FanPost

Coach sucks in Year 1, goes on to win natty: it can happen

I have said many times that I think Sark's first year has been a severe disappointment, and suggested he is to blame and not the players. Part of the reason I think that is simply that if you have a good coach, a single offseason is time enough for him to make some kind of mark, and the team will show improvement, or at least not backslide considerably, the way Texas did in 2021.

To test that idea, I collected the data shown in the link below, mostly from Wikipedia. What I have plotted is a single data point for every NCAAF championship-winning coach-school combo. These are Playoff winners, BCS game winners before that, and AP champions before that, back to 1936.

sark_year_1.0.html

On the x-axis is the winning fraction (calculated as wins divided by games played, so ties count as losses) of the school, the year before the eventual NC-winning coach took over (i.e., "Year 0"). On the y-axis is the winning fraction of the eventual NC-winning coach in his first year at the school (i.e., "Year 1"). The bold line is a 1:1 line, meaning data points on the line indicate that the year the coach took over, he had the same record as the school had the year before. The white diamond represents Sark at Texas in 2021.

Unsurprisingly, there are more dots above the 1:1 line, meaning the new head coach improved on the school's previous record; you would expect that from NC-winning coaches. But there are several points below the line, where the new coach came in, had a worse first year than the school's previous year, and went on to win a NC. There are even a few examples of coaches who did worse than Sark, measured as vertical distance from the 1:1 line--the difference between the coach's winning fraction and the one the school had the year before he arrived.

These worse-than-Sark examples are labeled and include Homer Norton's Aggies, who, let no one ever forget, won the NC in 1939; John McKay, who won several natties at USC; and Jimmy Johnson's Miami Hurricanes, which had just won a championship when JJ took over. I also included Gene Stallings's Crimson Tide, who were only percentage points better than Sark's 2021 Longhorns.

Also worth pointing out is that only four NC-winning coaches had worse overall records in their first year than Sark in 2021: Norton, McKay, Bill McCartney's 1982 Colorado Buffaloes, and Paul Dietzel's 1955 LSU Tigers. That is out of 53 total coaches in the dataset.

Anyway, examples of NC-winning coaches stinking it up in Year 1 are rare, but I confess I thought they would be rarer than they are. I don't have any real agenda in posting this. Having collected the data, I mostly just don't want to be accused of filing-drawer bias. So there it is. I don't know much about those other coaches, or whether those examples have further relevance for UT. Comments are welcome.

I will just conclude by saying that It Can Happen, and I will STFU and let Sark get to work now. Carry on.

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