Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 0-2
2010Little Caesars Pizza BowlL 32-34
Illinois
2014Heart of Dallas BowlL 18-35
Report card
Offense carries it: 61st percentile offense, below the median defense at 47th.
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
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.
2-2 against his rivals at Toledo.
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.
1-2 against his rivals at Illinois. Winless in 3 tries against Urban Meyer.
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.
3-4 against his rivals. Winless in 3 tries against Urban Meyer.
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
Called about what the situation called for under every play-caller.
1,936 run and pass snaps at Illinois, 2012–2014, 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.
Followed him here
Toledo→
Illinois2012Players 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 2014 roster arrived on his watch — 90 of 117 players. The other 27 are holdovers from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2012-2014) 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 Illinois rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2012–2014). In the two seasons before he arrived, Illinois’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: 15 of 52 signees (29%) across his 2012–2014 tenure, drawn from 13 states in all. Next: FL (10).
37% of his signees come from IL and its 5 border states (IN 2, IA 1, WI 1).
Off this map: 4 signees to the west (CA 4).
- median hometown distance
- 217 mi
- within 100 mi
- 12%
- within 500 mi
- 71%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 14%
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. None were his own recruits yet: all 1 roster-verified picks arrived under Ron Zook. 3 more can’t be traced to who brought them in (no roster record).
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | R3.24 | Hugh Thornton | Offensive Guard |  Indianapolis Colts | Estimated |
| 2013 | R4.03 | Akeem Spence | Defensive Tackle |  Tampa Bay Buccaneers | Estimated |
| 2013 | R5.17 | Terry Hawthorne | Cornerback |  Pittsburgh Steelers | recruited under Ron Zook |
| 2013 | R7.20 | Michael Buchanan | Defensive End |  New England Patriots | Estimated |
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 Illinois tenure of 16 by the numbers.
Followed Ron Zook (2005–2011) · succeeded by Bill Cubit (2015).
| Season | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 2-10 | 4-8 | 6-7 | |
| Postseason | — | — | L bowl | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | — | — | Bill Cubit | |
| DC | — | — | Tim Banks | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 15 | 59 | 32 | |
| Defense | 44 | 23 | 19 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 37.7 | 55.4 | 50.7 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 40.3 | 46.7 | 48.4 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 40.0 | 32.4 | 22.2 | |
13th-best Toledo tenure of 13 by the numbers.
Followed Tom Amstutz (2001–2008) · succeeded by Matt Campbell (2011–2015).
| Season | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 5-7 | 8-5 | 8-4 | |
| Postseason | — | L bowl | — | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 79 | 31 | 71 | |
| Defense | 54 | 73 | 43 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 41.4 | 32.6 | 36.9 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 36.9 | 28.0 | 30.3 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 34.4 | 34.1 | 30.3 | |
Was he good?
Only one of the usual three angles is measurable for this era — raised the program.
-1.7 pts at Toledo · #797 of 1290 · middle half