Thomas Hammock
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 2-1
2021Cure BowlL 41-47
2023Camellia BowlW 21-19
2024Famous Idaho Potato BowlW 28-20
Report card
Offense carries it: 51st percentile offense, below the median defense at 34th.
Northern Illinois, 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.
4-10 against his rivals. Just 1-5 against Mike Neu.
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
Ran more than the situation called for under Eidsness, Beschorner and Sanders.
5,439 run and pass snaps at Northern Illinois, 2019–2025, 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
His 6 ranked Northern Illinois classes of his own have averaged #92 nationally — best #84, worst #102.
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.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2025 roster arrived on his watch — 113 of 113 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 8% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
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.
9% of his 189 new players since 2022 came through the portal (FBS programs, same seasons: 22%) — well below the FBS rate. His share was 5% in 2022 and 9% in 2025.
Graded on the players who arrived and the players who left together, his portal seasons came out better than most FBS programs’ in 1 and worse than most in 3 of the 4 seasons graded. our read
Each player counts once, in the season he arrived. 2021, the first season of portal tracking here, is left off because its arrival records look incomplete (about 31 new players per FBS team, against 52 in 2022). Portal grade: the site’s position-value-weighted scoring (the same engine as the Portal Heat feed and the “Who won the portal” grade): the value of the players who came in minus the value of the ones who left, ranked against every FBS program’s grade that same season. A season with fewer than 4 transfers in and out is not graded.
“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 Northern Illinois rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2019–2025). In the three seasons before he arrived, Northern Illinois’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: 55 of 180 signees (31%) across his 2019–2025 tenure, drawn from 22 states in all. Next: WI (23).
59% of his signees come from IL and its 5 border states (WI 23, IA 12, IN 11, MO 6).
Off this map: 8 signees to the south (FL 8), 5 to the west (CA 3, CO, others) and 1 to the east (MA).
- median hometown distance
- 240 mi
- within 100 mi
- 38%
- within 500 mi
- 75%
- 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
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
6th-best Northern Illinois tenure of 13 by the numbers.
Followed Rod Carey (2012–2018) · succeeded by Rob Harley (2026–now).
| Season | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||
| Record | 5-7 | 0-6 | 9-5 | 3-9 | 7-6 | 8-5 | 3-9 | |
| Postseason | — | — | L bowl | — | W bowl | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||
| OC | Eric Eidsness | Eric Eidsness | Eric Eidsness | Eric Eidsness | Eric Eidsness | Wesley Beschorner | Quinn Sanders | |
| DC | Derrick Jackson | Derrick Jackson | Derrick Jackson | Derrick Jackson / Nick Benedetto | Derrick Jackson / Nick Benedetto | Nick Benedetto | Rob Harley | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||
| Offense | 19 | 23 | 88 | 45 | 70 | 38 | 16 | |
| Defense | 47 | 33 | 4 | 15 | 58 | 88 | 18 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 39.6 | 46.9 | 27.6 | 26.4 | 36.1 | 34.4 | 23.2 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 36.1 | 60.6 | 30.7 | 35.2 | 37.5 | 37.2 | 28.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 28.9 | 40.0 | 39.6 | 29.4 | 32.6 | 40.6 | 41.9 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Typical size for position, once adjusted for position mix.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
Coach of the Year: MAC Coach of the Year (2021)
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.
3rd 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.
-9.0 pts at Northern Illinois · #1182 of 1290 · bottom quarter