The purpose of this study was to determine:

1) How often does a coach who fails to make it to .500 in any of his first three seasons get retained for a fourth year?

2) When the above situation occurs, how frequently are schools that retain their coach rewarded with later success?

Put simply, how often does a coach keep their job after completing three seasons without ever reaching .500? And of those coaches, how many ever manage to break that threshold for the schools that kept them? If a coach can’t manage one .500 season in three attempts, how likely is it that they’ll be able to break .500 in year four (or five, or six, etc.)?

To answer those questions, I went through the records at the College Football Data Warehouse, starting in the year 1990.

Every time a new coach started at the beginning of a school’s season (i.e.: interim coaches or seasons finished by interim coaches later retained as head coaches weren’t included in any of the lists) in the year 1990 or later, their name, school, and year of hire (their first full season as the school’s head coach) were logged.

If a coach made it through three years without breaking .500 and was retained to coach at least part of a fourth year, that coach’s entry was flagged and their records through all seasons of their tenure with that school were logged.

Those coaches who went on to reach or break .500 for the school that retained them were listed as “successes”. The coaches who never managed to reach .500 were listed as “failures”. Coaches who are currently active that have not yet managed to reach or break .500 at their current school were listed as “undetermined”.

Exceptions/special cases:

1) In 2 or 3 instances, I counted hires made in 1989 who qualified as successes or failures. I  did not list any 1989 hires that broke .500 within 3 years or resigned/were fired before year four.

2) I considered a 6-7 season the equivalent of reaching .500, as the coaches did manage to earn a .500 record in the regular season and a bowl berth. Any coach who managed 6 wins in a season was considered to have a successful season for the purposes of this study.

3) I did not log the tenures of coaches who made a D-1AA to D-1A transition with their teams (Jim Leavitt at USF, Howard Schnellenberger at FAU, etc.).

4) I did not log any coaches who will be starting their first season at a school in the upcoming 2009 season (Brady Hoke at San Diego State, etc.). Since all of these coaches would be “undetermined” and add nothing but noise to the evaluation, I excluded them from the list of hires since 1990.