Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-2
2009Insight BowlW 14-13
2011Pinstripe BowlL 13-27
2012Liberty BowlL 17-31
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 2 programs, 2 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 — 48th percentile offense, 26th percentile defense.
Iowa 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
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.
3-4 against his rivals. Winless in 7 tries against Bill Snyder.
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
Passed more than the situation called for under Mangino.
4,916 run and pass snaps at Iowa State, 2009–2015, 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
Four numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2015 roster arrived on his watch — 132 of 132 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2009-2015) 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 Iowa State rosters have averaged 5 lb heavier than the FBS average (2010–2015 rosters on record) — heavier than 75% 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: 38 of 148 signees (26%) across his 2009–2015 tenure, drawn from 18 states in all. Next: FL (31).
30% of his signees come from TX and its 4 border states (OK 6).
- median hometown distance
- 498 mi
- within 100 mi
- 26%
- within 500 mi
- 51%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 25%
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. He brought in 1 of them himself. 4 more can’t be traced to who brought them in (no roster record).
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | R5.14 | Jeremiah George | Inside Linebacker |  New York Jets | Estimated |
| 2013 | R5.15 | A.J. Klein | Inside Linebacker |  Carolina Panthers | |
| 2013 | R7.40 | Carter Bykowski | Offensive Tackle |  San Francisco 49ers | Estimated |
| 2012 | R2.28 | Kelechi Osemele | Offensive Guard |  Baltimore Ravens | Estimated |
| 2010 | R7.21 | Reginald Stephens | Offensive Guard |  Cincinnati Bengals | Estimated |
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
In his own words
Every quote, back to October 2014
In his own words
There is a short list for you
We are diligently working to find some answers for open week preparation
and the wait and see piece is how we can motivate them, how we can prepare them and coach them up and get them to play their tails off against the Red Raiders.
This was a bad loss
The first five games that he played, since he didn’t play (the week before), he never had very much space to run in and credit to our guys blocking and what they created
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
8th-best Iowa State tenure of 19 by the numbers.
Followed Gene Chizik (2007–2008) · succeeded by Matt Campbell (2016–2025).
| Season | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||
| Record | 7-6 | 5-7 | 6-7 | 6-7 | 3-9 | 2-10 | 3-9 | |
| Postseason | W bowl | — | L bowl | L bowl | — | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||
| OC | — | — | — | — | — | Mark Mangino | Mark Mangino | |
| DC | — | — | — | — | — | Wally Burnham | Wally Burnham | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||
| Offense | 59 | 25 | 19 | 17 | 32 | 19 | 38 | |
| Defense | 26 | 33 | 51 | 24 | 62 | 4 | 32 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 38.5 | 37.5 | 44.6 | 42.7 | 42.6 | 48.5 | 35.7 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 37.8 | 34.7 | 38.7 | 46.2 | 33.3 | 52.0 | 41.5 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 23.1 | 25.7 | 40.6 | 17.9 | 26.8 | 26.5 | 30.8 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
+4.4 pts at Iowa State · #411 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.