Todd Orlando.
Poach watch
Every coordinator →South Alabama defensive coordinator, 2026
This winter
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.
- ▲ HigherA Group of Five program · 31st percentile of FBS in program stature last season
- ▼ LowerHis defense allows 8.4 points a game more than the FBS average · last season his defense at South Florida allowed 1.8 fewer
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.
Every stop on the calendar
| Years | Program | Walked into | Year 1 | Best | Vs. talent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014–2014 | Utah State | 94.0 | 89.5 | 89.5 | — |
| 2015–2016 | Houston | 67.6 | 59.0 | 87.1 | ▲ 21.9 |
| 2017–2018 | Texas | 55.1 | 94.2 | 94.2 | ▲ 7.9 |
| 2019–2019 | Texas | 49.6 | 53.5 | 53.5 | ▼ 12.8 |
| 2020–2021 | USC | 18.1 | 58.7 | 58.7 | ▼ 26.8 |
| 2022–2022 | Florida Atlantic | 65.8 | 49.2 | 49.2 | ▲ 0.1 |
| 2023–2025 | South Florida | 1.1 | 71.1 | 79.0 | ▲ 21.0 |
| 2026–2026 | South Alabama | 24.6 | 6.9 | 6.9 | — |
Utah State 2014–2014: ranked 94th the year before he arrived, 89th at its best — went backwards.
Florida Atlantic 2022–2022: ranked 66th the year before he arrived, 49th at its best — went backwards.
South Alabama 2026–2026: ranked 25th the year before he arrived, 7th at its best — went backwards.