Rod Carey
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 0-7
2012Orange BowlL 10-31
2013Poinsettia BowlL 14-21
2014Boca Raton BowlL 23-52
2015Poinsettia BowlL 7-55
2017Quick Lane BowlL 14-36
2018Boca Raton BowlL 13-37
Temple
2019Military BowlL 13-55
Report card
Below the median on both sides of the ball — 33rd percentile offense, 39th percentile defense.
Temple, 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.
10-2 against his rivals at Northern Illinois. Just 1-3 against John Bonamego.
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.
Just 1-2 against Mike Houston.
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.
10-2 against his rivals. Just 1-3 against John Bonamego.
Signature games
These losses tie at the model's current max -- an editorial pick among a real tie, not a clean ranking.
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
Called about what the situation called for.
2,168 run and pass snaps at Temple, 2019–2021, 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 Temple classes of his own have averaged #100 nationally — best #97, worst #104.
Northern Illinois
TempleAcross every program: 3 ranked classes of his own, averaging #98 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
Northern Illinois→Temple2019Players 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 2021 roster arrived on his watch — 89 of 109 players. The other 20 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 40% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2019–2021Counting players who have since left: 40% of the 25 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 Temple rosters have averaged 8 lb lighter than the FBS average (2019–2021) — lighter than 92% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, Temple’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: 13 of 46 signees (28%) across his 2019–2021 tenure, drawn from 16 states in all. Next: PA (10).
57% of his signees come from NJ and its 3 border states (PA 10, NY 2, DE 1).
Off this map: 1 signee to the west (HI).
- median hometown distance
- 97 mi
- within 100 mi
- 52%
- within 500 mi
- 73%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 7%
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 Matt Rhule; 1 he brought in himself.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | R3.14 | Matt Hennessy | Center |  Atlanta Falcons | recruited under Matt Rhule |
| 2020 | R5.24 | Harrison Hand | Cornerback |  Minnesota Vikings | |
| 2020 | R6.17 | Shaun Bradley | Inside Linebacker |  Philadelphia Eagles | recruited under Matt Rhule |
| 2020 | R7.27 | Chapelle Russell | Outside Linebacker |  Tampa Bay Buccaneers | recruited under Matt Rhule |
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
9th-best Temple tenure of 18 by the numbers.
Followed Geoff Collins (2017–2018) · succeeded by Stan Drayton (2022–2024).
| Season | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 8-5 | 1-6 | 3-9 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | Mike Uremovich | Mike Uremovich | Mike Uremovich | |
| DC | Jeff Knowles | Jeff Knowles | Jeff Knowles | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 23 | 11 | 7 | |
| Defense | 67 | 22 | 20 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 46.6 | 42.7 | 52.1 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 44.7 | 47.4 | 34.4 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 36.6 | 37.5 | 51.6 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent on offense and performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on defense.
Brings in smaller-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
1st-best Northern Illinois tenure of 13 by the numbers.
Followed Dave Doeren (2011–2012) · succeeded by Thomas Hammock (2019–2025).
| Season | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||
| Record | 0-1 | 12-2 | 11-3 | 8-6 | 5-7 | 8-5 | 8-6 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | L bowl | L bowl | L bowl | — | L bowl | L bowl | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||
| OC | — | — | Bob Cole | Bob Cole | Mike Uremovich | Mike Uremovich | Mike Uremovich | |
| DC | — | — | Jay Niemann | Jay Niemann | Kevin Kane | Kevin Kane | Jeff Knowles | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||
| Offense | — | 92 | 75 | 21 | 69 | 18 | 20 | |
| Defense | — | 33 | 43 | 73 | 5 | 86 | 78 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | — | 38.4 | 34.0 | 34.3 | 34.4 | 40.6 | 39.2 | |
| Red-zone pass% | — | 33.3 | 31.4 | 24.8 | 35.2 | 42.1 | 30.6 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | — | 27.0 | 20.4 | 38.6 | 37.5 | 26.8 | 20.9 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on offense and outperforms his recruiting talent on defense.
6 NFL Draft picks: Jimmie Ward (2014), Ken Bishop (2014), Da'Ron Brown (2015), Kenny Golladay (2017), Max Scharping (2019), Sutton Smith (2019)
All-time wins
Wins at programs this site tracks, 1936–present — one consistent count for every coach, not each program’s own historically reported total.
2nd all-time at Northern Illinois
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-3.1 pts at Northern Illinois · #893 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.