Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-2
2018Famous Idaho Potato BowlL 18-49
2019First Responder BowlL 20-23
2021Quick Lane BowlW 52-24
Report card
Offense carries it: 72nd percentile offense, below the median defense at 33rd.
Western Michigan, 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.
6-6 against his rivals. Just 2-4 against Chris Creighton.
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 Johns, Bath/Evans and Thorne.
4,750 run and pass snaps at Western Michigan, 2017–2022, 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 5 ranked Western Michigan classes of his own have averaged #91 nationally — best #76, worst #103.
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 2022 roster arrived on his watch — 112 of 112 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 6% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2017–2022Counting players who have since left: 6% of the 70 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 Western Michigan rosters have averaged 3 lb lighter than the FBS average (2017–2022) — lighter than 77% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, Western Michigan’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: 40 of 116 signees (34%) across his 2017–2022 tenure, drawn from 15 states in all. Next: IL (29).
52% of his signees come from MI and its 3 border states (IN 13, WI 5, OH 2).
Off this map: 8 signees to the south (FL 8), 2 to the west (AZ, TX) and 1 to the east (CT).
- median hometown distance
- 135 mi
- within 100 mi
- 24%
- within 500 mi
- 84%
- 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 3 of them himself; 3 arrived under P.J. Fleck.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | R6.07 | Zaire Barnes | Outside Linebacker |  New York Jets | |
| 2022 | R2.22 | Skyy Moore | Wide Receiver |  Kansas City Chiefs | |
| 2021 | R2.24 | D'Wayne Eskridge | Wide Receiver |  Seattle Seahawks | recruited under P.J. Fleck |
| 2021 | R5.11 | Jaylon Moore | Offensive Guard |  San Francisco 49ers | |
| 2018 | R3.28 | Chukwuma Okorafor | Offensive Tackle |  Pittsburgh Steelers | recruited under P.J. Fleck |
| 2018 | R5.33 | Darius Phillips | Cornerback |  Cincinnati Bengals | recruited under P.J. Fleck |
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
3rd-best Western Michigan tenure of 10 by the numbers.
Followed P.J. Fleck (2013–2016) · succeeded by Lance Taylor (2023–now).
| Season | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||
| Record | 6-6 | 7-6 | 7-6 | 4-2 | 8-5 | 5-7 | |
| Postseason | — | L bowl | L bowl | — | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||||
| OC | Kevin Johns / Jake Moreland | Jake Moreland | Jake Moreland | Jake Moreland | Mike Bath / Eric Evans | Jeff Thorne | |
| DC | Tim Daoust / Lou Esposito | Tim Daoust / Lou Esposito | Lou Esposito | Lou Esposito | Lou Esposito | Lou Esposito | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||
| Offense | 35 | 44 | 67 | 89 | 93 | 6 | |
| Defense | 50 | 6 | 68 | 25 | 37 | 84 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 33.4 | 36.5 | 44.0 | 34.3 | 38.3 | 40.5 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 25.0 | 34.0 | 31.2 | 35.6 | 27.7 | 35.4 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 27.9 | 52.3 | 51.2 | 29.4 | 48.8 | 44.2 | |
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.
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-5.5 pts at Western Michigan · #1030 of 1290 · bottom quarter