’t fired after five years, BUT you never had a winning season at the school, you failed. This exception includes exactly one coach. (Did I create this exception entirely to put Derek Mason into the “fail” bucket? I will let you, the reader, be the judge of that.)

Why five years? Five years is where the wheat generally gets separated from the chaff. If you make it to a sixth year, you’ve definitely gotten at least one contract extension, and you’ve probably won enough to satisfy at least the rational members of your fan base, even if you may or may not have placated the people who inhabit your school’s Rivals board. And obviously there are different degrees of success, but this measure does control a bit for the difficulty of the job, or at least the boosters’ perception of it. It’s why Mark Stoops can win 49 percent of his games and have four winning seasons in eight tries and be considered a success, and Ron Zook can win 62 percent of his games and never have a losing season and be considered a failure, because it’s Florida.

Note that for coaches who were only at their schools for a year or two — I count seven such coaches, including four active ones — I simply assigned an “incomplete” grade and moved on. For active coaches with less than five years, I’ve made value judgments which you probably won’t argue with — Jimbo Fisher and Dan Mullen pass, Jeremy Pruitt fails, because that seems to be the direction those situations are headed. That gives us 51 coaches with a grade, and the split of pass/fail is almost exactly 50/50: 25 coaches pass, 26 coaches fail.

So! What does the data tell us?

• Sorting by side of the ball they came up on, 9 of the 20 defensive coaches pass, while 15 of 30 offensive coaches do. That’s basically no difference.
• What if we only limit it to recent years? Well, 5 of 14 offensive coaches hired since 2010 pass, while 3 of 9 defensive coaches do. Again, no difference. (The interesting part here is that the pass rate in general is lower, in part because there have been a considerably larger number of two- and three-year tenures in the last decade; this means that Tennessee has three failed head coaches this decade instead of two.)
• How much of a difference does having been a Power 5 head coach previously make? Quite a lot, as it turns out: 12 of 17 such head coaches were successful at their new school, though this list is inflated a bit by the fact that both Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier appear twice. And three of the five failures — namely, Will Muschamp (South Carolina edition), Woody Widenhofer, and Gene Chizik — had bad records at the previous jobs.
• The Group of 5 head coach bucket — that is to say, coaches with FBS head coaching experience but not Power 5 — is 5-for-11, and it goes up to 7-for-11 if you count Bobby Petrino and Hugh Freeze (fired, respectively, after four and five years, but entirely for, ahem, off-field reasons) as successes. What’s interesting here, though, is that these coaches are 2-for-8 since 2008 (again, counting Petrino and Freeze as failures.)
• (As an aside, I don’t have a non-FBS head coaching column, but there are only four former SEC head coaches whose only prior head coaching experience came below the FBS level: Bobby Johnson, Hal Mumme, Jim Donnan, and Joe Moorhead. They’re 1-for-4.)
• And what about the guys with no FBS head coaching experience? They’re 8-for-23, though this actually gets slightly better if you limit it to guys who had been coordinators. There have been three head coaches who had never been a head coach or a coordinator at the FBS level (Hal Mumme, Robbie Caldwell, and Ed Orgeron, Ole Miss edition) and they all failed, with only Mumme even having a winning season.
• And finally, the answer you were probably looking for here: how do first-time FBS head coaches who were defensive coordinators do? They’re 3-for-9, with Mark Stoops, Bobby Johnson, and Kirby Smart being the hits (and, uh, Bobby Johnson was an FCS head coach and also the commenters will debate whether that qualifies as a success.) The failures are Mike DuBose, Ron Zook, Will Muschamp, Derek Mason, Barry Odom, and Jeremy Pruitt.
• Then again, the offensive coordinators don’t do that much better: 5-for-11, and one of the successes is David Cutcliffe, whose fifth year in Oxford also happened to be Eli Manning’s senior year. That list does at least include two major successes in Phillip Fulmer and Mark Richt, though.
• Interestingly, this effect largely disappears for coaches with prior head coaching experience: 10 of the 17 offensive-minded guys with previous head coaching experience succeeded, while 6 of 10 did on the defensive side did (and, again, three of the four failures here had failed at previous stops.) Interestingly, the offensive group included six Power 5 head coaches and five of those were successful (Steve Spurrier twice), with Houston Nutt being the only failure here.

So what’s the point here? Well, what this tells us is that first-time head coaches who were previously defensive coordinators have the lowest hit rate of anyone (with the exception of guys who haven’t even been a coordinator, but that’s a small group.) The other point, though, is that hiring somebody who’s never been a head coach at this level before is extremely hit or miss.