Saturday, February 4, 2012

Kelly vs other top coaches

I thought it would be fun to compare the first two years of coaches vs the two years (averaging the two years) before they showed up across a variety of programs. 
A popular notion on this board is that great coaches make it to NC in yr 3, so I thought I'd take a few NC coaches (Saban, Meyer), and a few good coaches (Dantonio, Harbargh), and our coach (Kelly) to see how 2 year improvements would look.  I took 3 very basic metrics - Wins, Pts differential, and my favorite yards per play differential (adjusted for SOS).
Here are their performance, ranked by pts differential improvement:
#1:
Wins 1.5
Pt diff  111
YPPD  0.25
#2:
Wins 1.5
Pt diff  54
YPPD  0.95
#3:
Wins 3.5
Pt diff  47
YPPD  0
#4:
Wins 3.5
Pt diff  42.5
YPPD  0.35
#5:
Wins 1.5
Pt diff  26
YPPD  0.05
1: Harbaugh
2: Kelly
3: Dantonio
4: Meyer
5: Saban
It is worth noting that each had a different starting point for pts differential, here's what each coach inherited:
1: Harbaugh -165
2: Kelly +44
3: Dantonio +10
4: Meyer +101
5: Saban +96
You can make a number of conclusions from this data - but it's hard not to think that Kelly is on the right path, at least compared to what these other coaches were able to accomplish.

No comments:

Post a Comment