To land a college football head coaching gig, coaches must work their way up as assistants, while gaining experience and building their resume. Throughout their journey, they will work for people with many different head coaching ideals and philosophies. Similar to a child’s transition into adolescence, these various things will shape and mold their own coaching style until they are able to become a head coach.
Regardless of age, there is a substantial amount for head coaches or higher ranking assistants to influence an up and coming assistant prior to landing their first head coaching job.
When Lane Kiffin was hired by Tennessee at age 31, he was the youngest head coach ever hired at a college football program and already had 12 years of experience under his belt. Twelve years is a long time. Think about how much different you were when you were six compared to 18. Even from 18 to 30.
And Lane Kiffin was the youngest hire of all time.
Most coaches probably have around 20 years of coaching experience as an assistant before they are finally hired to run a football program. Heck, Norm Chow is 65 and entering his first year as Hawaii’s new head coach, which equates to 38 years of grooming and experience as an assistant.
So, where do all these assistants who are landing first time head coaching jobs come from?
Majority of them are (offensive or defensive) coordinators from established programs coming off a successful season– a trend that is continuing upwards in recent years.
The season prior to landing their first head coaching job, the teams they were being taken from averaged 9.7 wins from 2010-2011. From 2005-2009, the average win total was only 8.2 wins.
If a coach wins consistently over a period of time, then they tend to get their fair share of assistants hired by other universities to be their head coach. The idea is that the former assistant can replicate and build upon the things they learned under their former head coach.
The truly successful coaches almost seem as if they become coaching factories, churning out assistant coaches who are deemed ready-made to take another university’s program to the same level – just add batteries.
This is how a coaching tree begins to form.
And although the method of hiring assistants from the head coach with a well decorated trophy case is extremely popular among athletic directors, it isn’t always as seamless as it sounds. One of the most familiar examples of assistants failing to imitate a successful head coach is the Bill Belichick coaching tree.
And similar to the same way your parents didn’t want you hanging out with the wrong crowd, athletic directors (should) look to avoid hiring assistants from a coaching tree that might only produce poisoned fruit.
Using some of our data from CoachesByTheNumbers.com, we compared some of the most prominent recent coaching trees to see which coaches produced the most successful assistants into head coaches.
The Coaching Trees:
Bob Stoops: Mark Mangino, Chuck Long, Mike Stoops, Kevin Sumlin, Kevin Wilson
Urban Meyer: Charlie Strong, Dan Mullen, Steve Addazio, Kyle Whittingham
Nick Saban: Jimbo Fisher, Derek Dooley, Will Muschamp, Bobby Williams
Les Miles: Bo Pelini, Mike Gundy, Larry Porter
Pete Carroll: Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian, Nick Holt, Ed Orgeron
Mike Leach: Art Briles, Dana Holgorsen, Ruffin McNeil, Sonny Dykes, Greg McMackin
Mike Bellotti: Jeff Tedford, Chip Kelly, Dirk Koetter, Chris Petersen
Bobby Bowden: Mark Richt, Chuck Amato, Tommy Bowden
What we used to measure the success of the coaching tree:
CBTN Rating Score: We took the average score of each assistant’s “CBTN Rating Score” as a head coach.
Overall Win %: Because winning is the only metric that trumps everything in sports, we took the average overall win % of each assistant as a head coach.
Win % against Top 25: Beating mediocre teams doesn’t measure success like beating the good ones can so we took the average win % vs. Top 25 teams of each assistant as a head coach.
Conference Win %: Racking up wins against Northeast Western State types in non-conference is a good excuse for people to drink in a parking lot. Winning in conference is what counts so we took the average conference win % for each assistant as a head coach.
CBTN % Difference Score: This looks at the difference in a coach’s winning percentage at a school compared to the winning percentage at that school in the 5 previous years. Some coaches have to clean up a giant mess at certain jobs, while others walk into a Taj Mahal with perfectly waxed floors. This is the key to determining if a coach was able to turn a program around. Six win seasons don’t always scream success like they should at some schools and vice versa so we took the average differential of each assistant as a head coach.
Then to round everything out, we tallied bowls, Top 25 finishes, Conference Championships, and BCS Bowls.
| Coaching Tree |
Yrs. | Rating (Avg) | Win % Overall | Win % Top 25 | Conf. Win % | % Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Bellotti | 25 | 68.8 | 71% | 41% | 66% | 11.7% |
| Bobby Bowden | 25 | 61.7 | 65% | 47% | 58% | 8.0% |
| Urban Meyer | 13 | 51.4 | 66% | 31% | 59% | 13.8% |
| Mike Leach | 18 | 40.7 | 53% | 29% | 56% | 3.0% |
| Les Miles | 13 | 37.9 | 60% | 40% | 52% | 9.9% |
| Bob Stoops | 24 | 31.3 | 47% | 27% | 42% | 5.9% |
| Nick Saban | 10 | 44.0 | 52% | 11% | 43% | -8.5% |
| Pete Carroll | 11 | 31.9 | 44% | 19% | 40% | -6.7% |
| Coaching Tree | Yrs. | Conference Champ. | Top 25 Finishes | Bowls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Bellotti | 25 | 8 | 11 | 23 |
| Bobby Bowden | 25 | 2 | 13 | 25 |
| Urban Meyer | 13 | 2 | 3 | 12 |
| Mike Leach | 18 | 4 | 2 | 11 |
| Les Miles | 13 | 1 | 6 | 10 |
| Bob Stoops | 24 | 0 | 2 | 10 |
| Nick Saban | 10 | 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Pete Carroll | 11 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Coaching Tree |
Total | Avg. Rating |
Win % Overall |
Win % Top 25 |
Win % Conf |
% Diff | *Conf Champ |
*Top 25 Finish |
*Bowls | *BCS Bowls |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mile Bellotti | 13 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bobby Bowden | 21 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Urban Meyer | 25 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Les Miles | 38 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 4 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mike Leach | 42 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 5 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Nick Saban | 57 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 6 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bob Stoops | 60 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 5 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 7 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pete Carroll | 68 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 8 | 8 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| *Tie Breakers- Conf Champs/Years; Top 25/Years; Bowls/Years; BCS Bowls/Years | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
With the recent success of guys like Chip Kelly and Chris Petersen, it’s not a complete surprise Mike Bellotti’s coaching tree rated the best by a landslide. Even Jeff Tedford, who has the third highest CBTN % difference score in the whole coaching database, can be considered underrated.
The key to the success of Bellotti’s coaching tree is that none of his protégés bombed at any of their coaching jobs. Petersen, Kelly, and Tedford all have significantly improved their programs and Dirk Koetter set things in motion at Boise State. While Koetter was unable to return Arizona State to the glory days of Jake the Snake, he did not completely tank or leave the program in shambles.
Where a lot of Athletic Directors get in trouble is when they look around for a quick fix emulation of a powerhouse program so they snag a replica coach and gamble millions that he can jump start their program into the national scene. The truth is that it takes decades to build programs into national powers and sometimes consistency is the key to building a program.
The interesting part of this study is the three guys at the top (Bellotti, Bowden, and Meyer) found success by building up programs without an abundance of wealth, resources, or history to national relevance at some point in their career.
The guys at the bottom of the coaching tree rankings (Stoops and Carroll), both excellent coaches, have never had to succeed at nontraditional powerhouses. They weren’t necessarily the guys at the factory building the shiny new sports cars like the others. They were just the mechanics who were able to restore it to mint condition after it had been sitting in a garage with boxes piled on top of it for 20 years.
And what damn fine mechanics they were too.
Perhaps learning under a coach that has been able to succeed (on a national scale) with limited resources is the main difference between a successful assistant hire and an unsuccessful one.
Last season, 120 college football coaches were paid $176,223,757 which averages out to $218,640 per win. That doesn’t include the salaries of assistants, trainers, and other administrative people within the athletic department.
It’s expensive to win in college football. Therefore, it should be important for athletic directors to trace the lineage of potential head coaching hires to their roots of the tree they came from.
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