Philip Montgomery
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 2-2
2015Independence BowlL 52-55
2016Miami Beach BowlW 55-10
2020Armed Forces BowlL 26-28
2021Myrtle Beach BowlW 30-17
Coordinator years
Offensive coordinator across 4 programs, 4 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.
Just 1-7 against Ken Niumatalolo.
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 Virginia Tech.
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. Just 1-7 against Ken Niumatalolo.
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 Montgomery.
545 run and pass snaps at Virginia Tech, 2025–2025, 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.
His recruiting, really
None of his Virginia Tech classes is ranked and fully his yet. Across his other stops, his own classes averaged #111 nationally.
TulsaVirginia TechAcross every program: 5 ranked classes of his own, averaging #111 nationally.
His class — he had the full signing cycleInherited — signed before he arrived
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 2025 roster arrived on his watch — 58 of 113 players. The other 55 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 48% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2025–2025Counting players who have since left: 48% of the 58 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 Tulsa rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2015–2022). In the three seasons before he arrived, Tulsa’s line averaged 5 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: 12 of 20 signees (60%) across his 2025–2025 tenure, drawn from 7 states in all. Next: NC (2).
80% of his signees come from VA and its 6 border states (NC 2, MD 1, TN 1).
Off this map: 1 signee to the west (TX).
- median hometown distance
- 213 mi
- within 100 mi
- 10%
- within 500 mi
- 82%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 6%
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.
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 Brent Pry (2022–2025) · succeeded by James Franklin (2026–now).
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on offense and underperforms his recruiting talent on defense.
Typical size for position, once adjusted for position mix.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
15th-best Tulsa tenure of 22 by the numbers.
Followed Bill Blankenship (2011–2014) · succeeded by Kevin Wilson (2023–2024).
| Season | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||||
| Record | 6-7 | 10-3 | 2-10 | 3-9 | 4-8 | 6-3 | 7-6 | 5-7 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | W bowl | — | — | — | L bowl | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||||||
| OC | Matt Mattox / Sterlin Gilbert | Philip Montgomery | — | — | — | — | — | — | |
| DC | Bill Young / Brian Norwood | Bill Young / Brian Norwood | Bill Young / Brian Norwood | Bill Young | Joe Gillespie | Joe Gillespie | Joe Gillespie | Luke Olson | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||||
| Offense | 84 | 86 | 48 | 15 | 37 | 32 | 38 | 55 | |
| Defense | 8 | 73 | 7 | 52 | 55 | 99 | 73 | 41 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 40.9 | 34.4 | 27.3 | 27.6 | 41.6 | 39.7 | 39.9 | 44.9 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 26.8 | 36.4 | 10.4 | 24.1 | 35.4 | 44.5 | 26.8 | 38.3 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 28.8 | 26.2 | 34.4 | 48.8 | 31.0 | 37.8 | 31.2 | 28.2 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Barely touches the portal — recruits and develops his own.
Brings in bigger-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
5 NFL Draft picks: Reggie Robinson II (2020), Trevis Gipson (2020), Zaven Collins (2021), Tyler Smith (2022), Chris Paul (2022)
1 player-season honored (All-America / national award): Zaven Collins (2020)
Was he good?
Every angle here comes back inconclusive — not enough separation from zero to call it either way.
+3.9 pts at Tulsa · #440 of 1290 · middle half