Hokepoints: Big Hires Are Evidently a Big Deal

From left: Brady Hoke & Jerry Kill in 2011 [Upchurch], Les Miles and Cam Cameron at the 1989 spring game [Bentley], and James Franklin as a coordinator [courtesy Maryland Athletics] 

For HTTV this year I did a study on Big Ten and SEC, and the factors that led to a marked disparity in football success that grew up between them since 1999. One of the most stunning differences I found was in the splashiness of coaching hires.

Someone on the board early this morning asked whether high-profile candidates are such a big deal. The original study answered this emphatically: "Yes!" I thought I'd extend it to the rest of the Power 5 hires since '99 and see if that's still true.

Methodology: I looked at the circumstances at the moment of hiring of every coach (156 total) who started a tenure at a currently Power 5 program since 1999, and put them into one of three (plus one) categories:

• Strong: Stealing another BCS school's coach, or the heir apparent at a power program, or grabbing the year's hottest candidate, or being the school that finally pries a legendary mid-major coach away when everyone else has been trying for years. Universally, these are headline-grabbing guys who probably needed a major monetary incentive to pry them from their last position.
• Average: A guy who was obviously responsible for turning a mid-major into a perennial 9- or 10-win team, a successful NFL or power program coordinator, promoting your own heir apparent (not after firing his boss), etc. These are the hires that you nod at and say "that makes sense" or "B+".
• Cheap: Promoting a coordinator you didn't plan on, grabbing a mid-major coach with mediocre success or success that's not obviously his. Grabbing a washout from the NFL or the Power 5, or a guy who wouldn't have been on any coaching radar except yours.
• (Interim): Don't count unless they were made full.

These are of course debatable, since they're the opinions of one dude who's been obsessively following college football over this time period, so you can only draw so much. I didn't remember all of them, obviously, but I was able to jog my impressions by reading articles on coaching searches around the time. This is one instance when my life was actually made better by the annual proliferation of "we grade this year's hires" articles from mainstream outlets. When I couldn't decide, I defaulted "average."

I welcome your suggestions for changes, so long as they fit the criteria (hindsight must be irrelevant).

The data:

[After the jump: what we learned]

When we break out the levels we get a result not unlike recruiting, where the performance of individuals is highly varied, but the blue chips are more likely to pan out:

There's an effect; it's not a huge one. Strong hires tend to win at a much higher clip, but they get hired at schools where winning is the norm, and winning almost two thirds of your games at a power five school is below the expectation for grabbing (and paying for) a big-name hire.

However the spread is significant. There is a trend, and if money isn't a big deal (or you're the kind of school who'll pay top dollar for a hire you could make on the cheap anyway) then the big name is absolutely the way to go. You can see why when you chart the hires of the power conferences in this time:

The conferences that emphasize big hires have been getting better; those who don't have fallen behind. The Big Ten's four headliners were John L. Smith (stolen from Louisville for a lot of money), Rich Rodriguez, Urban Meyer, and James Franklin. It would seem like just a 50% hit rate, worse than that if you're not sold on Franklin, or perhaps better than that if you're one of those people who wears Arizona undergarments to Michigan games.

One common thread with Smith and RR was the chorus of talk radio-level analysis singing "The spread will never work in the Big Ten!" on the way in, and on the way out, despite defensive struggles being the true culprit for their failures. On the micro level, there are all sorts of reasons why the big guys failed, and often it's weird things like culture non-fits, that cause it.

Big School Comparisons

Last thing I did was to break out the 36 hires made in this time by the 16 power schools that should have a similar kind of budget and recruiting cachet as the job at Michigan. They are: OSU, Bama, ND, Oklahoma, USC, Nebraska, Texas, PSU, Tennessee, FSU, Georgia, LSU, Miami (YTM), Auburn, and Florida.

Strong: 21 hires, among which four are Urban Meyer and Nick Saban. The other big successes relative to their program norms were Malzahn, Les Miles, Pete Carroll, Mark Richt, Bob Stoops, and Tuberville. Gene Chizik and Brian Kelly have won around the norm for their programs. Franchione and Kiffin (at USC) were somewhat below. Reserving judgment on Butch Jones and the guys hired just this year, only Tyrone Willingham and (sigh) Rich Rodriguez didn't come close to matching program expectations.

Average: 11 hires, and considerably less success. Larry Coker, Jimbo Fisher and Jim Tressel were the only major successes from this group, with Bo Pelini and Ron Zook (at Florida) around their programs' historical averages. Minor disappointments were Al Goden, Muschamp, and Bill O'Brien (who shouldn't be judged against the PSU norm for obvious reasons). Charlie Weiss, Mike Shula and Derek Dooley were disasters.

Cheap: Just four hires and none worked out—going cheap is rare for a program that can afford not to, unless your school is about to be hit with major NCAA violations. The latter explains Randy Shannon (-9%) and Luke Fickell, who registers as an interim for completing a season at OSU that was –29% below expectations. The two unforced errors were Bill Callahan, run out of his job with the Raiders by Charles Woodson's uprising who landed on Nebraska, and Brady Hoke.