Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-0
2017Gasparilla BowlW 28-3
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 3 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.
Report card
Below the median on both sides of the ball — 36th percentile offense, 39th percentile defense.
Georgia Tech, 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.
1-1 against his rivals at Temple.
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 Georgia Tech. Winless in 4 tries against Dabo Swinney.
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.
1-3 against his rivals. Winless in 4 tries against Dabo Swinney.
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
Ran more than the situation called for under Patenaude.
2,406 run and pass snaps at Georgia Tech, 2019–2022, 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 2 ranked Georgia Tech classes of his own have averaged #36 nationally — best #26, worst #47.
Temple
Georgia TechAcross every program: 3 ranked classes of his own, averaging #52 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
Temple→Georgia Tech2019Players 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 2022 roster arrived on his watch — 46 of 117 players. The other 71 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 30% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2019–2022Counting players who have since left: 12% of the 40 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
This tenure spans the 2021 transfer-portal tracking floor: seasons before 2021 structurally cannot be classified portal-vs-not (they land in 'unknown' below), so the portal-share figure understates how many pre-2021 arrivals might have been transfers under the pre-portal-tracking transfer rules.
“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 Georgia Tech rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2019–2021). In the three seasons before he arrived, Georgia Tech’s line averaged 10 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: 29 of 47 signees (62%) across his 2019–2022 tenure, drawn from 10 states in all. Next: FL (8).
87% of his signees come from GA and its 5 border states (FL 8, AL 1, NC 1, SC 1, TN 1).
Off this map: 4 signees to the west (CA 2, TX 2) and 1 to the north (NJ).
- median hometown distance
- 60 mi
- within 100 mi
- 51%
- within 500 mi
- 82%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 1%
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: 3 arrived under Paul Johnson; 1 he brought in himself.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | R7.07 | Tariq Carpenter | Inside Linebacker |  Green Bay Packers | recruited under Paul Johnson |
| 2021 | R6.25 | Jalen Camp | Wide Receiver |  Jacksonville Jaguars | recruited under Paul Johnson |
| 2021 | R7.27 | Pressley Harvin III | Punter |  Pittsburgh Steelers | recruited under Paul Johnson |
| 2020 | R6.27 | Tyler Davis | Tight End | Jacksonville Jaguars |
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
13th-best Georgia Tech tenure of 14 by the numbers.
Followed Paul Johnson (2008–2018) · succeeded by Brent Key (2022–now).
| Season | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||
| Record | 3-9 | 3-7 | 3-9 | 1-3 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||
| OC | Dave Patenaude | Dave Patenaude | Dave Patenaude | Chip Long | |
| DC | Andrew Thacker / Nathan Burton | Andrew Thacker / Nathan Burton | Andrew Thacker / Nathan Burton | Andrew Thacker | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||
| Offense | 13 | 45 | 12 | 10 | |
| Defense | 28 | 46 | 7 | 72 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||
| 1st-down pass% | 35.8 | 41.4 | 43.9 | 48.2 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 26.5 | 36.4 | 42.9 | 43.0 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 37.9 | 57.1 | 37.1 | 21.9 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Typical size for position, once adjusted for position mix.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
1 player-season honored (All-America / national award): Pressley Harvin III (2020)
Followed Matt Rhule (2013–2016) · succeeded by Rod Carey (2019–2021).
| Season | 2017 | 2018 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 7-6 | 8-4 | |
| Postseason | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||
| OC | Dave Patenaude | Dave Patenaude | |
| DC | Taver Johnson | Andrew Thacker | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 55 | 50 | |
| Defense | 71 | 66 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 47.6 | 44.5 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 50.0 | 38.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 25.0 | 43.8 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on offense and outperforms his recruiting talent on defense.
5 NFL Draft picks: Jake Martin (2018), Jullian Taylor (2018), Rock Ya-Sin (2019), Ryquell Armstead (2019), Michael Dogbe (2019)
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-8.5 pts at Georgia Tech · #1166 of 1290 · bottom quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.