Grading 1st Year College Football Head Coaches

Glory to the Green · January 16

Eric Morris received a C-. Seems fair to me.

Edited January 16 by Glory to the Green

Mean Green 93-98 · January 16

That seems a little generous. I like the guy, and his offense shows promise. But when you clearly underperform the guy who just got fired, that has to be a D.

El Paso Eagle · January 16

14 minutes ago, Mean Green 93-98 said:

That seems a little generous. I like the guy, and his offense shows promise. But when you clearly underperform the guy who just got fired, that has to be a D.

A for Offense = 4.0
F for Defence = 0.0
B for S Teams = 3.0

So overall, 2.33 (C- sounds about right)

GoGreenBeans · January 16

27 minutes ago, Mean Green 93-98 said:

That seems a little generous. I like the guy, and his offense shows promise. But when you clearly underperform the guy who just got fired, that has to be a D.

I gotta respectfully disagree with you here. Morris wasn't coming in and replacing a terrible coach. Seth was a guy that had UNT playing "bowl game football", which is 6/7 wins a year. Obviously not stellar, but you can do much worse.

C- is a fair grade, but we can't compare 1st year Morris to last year Littrell. Seth had built something here, while Morris is still building up

Mean Green 93-98 · January 16

34 minutes ago, El Paso Eagle said:

A for Offense = 4.0
F for Defence = 0.0
B for S Teams = 3.0

So overall, 2.33 (C- sounds about right)

Fair enough. But personally, if I'm the professor, I'm weighing wins and losses a whole lot more heavily than stats. So taking a 7-win team--a record deemed unacceptable--down to a 5-win team has to get a bad grade.

MeanGreenTexan · January 16

17 minutes ago, GoGreenBeans said:

I gotta respectfully disagree with you here. Morris wasn't coming in and replacing a terrible coach. Seth was a guy that had UNT playing "bowl game football", which is 6/7 wins a year. Obviously not stellar, but you can do much worse.

C- is a fair grade, but we can't compare 1st year Morris to last year Littrell. Seth had built something here, while Morris is still building up

Yes. We absolutely can, and should.
Littrell was let go because he failed to live up to standards. Morris was brought in, and we all should have expected to IMPROVE on Littrell's failure. Immediately. Look at TX St. Look at UNLV. ...then look at us.

D, or worse.

Mean Green 93-98 · January 16

24 minutes ago, GoGreenBeans said:

we can't compare 1st year Morris to last year Littrell. Seth had built something here, while Morris is still building up

This doesn't make much sense. You have to judge a coaching job based on what he stepped into. Littrell only won 5 games his first year; but considering he inherited a 1-win team and installed polar opposite offensive and defensive systems, that was a solid B+ coaching job.

When Mosely hired Morris, the assumption was that he would be able to pick right up where Littrell left off and improve on it, considering they come from basically the same school of coaching.

EDIT: Looks like @MeanGreenTexan was already typing the same thing when I started typing.

Edited January 16 by Mean Green 93-98

97and03 · January 16

D is fair. C- grading on a curve (new conference).

wardly · January 16

List all the 1st year coaches and compare his record to theirs. While there are some coaches that have winning seasons after their predecessor has been fired they are in the minority.For example the Northwestern coach did, the Colorado coach didn't.

VideoEagle · January 16

1 hour ago, MeanGreenTexan said:

Morris was brought in, and we all should have expected to IMPROVE on Littrell's failure. Immediately.

But that's not how it works. There was a multiyear study done back in 2012ish that found teams that fired a coach in hopes of getting a better record. The study was called something like pushing the reset button. The results showed that if a team had 0-2 wins, almost always there was an improvement. A seven-win team with a new coach only improved 1/3 of the time. If you look at the records of the new coaches from last year, you'll see these results still hold almost exactly.

Yes, there are always the outliers like Texas State. But those are the exceptions and a little over 2/3s of the time a new coach taking over a winning team has a worse record in their first year.

Drawing to an inside straight does work sometimes, but usually it doesn't!

Mean Green 93-98 · January 16

3 minutes ago, wardly said:

List all the 1st year coaches and compare his record to theirs. While there are some coaches that have winning seasons after their predecessor has been fired they are in the minority.For example the Northwestern coach did, the Colorado coach didn't.

The Colorado coach won 4 games his first year, while taking over a team that only won one game the previous year.

Deion clearly wins that battle over our coach.

VideoEagle · January 16

3 minutes ago, Mean Green 93-98 said:

The Colorado coach won 4 games his first year, while taking over a team that only won one game the previous year.

Deion clearly wins that battle over our coach.

Yes, coaches taking over teams with 0-2 wins overwhelmingly improve on their predecessor's record in their first year. Coaches taking over 6+ win teams only improve about 1 out of 3 times. The better the record of the team you take over, the less likely you will improve in your first year.

Mean Green 93-98 · January 16

3 minutes ago, VideoEagle said:

Yes, coaches taking over teams with 0-2 wins overwhelmingly improve on their predecessor's record in their first year. Coaches taking over 6+ win teams only improve about 1 out of 3 times. The better the record of the team you take over, the less likely you will improve in your first year.

Do coaches taking over teams with 0-2 wins overwhelmingly add 3 wins to that total their first year?

Do coaches taking over teams with 6+ wins overwhelmingly subtract 2 wins from that total their first year?

To insinuate that our coach did a better job than Deion did because he won one more game is absurd.

VideoEagle · January 16

6 minutes ago, Mean Green 93-98 said:

To insinuate that our coach did a better job than Deion did because he won one more game is absurd.

Not sure where or how you got the bizarre idea I thought Morris did a better job than Deion.

I just pointed out that historically, coaches taking over teams with 0-2 wins overwhelmingly improve on the total wins in their first year. Coaches taking over teams with six or more wins only improve on the previous year's record a little less than 1/3 of the time. Expecting Morris to improve our record in his first year is the same as expecting a 3 to come up more often in craps than a 6 - it is possible but not likely.

Mean Green 93-98 · January 16

2 minutes ago, VideoEagle said:

Not sure where or how you got the bizarre idea I thought Morris did a better job than Deion.

The post to which I was responding literally said, "Compare [Morris's] record to [Sanders']."

5 minutes ago, VideoEagle said:

I just pointed out that historically, coaches taking over teams with 0-2 wins overwhelmingly improve on the total wins in their first year. Coaches taking over teams with six or more wins only improve on the previous year's record a little less than 1/3 of the time. Expecting Morris to improve our record in his first year is the same as expecting a 3 to come up more often in craps than a 6 - it is possible but not likely.

Of course coaches taking over teams with 0-2 wins overwhelmingly improve. It's hard to do much worse, right? But do they overwhelmingly improve by 3 wins? If not, then your attempted refutation of my point fails.

And again, my point was not just that Morris didn't improve on our record; he also made it 2 wins worse.

So again, my point that Deion did a better coaching job than Morris last year stands. I hope that changes next year.

wardly · January 16

3 hours ago, wardly said:

List all the 1st year coaches and compare his record to theirs. While there are some coaches that have winning seasons after their predecessor has been fired they are in the minority.For example the Northwestern coach did, the Colorado coach didn't.

This was just a subjective question. You can probably review most first year coaches maiden record after the previous coach was fired and find some justification if they have a losing record. I think that Morris inherited a defense that no one expected to be the worst in the country and we lost two games we should have won, Navy and Memphis. If we go 7&5 its still the nation's worse defense but we had a winning season.

MeanGreenTexan · January 17

1 hour ago, wardly said:

This was just a subjective question. You can probably review most first year coaches maiden record after the previous coach was fired and find some justification if they have a losing record. I think that Morris inherited a defense that no one expected to be the worst in the country and we lost two games we should have won, Navy and Memphis. If we go 7&5 its still the nation's worse defense but we had a winning season.

No he didn’t, unless Bennett is a miracle-worker. He brought in his own flat tire of a DC & hamstrung his defense from the jump.

GMG_Dallas · January 17

These posts defending Morris for his first year makes me think some of y'all subconsciously add a "for North Texas" qualifier to everything. Five wins is decent "for North Texas." We didn't get too much worst "for North Texas."

Reality is, taking a 7 win team and losing 2 less is bad. There's no way to sugar coat that. We played in a better conference? Cool. Our 2022 and 2023 schedules had 6 common opponents. Both SL and Morris went 2-4 against those 6 common opponents (in the regular season, not counting the CUSA CCG against UTSA). The only differences are that SL beat FIU and lost to UAB while Morris lost to FIU and beat UAB. We didn't fire SL and hire Morris to do the same or worst. We made the change to do better. You can't inherit a team with a winning record and have a losing record in year 1. That's fireable for the bigger programs. If we want to join those ranks, we should set similar standards.

Edited January 17 by GMG_Dallas

MeanGreenTexan · January 17

4 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

These posts defending Morris for his first year makes me think some of y'all subconsciously add a "for North Texas" qualifier to everything. Five wins is decent "for North Texas." We didn't get too much worst "for North Texas."

Reality is, taking a 7 win team and losing 2 less is bad. There's no way to sugar coat that. We played in a better conference? Cool. Our 2022 and 2023 schedules had 6 common opponents. Both SL and Morris went 2-4 against those 6 common opponents (in the regular season, not counting the CUSA CCG against UTSA). The only differences are that SL beat FIU and lost to UAB while Morris lost to FIU and beat UAB. We didn't fire SL and hire Morris to do the same or worst. We made the change to do better. You can't inherit a team with a winning record and have a losing record in year 1. That's fireable for the bigger programs. If we want to join those ranks, we should set similar standards.

Down with the needless "UNT's standards" qualifiers! Tired of that BS.

Glory to the Green · January 17

4 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

You can't inherit a team with a winning record and have a losing record in year 1. That's fireable for the bigger programs. If we want to join those ranks, we should set similar standards.

I get what you’re saying, but we’re not Texas, or A&M. We don’t pay our coaches like the bigger programs and we don’t have an NIL like the bigger programs. We can have high expectations and be realistic, too. From the Reese article, our coaches are expecting 8-12 wins. For year two of EM, this sounds great to me. If he rolls out 5 wins again, that would be an incredible failure. Even with 5 wins, can we afford to let him go? We just don’t have those deep pockets, yet. This should be an exciting offseason. I’m looking forward to it.

GMG_Dallas · January 17

2 hours ago, Glory to the Green said:

I get what you’re saying, but we’re not Texas, or A&M. We don’t pay our coaches like the bigger programs and we don’t have an NIL like the bigger programs. We can have high expectations and be realistic, too. From the Reese article, our coaches are expecting 8-12 wins. For year two of EM, this sounds great to me. If he rolls out 5 wins again, that would be an incredible failure. Even with 5 wins, can we afford to let him go? We just don’t have those deep pockets, yet. This should be an exciting offseason. I’m looking forward to it.

If the AD doesn't set and maintain a higher standard for the coaches then we can't expect the students and fans to take the program seriously and show up, donate, or be involved in other ways. People want to be a part of serious organizations.