Now
Career arc
Report card
Offense carries it: 48th percentile offense, bottom-quarter defense at 15th.
East Carolina, 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.
1-0 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
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.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Passed more than the situation called for under Petersen.
2,802 run and pass snaps at East Carolina, 2016–2018, 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 one ranked East Carolina class of his own finished #89 nationally.
His class — he had the full signing 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.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2018 roster arrived on his watch — 72 of 92 players. The other 20 are holdovers from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2016-2018) 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 East Carolina rosters have averaged 4 lb lighter than the FBS average (2016–2018) — lighter than 81% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, East Carolina’s line averaged 6 lb heavier 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: 36 of 72 signees (50%) across his 2016–2018 tenure, drawn from 12 states in all. Next: FL (8).
71% of his signees come from NC and its 4 border states (GA 7, SC 6, VA 2).
Off this map: 4 signees to the west (CA 2, TX 2), 3 to the north (OH 2, NJ) and 1 to the south (FL).
- median hometown distance
- 198 mi
- within 100 mi
- 32%
- 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.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. He brought in 1 of them himself.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | R2.05 | Zay Jones | Wide Receiver |  Buffalo Bills |
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
11th-best East Carolina tenure of 15 by the numbers.
Followed Ruffin McNeill (2010–2015) · succeeded by Mike Houston (2019–2024).
| Season | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 3-9 | 3-9 | 3-8 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | Tony Petersen | Tony Petersen | Tony Petersen | |
| DC | Kenwick Thompson | Kenwick Thompson | David Blackwell | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 54 | 23 | 7 | |
| Defense | 13 | 0 | 25 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 53.6 | 50.7 | 54.6 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 48.9 | 44.1 | 51.7 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 41.9 | 34.1 | 25.0 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Was he good?
The data leans negative: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-9.0 pts at East Carolina · #1182 of 1290 · bottom quarter