0-8, lost 8 straight, on track for 1-11 in the regular season.
Now
Career arc
This week Wed Nov 4
- Last gameL 24-31 at UNLV Sat Oct 31
- This season0-8 lost 8 straight
- On track for1-11 regular season
- Nextat San José State Sat Nov 7
- Stature115th of 138 FBS programs
Saturday: at San José State
Sat Nov 7, 4 pm ET MW+ · San José State is 4-5 · First meeting between Harley and Ken Niumatalolo as head coaches · Northern Illinois’s chance to win: 22% (the site’s model)
Offense: 129th of 138 per play. Defense: 132nd.
4 games left
- Sat Nov 7at San José State (4-5)MW+22%
- Sat Nov 14vs. Nevada (3-5)MW+35%
- Sat Nov 21at North Dakota State (7-2)
7% - Sat Nov 28vs. UTEP (1-7)MW+64%
Percent: Northern Illinois’s chance to win, from the site’s model. Records are through today. Networks as announced; the rest are set closer to kickoff.
How the season got here
Where Northern Illinois stood among 138 FBS programs by stature after each game (1st is the highest; the CFB Zeitgeist ledger).
- Oct 26–Nov 1L 24-31 at UNLV2 headlines · 77th of 138Super Bowl champion coach Doug Pederson: NIU will be better next year because of what Rob Harley doing now
Shaw Local - Oct 19–25L 21-56 vs. Hawai'i0 headlines
- Oct 12–18L 23-41 at Wyoming0 headlines
- Oct 5–11L 7-28 vs. Air Force0 headlines
- Sep 28–Oct 4No game0 headlines
- Sep 21–27 · rebuiltL 14-35 at Georgia State0 headlines
Each week as this page showed it at the time. Weeks marked rebuilt came before this page existed: they were built afterward from only what was known by the end of that week.
Watch the biggest plays from Northern Illinois’s games, ranked by how much each moved the chance to win.
Hot seat
See every job →Hot seat: not rated · interim head coach.
Rob Harley is the interim head coach, and interims are not rated: the history behind this number follows coaches hired to the job. How every job is measured.
Poach watch
He is the interim head coach this season, and an interim head coach gets no number.
Fans
Fan chatter
- Oct 17L 23-41 at Wyoming
I hope not, at this point tank so hard that both Harley and Frazier get fired
Northern Illinois fan - Sep 5L 0-40 at Iowa
Good to see Rob Harley isn’t the answer and we can start our HC search early in the year
Northern Illinois fan
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.
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.
Style position and drift
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.
Building the roster
Three 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.
Inherited — 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 2026 roster arrived on his watch — 63 of 116 players. The other 53 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 0% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2026–2026Counting players who have since left: 0% of the 63 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.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 6 of 32 signees (19%) across his 2026–2026 tenure, drawn from 15 states in all. Next: IL (5).
44% of his signees come from IN and its 4 border states (IL 5, KY 1, MI 1, OH 1).
Off this map: 2 signees to the west (CA 2) and 2 to the south (FL 2).
- median hometown distance
- 244 mi
- within 100 mi
- 32%
- within 500 mi
- 72%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 11%
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
One headline named him in the last 7 days
85th of 138 FBS head coaches
In his own words
Every quote, back to August 2026
In his own words
A game comes down to five to seven plays
We started to get aware of their splits and what they were trying to do
These guys have kept swinging, and it makes me emotional to think about
They’ve got two quarterbacks that can run, they’re big
We have a lot of guys, especially on defense, that have never played at this level
We just have to continue to harp on the details that it takes to have good ball security and take care of the football
He’s a big back; he’s tough to tackle and he continues to have good vision
These guys don’t quit
We got some guys dinged up, nothing season ending obviously
Those plays kill a defense, they just kill them
I think Tyger will be the one that goes out first
There’s things that we’re trying to do with just a level of urgency and a level of physicality early in practice that’s going to try and stimulate, you know, starting fast and doing those things
I thought, again, they fought and they executed in some big situations to get us back into that ball game
I think we’ll assess it, you know, we’re going to assess everything on Sunday
I think producing is always going to be the No. 1 thing you look at, and then consistency, right? Consistency and continuing to build, and again, we said, you know, that was a major question
Nobody’s 2026 game tested
We’re supposed to be in the ‘B’ gap, and those guys move sideways and they cut you off, and now we find ourselves in the ‘D’ gap, two gaps away, and the ball is going to wind back into that gap
I think from Tyger’s (Taron) standpoint, you know, he’s a guy that’s got great touch. He’s got great touch, I don’t have a coverage for great touch and accuracy
I think what we’ve said is that we’re going to finish this whole process, and we’re not going to, you know, make any rash decisions, and we’re going to let the practices and the production show what it’s all about
Obviously DeAree, you’ve got La’Don (Bryant), you’ve got Kenji (Lewis), you’ve got guys that can go do things and play multiple positions too
Yeah, right now they haven’t proved that we need to necessarily rotate anything
We’re all learning the fight song
They’ve tried all these different things, and the number one thing they’ve come back to is really just a consistency of routine, and trying to stay on their home time zone
Career
Hires into jobs like this
Hired into programs rated 15 to 15 (Regional Program III tier). Rough match, not calibrated yet — ranked on what the job inherited alone. Coaches hired into this same job aren’t used as comps.
- Thomas Hammock20195–7-3.9
- Dave Doeren201111–3+2.4
- Jerry Kill20086–7+1.1
- Joe Novak19961–10-2.5
- Charlie Sadler19912–9-2.7
- Jerry Pettibone19854–7+0.6
- Lee Corso19844–6-0.2
- Bill Mallory19807–4+2.1
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Followed Thomas Hammock (2019–2025).
AI Narratives — “Northern Illinois — stat check”.
How good is he so far?
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.