How often does a D-1A NCAA football coach make it through his first three seasons at a school without managing to finish .500 or better at least once?

And if a coach can’t manage at least one .500 season in his first three years at a school, how likely is it that he’ll ever manage the feat?

For North Texas football fans, these are not idle questions.

The short answer is: On average, one out of every thirteen coaches hired in the past 20 years has gone at least three seasons without getting at least six wins in any season and later managed to achieve that feat at least once.

Anyone who cares to delve deeper into the recent history of NCAA football is invited to look through the research themselves. The methodology can be found here, the successes are here, the failures are here, the coaches who aren’t yet qualified as either are here, and the complete list of all coaches hired since 1990 is here.

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There have been 325 football coaches hired by D-1A institutions in the past 20 years.

239 of them either reached .500 in at least one of their three seasons or, for some reason, didn’t stick around to start a fourth year.

18 of them, including Todd Dodge, have yet to reach .500 in a single season, but have not completed three seasons or are still employed by the same school and may still manage to qualify as successes.

That leaves 68 coaches. Of those 68, 43 never managed to reach .500 in any season, including one (Bobby Wallace) who was given eight seasons and never managed more than four wins in a single year.

25 coaches, or roughly one third of those who survived three years of sub-.500 records, did manage to reach or break .500 at least once for the school that was patient enough to retain them.

On the surface, a 1 in 3 chance of turning things around given such a dismal start might seem like a surprisingly high chance of seeing success through patience. But those odds require a very loose definition of “success”. Looking through the “successes” more closely, there are a few categories of coaches that some fans might not perceive as truly successful coaches:

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The Phil Bennett Exception: Any coach who only managed/has managed to reach or break .500 once in 5 or more seasons.

Excludes 10:  Tim Murphy, Dean Pees, Bill Curry, Charlie Weatherbie, Mark Duffner, Sylvester Croom, Jim Colletto, Phil Bennett, Bobby Johnson, Jim Caldwell

The Rickey Bustle Exception: Any coach who never managed/has managed to get above six wins in any season during their tenure at the relevant school.

Excludes 8 (2 unique): Dean Pees, Bill Curry, Rickey Bustle, Charlie Weatherbie, Mark Duffner, Chris Tormey, Jim Colletto, Phil Bennett

The Darrell Dickey Exception: Any coach who still wound up getting fired by the relevant school at some point in the future.

Excludes 9 (5 unique): Lee Owens, Kim Helton, Mark Duffner, Larry Smith, Chris Tormey, Darrell Dickey, Dave Baldwin, Phil Bennett, Jim Caldwell

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Depending on how you define success, you might come out with far fewer than 25 success stories. If you think Phil Bennett was a failure, but you’d settle for a Rickey Bustle or a Darrell Dickey… That still leaves 15 successful coaches out of the past 20 years. If you’re unwilling to accept Bennett or Bustle level results, but you’d be satisfied with a repeat of the wins and losses from Darrell Dickey’s tenure; that leaves 13 examples where patience paid off for the school in question.

But if your definition of success is a little higher than hoping for a 1 in 3 chance at a Phil Bennett, Rickey Bustle, or Darrell Dickey… The picture isn’t so rosy.

Applying all three of those exclusions leaves just eight “successes”: Brady Hoke, Dan McCarney, Rich Brooks, Rocky Long, Joe Novak, Gary Barnett, Greg Schiano, and Barry Alvarez.

And four of those remaining “successes” had/have career records below .500, despite having been head coaches for at least 10 (and as many as 24) years: McCarney, Brooks, Long, and Novak.

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8 successful coaches in the past 20 years is an ugly enough picture of what our future might look like. That’s one out of every forty one coaches hired. Even if we look only at the 68 who didn’t reach .500 in their first three years, that’s still less than 12% of the subtotal.

But those raw numbers ignore the background and experience of the coaches who wound up being truly successful.

All but one of the eight “successes” had at least 10 years as full-time assistants or head coaches at the D-1A or NFL level before beginning their tenure at the relevant school.The only exception is Gary Barnett, who had 8 years of experience before taking over at Northwestern.

Alvarez - 11
Barnett - 8
Brooks - 38
Hoke - 19
Long - 18
McCarney - 17
Novak - 22
Schiano - 10

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That’s the historical situation we’re facing if Todd Dodge can’t manage at least six wins during the 2009 season. It’s not impossible to reach six wins… So keep your fingers crossed.

Because, historically speaking, the odds of seeing success are not encouraging. Depending on how loosely one defines “success”, the odds range from low to very, very low.

And that’s if you believe that prior experience is an irrelevant coincidence among the coaches who did manage to turn their teams around. Because if you look at coaches with less than 8 years of D-1A or NFL experience, the historical odds of real success drop down to zero.

If you’re a North Texas fan, it might be good for your mental health if you adjust your future expectations accordingly.