Walt Harris
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 2-4
1997Liberty BowlL 7-41
2000Insight.com BowlL 29-37
2001Tangerine BowlW 34-19
2002Insight BowlW 38-13
2003Continental Tire BowlL 16-23
2004Fiesta BowlL 7-35
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.
5-7 against his rivals at Pittsburgh. Winless in 3 tries against Larry Coker.
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.
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.
0-4 against his rivals at Stanford.
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.
5-11 against his rivals. Winless in 3 tries against Larry Coker.
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
Called about what the situation called for.
706 run and pass snaps at Stanford, 2005–2006, 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.
Building the roster
Four numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
Followed him here
Pittsburgh→
Stanford2005Players 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 2006 roster arrived on his watch — 20 of 29 players. The other 9 are holdovers from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2005-2006) 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.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 4 of 21 signees (19%) across his 2005–2006 tenure, drawn from 13 states in all. Next: AZ (3).
33% of his signees come from CA and its 3 border states (AZ 3).
- median hometown distance
- 514 mi
- within 100 mi
- 0%
- within 500 mi
- 50%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 25%
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 can be traced to who brought them in — there’s no roster record for these players here.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | R3.28 | Trent Edwards | Quarterback |  Buffalo Bills | Estimated |
| 2007 | R3.30 | Michael Okwo | Linebacker |  Chicago Bears | Estimated |
| 2007 | R5.07 | Brandon Harrison | Defensive Back |  Houston Texans | Estimated |
| 2006 | R3.13 | Jon Alston | Linebacker |  St. Louis Rams | Estimated |
| 2006 | R5.23 | Julian Jenkins | Defensive End |  Tampa Bay Buccaneers | Estimated |
| 2006 | R6.12 | Babatunde Oshinowo | Defensive Tackle |  Cleveland Browns | Estimated |
| 2006 | R7.30 | T.J. Rushing | Defensive Back |  Indianapolis Colts | 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.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
Followed Buddy Teevens (2002–2004) · succeeded by Jim Harbaugh (2007–2010).
| Season | 2005 | 2006 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 5-6 | 1-11 | |
| Postseason | — | — | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 37 | 8 | |
| Defense | 8 | 13 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 41.9 | 44.7 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 53.0 | 48.9 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 6.5 | 22.7 | |
16th-best Pittsburgh tenure of 23 by the numbers.
Followed Johnny Majors (1993–1996) · succeeded by Dave Wannstedt (2005–2010).
| Season | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||||
| Record | 6-6 | 2-9 | 5-6 | 7-5 | 7-5 | 9-4 | 8-5 | 8-4 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | — | — | L bowl | W bowl | W bowl | L bowl | L bowl | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||||
| Offense | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 57 | |
| Defense | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 67 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 44.8 | |
| Red-zone pass% | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 41.4 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 29.0 | |
15 NFL Draft picks: Hank Poteat (2000), Kevan Barlow (2001), Antonio Bryant (2002), Ramon Walker (2002), Bryan Knight (2002), Gerald Hayes (2003), Torrie Cox (2003), Bryan Anderson (2003) + 7 more
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 Pittsburgh
Was he good?
Only one of the usual three angles is measurable for this era — raised the program.
+9.3 pts at Pittsburgh · #237 of 1290 · top quarter