The Sports Reference website recently has begun covering college sports in addition to pro sports results, specifically NCAA Division I FBS football and Division I men's basketball. Part of their coverage involves rating a school's team's strength each season using what they call the "Simple Rating System" (SRS). It's a variant of the so-called "Pythagorean" rating system developed by Bill James for his Baseball Abstract almost 40 years ago, adjusted for schedule strength (you can learn more about these types of ratings
here). I though it would be interesting to compare the various football coaches Rice has employed over the years using SRS and see how some of the more interesting individual seasons are ranked.
Here's the list of football coaches from best to worst career SRS, along with their overall records and winning percentage at Rice. SRS is computed such that an average team has an SRS of zero. Higher positive numbers indicate better teams, while lower negative numbers indicate worse teams:
Name (Wins-Losses-Ties; Winning Percentage) SRS
Jess Neely (144-124-10, 0.556) 8.43
Jimmy Kitts (33-29-4, 0.565) 7.87
Al Conover (14-28-2, 0.357) 3.18
Phillip Arbuckle (44-23-8, 0.716) 2.60
Bo Hagan (12-27-1, 0.321) 0.19
Bill Peterson (3-7-1, 0.350) 0.05
Jack Meagher (26-26, 0.500) -0.58
Fred Goldsmith (23-31-1, 0.435) -2.84
Todd Graham (7-6, 0.538) -3.89
John Heisman (14-18-3, 0.484), -5.00
Ken Hatfield (55-78-1, 0.417) -5.34
Ray Alborn (13-53, 0.197) -5.68
Homer Rice (4-18, 0.182) -7.38
Claude Rothgeb (2-7, 0.222) -8.22
David Bailiff (57-80, 0.416) -8.50
Watson Brown (4-18, 0.182) -8.83
John Anderson (1-5-1, 0.250) -9.67
Jerry Berndt (6-27, 0.182) -11.19
Mike Bloomgren (5-20, 0.200) -14.82
If you think that Mike Bloomgren is the worst head coach in Rice football history, so far you're right, although the way he's trending he might be out of the cellar by the end of next season. Conversely, it's no real surprise that Jess Neely leads the list. It does beg the question, however; why was Bo Hagan fired even though he had a higher average SRS than the legendary John Heisman?!
It's also interesting to look at the top ten Owl seasons (out of 106 total) based on SRS:
Ordinal. Season (Wins-Losses-Ties) SRS Coach
1. 1947 (6-3-1) 20.87 Neely
2. 1953 (9-2) 19.76 Neely
3. 1949 (10-1) 19.74 Neely
4. 1946 (9-2) 17.83 Neely
5. 1917 (7-1) 17.22 Arbuckle
6. 1960 (7-4) 17.15 Neely
7. 1957 (7-4) 15.24 Neely
8. 1934 (9-1-1) 15.00 Kitts
9. 1954 (7-3) 14.38 Neely
10. 1963 (6-4) 13.41 Neely
Again, it's no surprise that Neely's teams dominate the list, with the other top two in career winning percentage, Arbuckle and Kitts, also contributing. In fact, you have to go all the way down to 20th on the list before you get to a team not coached by Neely, Arbuckle or Kitts (Al Conover's 5-5-1 squad in 1972, which rated at 8.39). Showing how Rice football has declined in the last 40 years, the highest-rated squad since 1980 is Ray Alborn's 1980 5-6 team, checking in at 31st with a 5.53 rating. The next two-highest from that group is David Bailiff's 2008 10-3 C-USA team and Texas Bowl champion in 35th with a 3.92 rating, and in 36th Ken Hatfield's 1996 7-4 WAC team with a 3.88 rating; these are the respective high ratings for each conference team.
Perhaps the most intriguing team, however, is the one at the top of list: Jess Neely's 1947 team, which despite being the highest-rated team by SRS in Rice history and which finished the season ranked 18th in the AP poll, ended with only a 6-3-1 record and a third-place finish in the SWC. What's more, although four of the seven SWC teams went to bowl games that season, Rice wasn't one of them. Conference winner SMU and runner-up Texas went, but so did fourth-place TCU (likely on the strength of its season-ending tie with then-undefeated and untied SMU, when the Mustangs scored the tying touchdown with seconds left only to have Doak Walker miss the game-winning extra-point try) and fifth-place Arkansas (which beat SEC champ Ole Miss in nonconference play).
Let's now look at the flip side: what were the ten worst seasons out of 106 in Rice football history by SRS? I've listed these going from less worse to worst worse:
Ordinal. Season (Wins-Losses-Ties) SRS Coach
97. 2016 (3-9) -13.67 Bailiff
98. 1927 (2-6-1) -14.28 Heisman
99. 2007 (3-9) -14.59 Bailiff
100. 2005 (1-10) -15.03 Hatfield
101. 1929 (2-7) -15.19 Meagher
102. 1943 (3-7) -15.78 Neely
103. 2009 (2-10) -16.33 Bailiff
104. 1983 (1-10) -17.21 Alborn
105. 2017 (1-11) -18.37 Bailiff
106. 2018 (2-11) -19.18 Bloomgren
For those of you who thought that Rice football had hit bottom in 2017 and 2018, you're right (so far). Recall that Rice has had three winless seasons in its history, none of which appear on this list. The two winless and untied seasons just missed: 1988 (0-11 under Berndt) is 95th, and 1982 (0-11 under Alborn) is 96th. The third one, winless but with a tie, 1968 (0-9-1 under Hagan) is 70th. You can also see the bizarre swings that have sometimes characterized Rice football. The aforementioned 2008 season, the second-best since 1980, is bookended by two of the worst seasons in Rice history. Even the greats aren't fully exempt; Jess Neely's 1943 squad makes this list along with his eight entries in the top ten (incidentally, the 2019 season comes in at 90th, so some progress is being made).
One thing that stands out in this kind of exercise is that context matters. Take the 1978 and 1979 seasons, Ray Alborn's first two at the Rice helm. The Owls put up a 3-19 mark over that span, but that's perhaps understandable inasmuch as those seasons had the two highest strengths-of-schedule as measured by SRS in Rice football history. The average of 13.81 meant that the average Owl opponent those two seasons would've ranked around 20th in Division I. Imagine playing a borderline Top 20 team every week for two consecutive seasons.... The SWC was pretty strong in football more or less from the end of World War II until the 1980s; in fact, the top 55 seasons in SoS are from Rice's tenure in the SWC. We've already seen how this affected the 1947 team. In this regard, Al Conover got the shaft worst of all; his four teams had the 12th, 15th, 16th and 31st all-time hardest schedules. It works the other way, too; David Bailiff's 2013 C-USA champion played the 98th-hardest schedule (there's something to be said for striking while the iron's hot...).
There's lots of interesting stuff to be seen looking at Rice's men's basketball history, and I'll submit a post about that soon.