Chad Morris
Now
Career arc
Coordinator years
Offensive coordinator across 2 programs, 3 stints, before and after wearing the head-coach hat — every season measured on the same axis, whether he personally ran the unit or someone else did.
How to read this. Coordinator seasons come from our coordinator career records; head-coaching-era seasons are the same unit's FBS-relative percentile for those years, regardless of who coached it, read directly from the staff assignments record. A role change (a “hinge”) is a fact, never a performance verdict — only the season-by-season data itself is colored by outcome.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
Pick a job to see its years on their own.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
0-3 against his rivals at SMU. Winless in 3 tries against Gary Patterson.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
0-2 against his rivals at Arkansas.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
0-5 against his rivals. Winless in 3 tries against Gary Patterson.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Called about what the situation called for.
1,443 run and pass snaps at Arkansas, 2018–2019, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Six numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His one ranked Arkansas class of his own finished #23 nationally.
His class — he had the full signing cycleTransition — he was hired mid-cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his; inherited and mid-transition classes still show here, faded, but stay out of the average.
Followed him here
SMU→
Arkansas2018Players who transferred from his old program to his new one through the portal in the same year he made the move. Name-matching across data sources misses some, so every count is a floor, not an exact number.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2019 roster arrived on his watch — 84 of 130 players. The other 46 are holdovers from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2018-2019) predates 2021, when transfer-portal tracking begins in this database. Portal usage cannot be measured for this tenure at all -- this is not the same as '0% portal'.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his SMU rosters have averaged 6 lb lighter than the FBS average (2015–2017) — lighter than 89% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, SMU’s line averaged 11 lb lighter than the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 11 of 35 signees (31%) across his 2018–2019 tenure, drawn from 11 states in all. Next: TX (7).
80% of his signees come from AR and its 6 border states (TX 7, LA 3, OK 3, TN 3, MS 1).
Off this map: 2 signees to the east (MD, SC), 1 to the west (TX) and 1 to the north (OH).
- median hometown distance
- 248 mi
- within 100 mi
- 10%
- within 500 mi
- 87%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 2%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. None were his own recruits yet: all 5 roster-verified picks arrived under Bret Bielema.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | R3.31 | McTelvin Agim | Defensive Tackle |  Denver Broncos | recruited under Bret Bielema |
| 2020 | R7.02 | Kamren Curl | Safety |  Washington Football Team | recruited under Bret Bielema |
| 2019 | R4.16 | Hjalte Froholdt | Offensive Guard |  New England Patriots | recruited under Bret Bielema |
| 2019 | R5.10 | Dre Greenlaw | Outside Linebacker |  San Francisco 49ers | recruited under Bret Bielema |
| 2019 | R6.17 | Armon Watts | Defensive Tackle |  Minnesota Vikings | recruited under Bret Bielema |
A pick counts toward his tenure when the player’s final college season was one he coached, a checkable rule rather than a claim about who developed the player. A blank note means the player is on a verified roster and arrived on his watch. “Estimated” means no roster record, so the final season is assumed to be the year before the draft.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
Followed Bret Bielema (2013–2017) · succeeded by Sam Pittman (2020–2025).
| Season | 2018 | 2019 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 2-10 | 2-8 | |
| Postseason | — | — | |
| Coordinators | |||
| OC | Joe Craddock | Joe Craddock | |
| DC | John Chavis | John Chavis | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 13 | 6 | |
| Defense | 27 | 6 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 38.1 | 46.4 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 40.6 | 53.8 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 15.6 | 26.2 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
17th-best SMU tenure of 18 by the numbers.
Followed June Jones (2008–2014) · succeeded by Sonny Dykes (2018–2021).
| Season | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 2-10 | 5-7 | 7-5 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | Joe Craddock | Joe Craddock | Joe Craddock | |
| DC | Van Malone | Van Malone | Van Malone | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 27 | 36 | 70 | |
| Defense | 7 | 32 | 12 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 36.9 | 39.8 | 43.6 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 34.5 | 40.0 | 39.8 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 40.6 | 18.6 | 32.6 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on offense and underperforms his recruiting talent on defense.
3 NFL Draft picks: Courtland Sutton (2018), Justin Lawler (2018), Trey Quinn (2018)
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
+0.9 pts at SMU · #620 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.