Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-3
2011Famous Idaho Potato BowlL 23-24
2012Famous Idaho Potato BowlW 41-15
2019Frisco BowlL 41-51
Wisconsin
2013Capital One BowlL 24-34
Report card
Offense carries it: 47th percentile offense, bottom-quarter defense at 20th.
Oregon State, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
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.
1-3 against his rivals at Utah State. Winless in 3 tries against Pat Hill.
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.
5-0 against his rivals at Wisconsin.
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.
1-1 against his rivals at Oregon State. Winless in 3 tries against Chris Petersen.
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.
0-1 against his rivals at Utah State.
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.
7-5 against his rivals. Winless in 5 tries against Chris Petersen.
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.
Defining games during this era
From our list of the 50 most defining games of the Playoff era, ranked by how much each game mattered, not by date.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Ran more than the situation called for under Baldwin.
1,939 run and pass snaps at Oregon State, 2015–2017, 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
No class below is fully his yet — every one was inherited or signed mid-transition, so none counts toward a verdict.
Transition — 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
Wisconsin→
Oregon State2015Players 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 2017 roster arrived on his watch — 36 of 108 players. The other 72 are holdovers from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2015-2017) 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 Utah State rosters have averaged 6 lb lighter than the FBS average (2010–2019 (4 seasons) rosters on record) — lighter than 89% of FBS coaching runs since 2010.
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: 16 of 63 signees (25%) across his 2015–2017 tenure, drawn from 15 states in all. Next: AZ (7).
46% of his signees come from CA and its 3 border states (AZ 7, OR 6).
1 signee without a plottable hometown location not shown.
- median hometown distance
- 811 mi
- within 100 mi
- 19%
- within 500 mi
- 33%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 35%
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. Most were someone else’s recruits: 2 arrived under Mike Riley; 1 he brought in himself.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | R4.30 | Sean Harlow | Center |  Atlanta Falcons | recruited under Mike Riley |
| 2017 | R5.25 | Treston Decoud | Cornerback |  Houston Texans | |
| 2016 | R3.16 | Isaac Seumalo | Center |  Philadelphia Eagles | recruited under Mike Riley |
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.
Inheritor inherited a power and neither built it higher nor let it collapse · Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
9th-best Oregon State tenure of 17 by the numbers.
Followed Mike Riley (2003–2014) · succeeded by Cory Hall (2017).
| Season | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 2-10 | 4-8 | 1-5 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | Dave Baldwin | Kevin McGiven / T. J. Woods | Kevin McGiven / T. J. Woods | |
| DC | Kalani Sitake | Kevin Clune | Kevin Clune | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 24 | 38 | 22 | |
| Defense | 14 | 67 | 3 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 39.1 | 36.2 | 40.2 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 36.8 | 35.9 | 28.3 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 26.5 | 21.9 | 7.4 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Followed Bret Bielema (2006–2012) · succeeded by Paul Chryst (2015–2022).
| Season | 2013 | 2014 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 9-4 | 10-3 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||
| OC | — | Andy Ludwig | |
| DC | — | Dave Aranda | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 72 | 86 | |
| Defense | 79 | 63 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 38.8 | 32.9 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 46.1 | 30.5 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 14.6 | 29.3 | |
7 NFL Draft picks: Dez Southward (2014), Chris Borland (2014), James White (2014), Jared Abbrederis (2014), Beau Allen (2014), Melvin Gordon (2015), Robert Havenstein (2015)
10th-best Utah State tenure of 22 by the numbers.
Followed Brent Guy (2005–2008) · succeeded by Matt Wells (2013–2018) · returned in 2019 · succeeded by Frank Maile (2020).
| Season | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2019 | 2020 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||
| Record | 4-8 | 4-8 | 7-6 | 11-2 | 7-6 | 0-3 | |
| Postseason | — | — | L bowl | W bowl | L bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||||
| OC | — | — | — | — | Mike Sanford | Bodie Reeder | |
| DC | — | — | — | — | Justin Ena | Stacy Collins / Frank Maile | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||
| Offense | 72 | 38 | 84 | 72 | 37 | 4 | |
| Defense | 0 | 24 | 59 | 95 | 30 | 16 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 39.0 | 33.0 | 28.6 | 47.9 | 46.9 | 31.9 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 29.3 | 15.8 | 17.4 | 45.3 | 44.8 | 40.0 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 22.7 | 25.7 | 34.8 | 26.5 | 17.5 | 20.0 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
7 NFL Draft picks: Curtis Marsh (2011), Bobby Wagner (2012), Robert Turbin (2012), Michael Smith (2012), Will Davis (2013), Kerwynn Williams (2013), Jordan Love (2020)
Was he good?
A mixed record — ahead of expectations by some measures here, behind by others. The honest read is that it depends which lens you use.
+8.9 pts at Utah State · #246 of 1290 · top quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.