Staff Ratings

Recruiting is an essential part of a college football program’s success. At mcillecesports.com, program talent levels are rated on a 0-100 percentile scale based on a 4-year weighted average of recruiting results. Any good prediction algorithm will heavily factor in a team’s talent level, as it is consistently a critical predictor of a team’s performance.

However, coaching & development (C&D^) of those players is different than the recruiting aspect. By comparing performance expectations based on talent level to the actual product on the field, every coach in the FBS can be graded for their C&D: that is, how much does a particular coach boost or hinder his unit’s output in the games? And how important is that particular unit’s output to the team’s chances of winning a game? For example, an Air Raid offense doesn’t have much reliance on a QB run game, whereas for academy option teams, the QB run game is critical. These rankings account for all these pieces: talent-based expectation, unit performance, coaching system, and historical coaching performance.

To use the lookup table, type in a team name. Use the TeamID column if your search returns multiple teams. If a search does not return proper results, use the clear filters button, then restart your search.

XP = Total relevant** seasons of FBS coaching experience from 2005 – 2022. Data are unavailable for prior seasons. See the Coach Ratings page for Role definitions.

CCH* = 2023 projected win probability effect due to coaching & development.

StdWin* = 2023 projected standardized wins, scaled to a 12-game regular season. This is based on a weighted average of past (relevant) seasons and a regression-to-the-mean effect (important for inexperienced coaches). The weight is based on absolute win probability effects for that particular year, putting more emphasis on years when a coach’s subordinate units were more heavily used. This will automatically downweight the pandemic-affected 2020 season for most coaches. Due to these complexities, StdWin* is NOT necessarily equal to the coach’s historical StdWin average.

To learn more about a coach, head over to the Coach Ratings page and type in their name or unique CoachID to get their detailed FBS history from 2005 – 2022. If a particular rating seems odd at first glance, checking out the history is a great way to learn more and avoid recency bias when objectively evaluating coaching performance.

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Cobbling together all these factors, these C&D ratings are then scaled to a 12-game regular season to create a projected regular season value for Standardized Wins (StdWin*). The StdWin concept is more fully described on the Coach Ratings page. 

The resulting rating, StdWin*, estimates how many net wins the coaching staff is worth post-recruiting in a 12-game schedule against:

  • Opponents with equal talent
  • Opponents with average coaching

For 2023, the top C&D staff in America is Liberty, led by ex-Coastal Carolina boss Jamey Chadwell. Liberty has a staff total of about +4 StdWin*, meaning that if they were to play 12 opponents, all with average coaching and possessing equivalent talent to Liberty’s roster, the Flames would be expected to be four games above .500 (i.e., 10-2) against that schedule.

In other words, given equal rosters, the Liberty staff’s ability to develop players, implement systems, scout opponents, etc., would lead them to an expected record of 10-2. At the individual game level, you can look up the total value of the CCH* column (also defined at the Coach Ratings page above), which indicates the staff’s total win probability effect. For Liberty, the win probability effect is about +34%, meaning they would have an 84% chance of beating an opponent with equal talent and average coaching.

As addressed in the Coach Ratings article, standardizing by recruiting and schedule is critical to avoid biasing the C&D ratings in favor of the big recruiting programs. However, this system does not punish the great recruiting teams: despite nationally elite roster talent, the Georgia Bulldogs boast the #4 C&D staff in the country, and Alabama will always remain near the top so long as Nick Saban is in charge.

Check out the the College Football Atlas page to see how this data is incorporated into season predictions!

2023 College Football Atlas Cover Page

 

 

 

 

^It is also reasonable to assume C&D includes talent identification. A coach might be good at identifying recruits who are better than their recruiting service ratings indicate. Here, that concept is lumped in with coaching & development.

**Relevant means that the XP is directly attributable to the coach’s 2023 role. For example, if a WR coach used to coach RBs, those years coaching RBs will not be included in XP, because they are not included in the CCH*/StdWin* ratings. However, if a former OC is now coaching WRs, his XP as an offensive coordinator will count, because as an OC, he had some responsibility over WRs and was graded in that role. Analogous situations are extensible to head coaches and defensive coordinators.

NOTES:

Not all 2023 staffs are finalized, so a handful of staff ratings may change slightly before the 2023 season begins.

FCS to FBS transitional programs, like Jacksonville State, sometimes have coaching staffs with little FBS experience. Inexperienced coaches are treated as average (zero net effect) until data is available upon which to rate them. It would be unfair to treat them as subpar coaches simply because they coached at the FCS (or other non-FBS) level. The XP column for such teams adds important context about their FBS experience level.

If you would like to report any corrections to the coaching staff listings, please communicate them to analytics@mcillecesports.com