The Zeitgeist List · Coordinators · Never a head coach

Shannon Dawson.

Offensive coordinator · 12 seasons · 5 stints · 5 programs3 seasons ranked in the national top 10%

Own effect on the unit

Offense+0.27not distinguishable from zero

model fit as of 2026-09-04

Poach watch

Every coordinator →

Miami offensive coordinator, 2026

This winter

32%chance he leaves this winter for a head-coaching job or a bigger coordinator job — including going with his head coach if he’s hired awayWanted3rd-highest of 329 FBS coordinators

0%50%+

Our poach model, on his team’s results so far, how his unit compares with the FBS average this season and last, his program’s standing and his role. Ranked against the 329 FBS coordinators with 3+ games this season. The zone words describe the market’s interest; none of them says he is leaving.

What drives his number

The biggest factors, each against the typical FBS coordinator today.

▲ Higher
His offense scores 19.1 points a game more than the FBS average · last season his offense scored 6.4 more
▲ Higher
An offensive coordinator
▼ Lower
A Power Four program · 92nd percentile of FBS in program stature last season
▲ Higher
His team is 8-0, outscoring opponents by 29.9 points a game · AP-ranked

How good is this number? It ranks a coordinator who moves up ahead of one who stays 71 to 73% of the time, and its average matches the share who actually move. What it can’t do

Tested on every FBS coordinator from 2018 through 2025, each season scored by a model fit only on the seasons before it: from three games on, given one coordinator who moved up and one who didn’t, it ranked the one who moved ahead 71 to 73% of the time, and its average chance came within a tenth of a point of the share who actually moved.

Counting a coordinator who follows his hired-away head coach as moving up was decided after the model’s first results were seen.
Much of the signal comes through his head coach: coordinators often move because their boss is hired away. This site’s number for head coaches is now live, on each head coach’s page, but this number doesn’t use it.
Moves to NFL coordinator jobs are undercounted in the history it learned from; they were found mainly for coordinators with Wikipedia pages.
On its own it is weak at picking which coordinator lands a head-coaching job (about 60% on the same test). The number is about moving up by any route.
It is frozen: it learns nothing from 2026 until a deliberate refit.

The tenure clock

Every stop re-aligned to its own first year, so the stops stack instead of scrolling past each other. The gray dashed line is a reference, not a path: each point is the median of whoever was still in the job that year, across every real OC/DC stint since 2014 at that role, and the pool shrinks year over year because surviving to a later year means not having been fired.

West Virginia 2014–2014

Kentucky 2015–2015

Southern Miss 2016–2018

Houston 2020–2022

Miami 2023–2026

Median of those still in the job, that year of a tenure. A shrinking pool, not a path.

Southern Miss, 3 years

▼ 54.1

67.6 to 13.5 percentile.

Houston, 3 years

▲ 49.0

43.7 to 92.7 percentile.

Miami, 4 years

▲ 30.8

68.8 to 99.6 percentile.

Median offensive coordinator

+0.5

first season to last, across 222 stints of 3+ years. 50.9% improve at all.

Every stop on the calendar

Years	Program	Walked into	Year 1	Best	Vs. talent
2014–2014	West Virginia	26.0	49.6	49.6	—
2015–2015	Kentucky	28.5	39.5	39.5	▼ 16.6
2016–2018	Southern Miss	91.8	67.6	68.8	▲ 5.9
2020–2022	Houston	41.9	43.7	92.7	▲ 15.3
2023–2026	Miami	24.0	68.8	99.6	▲ 21.2

Southern Miss 2016–2018: ranked 92nd the year before he arrived, 69th at its best — went backwards.

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