Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-1
2022New Orleans BowlL 23-44
202368 Ventures BowlW 59-10
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 3 programs, 5 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
Above the median on both sides of the ball — 62nd percentile offense, 58th percentile defense.
South Alabama, 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
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.
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.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Called about what the situation called for.
1,816 run and pass snaps at South Alabama, 2022–2023, 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
Five numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 2 ranked South Alabama classes of his own have averaged #96 nationally — best #90, worst #102.
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.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2023 roster arrived on his watch — 96 of 119 players. The other 23 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 14% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2021–2023Counting players who have since left: 16% of the 136 arrivals we can classify came through the 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 South Alabama rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2021–2023). In the three seasons before he arrived, South Alabama’s line averaged within a few pounds of 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: 17 of 40 signees (42%) across his 2021–2023 tenure, drawn from 8 states in all. Next: MS (10).
88% of his signees come from AL and its 4 border states (MS 10, FL 6, GA 1, TN 1).
Off this map: 3 signees to the west (OK 2, CA) and 3 to the east (FL 3).
- median hometown distance
- 178 mi
- within 100 mi
- 33%
- within 500 mi
- 89%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 4%
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 2 roster-verified picks arrived under Steve Campbell.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | R5.21 | Darrell Luter Jr. | Cornerback |  San Francisco 49ers | recruited under Steve Campbell |
| 2022 | R3.24 | Jalen Tolbert | Wide Receiver |  Dallas Cowboys | recruited under Steve Campbell |
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
3rd-best South Alabama tenure of 4 by the numbers.
Followed Steve Campbell (2018–2021) · succeeded by Major Applewhite (2024–now).
| Season | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 5-7 | 10-3 | 7-6 | |
| Postseason | — | L bowl | W bowl | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | Major Applewhite | Major Applewhite | Major Applewhite | |
| DC | Corey Batoon | Corey Batoon | Corey Batoon | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 23 | 65 | 89 | |
| Defense | 57 | 62 | 91 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 47.9 | 43.7 | 43.3 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 36.7 | 30.4 | 30.8 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 66.7 | 44.4 | 43.3 | |
Outperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Brings in smaller-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
Was he good?
The data leans positive: every conclusive reading points the same way.
+8.2 pts at South Alabama · #265 of 1290 · top quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.