http://espn.go.com/college-football/stor...ire-season

Troy is 0-5 this year, but his total record at Troy is 175-109. In FBS, he is 2 games over .500, but may slip below .500 the way the season is going.

When he leaves, Bailff will move up to the 5th most tenured coach at a non-P5 program. Here are the longest tenured guys and their records at their current jobs

1. George O'Leary, UCF, 74-58

2. Bronco Mendenhall, BYU, 86-35

t-3. Rick Stockstill, Middle Tennessee, 55-51

t-3. Frank Solich, Ohio, 69-53

t-5. David Bailiff, Rice, 42-51

t-5. Ken Niumatalolo, Navy, 51-34

t-5. Troy Calhoun, Air Force, 53-42

8. Bobby Wilder, Old Dominion, 49-17 (almost all in FCS)

Wilder and Solich make less than Bailiff. Stockstill about the same. Calhoun is $1M. Mendenhall, Niumaltalolo, and O'Leary are in the $1.7-2 M range.

I think you've mixed up FBS/FCS

Except for O'Leary and Mendenhall, none of those are at large schools or schools with a long (recent) history of success.

Also, it's conceivable that O'Leary moves off of that list pretty soon.

Is Niumatalolo right? It seems like he's missing about 8 games of results, if he's been at Navy that long.

I found his history, and it appears that he coached a bowl in 2007 only (taking over for Paul Johnson). Not sure that should count as a season.

all data sourced from wikipedia rather than team web sites.


the point of this post simply to remind people what a curious anomaly bailiff is within his profession.

There are 63 non-P5 jobs in FBS. Only 7 of those coaches have more than 7 full seasons on seat. In contrast, 12 P5 coaches have longer tenures, and there are fewer P5 jobs.

Of the ones with Bailiff tenures or longer, Bailiff is only one with a losing record.

My conclusions:

1. Most non-P5 coaches fail and are fired in 4 years or less. It is typically a very difficult job
2. Most coaches who have success early in their tenures get hired away to the P5, in part because of the vast difference in ability to pay
3. Bailiff is the odd duck. He has done (just barely) enough to avoid getting fired, arguably because of low expectations at Rice, but he has never been and I'm quite certain never will be a candidate for a P5 job.

in contrast, of the others on this list, Solich and O'Leary have been hugely successful at P5 level. Solich was 58-19 at Nebraska. O'Leary was 52-33 at Georgia Tech.

O'Leary is in exile only because of the resume fiasco that surfaced when he was hired for what was at the time still a Top 10 job in college football. Solich might be self-imposed exile--not sure if he was ever a candidate for a Big 10 job, but I would expect so at some point (illinois, indiana, purdue have consistently done much worse than him)

Mendenhall as discussed in the realignment thread is as close to quasi-P5 as it gets, with the unique segment BYU plays in, and he is paid accordingly.

Navy and Air Force seem to be special cases. I don't know much about Stockstill at MTSU. I'll predict that Wilder from ODU gets an ACC job in the next 3 years.

(10-08-2014 12:31 PM)MemOwl Wrote:  There are 63 non-P5 jobs in FCS. Only 7 of those coaches have more than 7 full seasons on seat. In contrast, 12 P5 coaches have longer tenures, and there are fewer P5 jobs.

Again, every coaching job in FCS is non-P5 because the P5 are in FBS.

Division I (NCAA) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_football Wrote:Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly known as Division I-A, is the top level of college football
The Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), formerly known as Division I-AA

(10-08-2014 01:08 PM)I45owl Wrote:  Again, every coaching job in FCS is non-P5 because the P5 are in FBS.

edited previous posts

Bailiff certainly is an odd duck in regards to his tenure vs overall win percentage. Obviously some of that has to do with the expectations at Rice vs other schools, but I think the majority of this comes from two sources:

1) Bailiff excels off the field with regards to recruiting, community outreach, positive stories about the program, etc. He is probably one of the better coaches in the country with regards to those attributes, and they help cover up the blemishes of his record on the field. If he was a Braun type of coach, there would be a much better chance he wouldn't be here, since there wouldn't be much to hang his hat on.

2) He has gotten lucky with when he wins. He had a poor first year, but an astounding second. If he had put together two bad years in a row, a third would have doomed him. We saw that the program was going to be hurting following '08, so many were fine with the abysmal records of '09 and '10. Even more grumblings came in '11 as his welcome wore off, and just as pretty much everyone on this board had their pitchforks out (myself included) he went and finished '12 with a flourish, and took that momentum in '13 by winning a conference championship. Had it not been for the turnaround in '12, I have little doubt in my mind that he would not be working at Rice any more.

Re: Long Coaching Tenure

1) Lose enough not to get hired away
2) Win enough not to get fired
3) Coach at a school (e.g. Rice) with a low standard for #2

Example: Willis Wilson (Basketball)

#1 can be harder than it sounds. Jerry Berndt got hired away from Rice after going 6-27 over three years.

(10-08-2014 02:23 PM)temchugh Wrote:  Re: Long Coaching Tenure

1) Lose enough not to get hired away
2) Win enough not to get fired
3) Coach at a school (e.g. Rice) with a low standard for #2

Example: Willis Wilson (Basketball)

#1 can be harder than it sounds. Jerry Berndt got hired away from Rice after going 6-27 over three years.

We were still in the SWC then, FWIW.

Watson Brown got poached after going 4-18. But Vandy fired him for 10-45, which is EXACTLY the same winning percentage as 4-18. Ironic, I think.

by my count, through end of 2013, Bailiff had beaten 30 different head coaches.

Of those, 14 were fired at the end of the season of the loss or by end of the season following.

Kevin Sumlin, Larry Coker, June Jones, and Mike Price are the only coaches to lose multiple games to Bailiff and retain control of the destiny of their careers.

Which goes to the zero sum aspect of coaching and expectations of new coaches.

Sadly, our history is such that new coaches are expected to beat Rice as an initial benchmark of progress.

In contrast, Alabama won 11 games last year. Not a single one of those losing coaches got fired, and I don't believe any is in serious jeopardy this year.

(10-08-2014 02:55 PM)MemOwl Wrote:  by my count, through end of 2013, Bailiff had beaten 30 different head coaches.

Of those, 14 were fired at the end of the season of the loss or by end of the season following.

Kevin Sumlin, Larry Coker, June Jones, and Mike Price are the only coaches to lose multiple games to Bailiff and retain control of the destiny of their careers.

Which goes to the zero sum aspect of coaching and expectations of new coaches.

Sadly, our history is such that new coaches are expected to beat Rice as an initial benchmark of progress.

In contrast, Alabama won 11 games last year. Not a single one of those losing coaches got fired, and I don't believe any is in serious jeopardy this year.

Well good thing we didn't lose to Alabama, or it looks like Bailiff would be sticking around here for a while!

But anyways. I did a quick search and found that, for non-first year coaches, the average tenure is 4.28 years. Remove Beamer and Blakeney and it drops to 3.88 (median is 3 years). The standard dev is 4.4 years when you include all, non-first year coaches, so if my stats memory is correct, Bailiff has a longer tenure than just under 84% of all FBS coaches with more than a year of coaching under their belt.

Did a little more research on the epidemiology of non-P5 coaches, using encounters with Bailiff as a sample.

By my count, over his first 7 seasons, Bailiff coached against 34 different coaches in non-P5 programs. The most interesting immediate finding is that he has a winning record against this group, 37-30. He is 3-17 against P5 schools, with the wins coming against Kansas and Purdue.

But focusing on the non-p5, 13 of those coaches are still in place. His record against them is 13-10.

10 were clearly fired with very bad aggregate records, and Bailiff went 12-5 against that group.

6 were promoted to BCS jobs, and Bailiff went 3-10 against that group

5 retired or kind of retired (were pushed out but with tenures of 7 years or longer, they were clearly successful enough to get multiple extensions). Bailiff went 9-5 against this group.

Biggest surprise to me is the 6 promotions vs. 10 relegations. I thought chance of success in non-P5 was far worse than that.