How coaching changes affect production on offense and defense
Bill Belichick expresses his excitement after North Carolina’s spring practice and shares his only expectation is to get better every day. (0:50)
Last season’s SP+ projections were accurate enough: Five of the top six teams in the preseason projections made the College Football Playoff — No. 3 Oregon went unbeaten in the regular season, while No. 2 Ohio State won the national title — and No. 4 Alabama and No. 8 Ole Miss nearly did. Boise State was projected as the best Group of 5 team and backed that up, and playoff surprise SMU started out ranked higher in SP+ than in the polls. The spreadsheets didn’t see Indiana coming any better than the humans, and SP+ was just as blindsided by Florida State’s historic collapse, but all in all, it was a solid performance.
There were still quite some caveats when looking at the rankings in real time, though. Michigan was projected seventh overall but had to replace head coach Jim Harbaugh and some key assistants after 2023’s national title run. Iowa’s offense was projected 114th, but Kirk Ferentz had finally discarded his son as offensive coordinator, and it was possible the Hawkeyes might actually try to score points. Troy was projected a respectable 64th, nearly tops in the Sun Belt, despite losing a special head coach in Jon Sumrall.
Michigan finished the season beautifully but still ended up 8-5 and 26th overall. Iowa’s offense indeed jumped to 69th. Troy collapsed to 4-8 and 96th.
SP+ projections take incoming and returning talent into account, but not incoming or returning coaches. We know this can have an effect, but I haven’t found a way to incorporate coaching changes in a way that actually makes the projections better. Maybe that will remain the case, but we’re going to give it another go in the next round of projections in May. And we’re going to try it with both head coach and coordinator change data. The correlations are too strong to not make another attempt.
When you compare a team’s (or offense’s or defense’s) recent performance to its long-term performance baseline, a coach or coordinator change can prompt quite a bit of regression toward the mean. When an upstart enjoys a stellar run but loses its head coach, odds are good that gravity will drag it down quickly. When a historically strong program plays poorly and fires its coach, a rebound of some sort will likely follow. Granted, these statements are all true even without coach or coordinator changes. But the correlations get much stronger when a change takes place.
Let’s walk through the “recency vs. long-term performance” concept and what it might mean for certain teams in 2025. (For UNLV, it could mean very bad things.)
Head coaching changes: It turns out that there’s a pretty strong, negative correlation between (a) the difference between a team’s previous-year performance and its 20-year average, and (b) a proceeding change in SP+ ratings. For teams with new head coaches, that correlation is -0.559 over the past 15 years.
Translation: If you overachieved last year compared to your 20-year average, and you lost your head coach, you are pretty likely to regress the following year. And if you underachieved and changed coaches, you’re likely to improve.
That’s a pretty strong predictor. And it could say something revealing about the teams, offenses and defenses that were positive or negative outliers last season.
Jump to a section:
Head coach changes | New offensive coordinators | New defensive coordinators
Teams with new head coaches that are likely to improve
Southern Miss Golden Eagles
2024 performance: 1-11 and 133rd in SP+
SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -16.2 points
Coaching change: From Will Hall to Charles Huff (former Marshall head coach)
Southern Miss has historically punched above its weight class as well as anyone with its resources could, but the achievements — three ranked finishes, a run of 18 straight winning seasons in the 1990s and 2000s, countless upsets of power programs — have been occasionally belied by a ridiculously low floor. And the Golden Eagles’ introduction to the NIL era hasn’t gone particularly well: They’ve now won three or fewer games in four of the past five seasons.
Even with that in mind, last season was particularly poor. They beat only Southeastern Louisiana, and they finished ahead of only a historically awful Kent State team in SP+. Initial SP+ projections had them rising only to 128th. But if their 20-year history is any indication, they could be expected to jump a bit more than that in Charles Huff’s first season.
Tulsa Golden Hurricane
2024 performance: 3-9 and 128th in SP+
SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -15.4 points
Coaching change: From Kevin Wilson to Tre Lamb (former ETSU head coach)
Here’s another team that hasn’t begun the NIL era particularly well. Kevin Wilson actually uncovered quite a few bright young talents in his short stint with the Golden Hurricane, but he couldn’t hold on to any of them, and Tulsa first fell from 82nd to 114th in SP+ in 2023, then to 128th last year. Tre Lamb might not make Tulsa’s relatively small alumni base more willing to contribute than Wilson, and progress might therefore be slow. But even with Southern Miss-esque ups and downs through the years, Tulsa might be expected to rise at least a bit in 2025.
Purdue Boilermakers
2024 performance: 1-11 and 121st in SP+
SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -15.6 points
Coaching change: From Ryan Walters to Barry Odom (former UNLV head coach)
Purdue was quite comfortably the worst power conference team in college football last season. The Boilermakers then made a perfectly apt hire by bringing in Barry Odom, and he is attempting the same type of gut job — 29 incoming transfers, 32 outgoing transfers — that he executed when he showed up at UNLV two seasons ago. It worked there, but obviously the level of competition is a bit higher now. Regardless, while the Boilermakers are projected to improve only into the 110s in SP+, it’s probably fair to expect a bit more than that, both because Odom is good at this and because, looking at how far the Boilermakers fell below their historic norm last season, a natural rebound is likely.
Teams with new head coaches that are likely to regress
UNLV Rebels
2024 performance: 11-3 and 36th in SP+
SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average:+24.3 points!
Coaching change: From Barry Odom (left for Purdue) to Dan Mullen
I am utterly fascinated by UNLV heading into 2025. On one hand, in Dan Mullen they hired a veteran head coach with lots of success on his résumé, and he takes over a team that won 20 games over the past two seasons and a roster that, by my count, features 14 former blue-chip recruits, more than a lot of power conference teams can boast.
On the other hand, he takes over a program that has enjoyed three winning seasons in 24 years and flew further above its historic mean last season than any team in the country. If regression toward the mean means anything — and it usually does — UNLV is in for a rough tumble in 2025. But if talent and coaching prowess mean anything, the Rebels are one of the most high-upside teams in the Group of 5. With a schedule featuring only two teams projected higher than 95th in SP+ (UCLA and Boise State), UNLV should win a decent number of games, but anything between 5-7 and 10-2 could make some level of sense.
Bowling Green Falcons
2024 performance: 7-6 and 77th in SP+
SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: +12.1 points
Coaching change: From Scot Loeffler (left to become Philadelphia Eagles QB coach) to Eddie George
Ohio Bobcats
2024 performance: 11-3 and 63rd in SP+
SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: +8.7 points
Coaching change: From Tim Albin (left for Charlotte) to Brian Smith
The MAC has had a tougher offseason than any other FBS conference. It’s losing Northern Illinois to a reconstructed Mountain West in 2026, it ranks a distant last in average returning production — 16 FBS teams are under 39% in that measure, and six of them are from the MAC — and it also lost two of its most recently successful coaches in Scot Loeffler and Tim Albin. Neither jumped to power conference head coaching jobs either; the former left for an NFL position coach gig (albeit one with the Super Bowl champs), and the latter left for a Charlotte program that has enjoyed one winning season in 10 FBS years. Money is making itself even more prominent than before in this sport, and the MAC doesn’t really have a ton of it floating around. And two of last year’s best teams are likely to backtrack after coaching changes. (For what it’s worth, I liked Ohio’s hire of Brian Smith, but he has a tall task ahead of him.)
These are obviously all Group of 5 teams.
Interestingly, the power conference team furthest up on the “likely to regress” list is North Carolina. You know, the school that just hired six-time Super Bowl champion Bill Belichick. This exercise is obviously intended to compare a school’s recent performance to its historic baseline, and doesn’t care about the achievements of the incoming coach. But UNC basically performed to its historic baseline last season in Mack Brown’s final campaign and might be expected to regress slightly this coming season based on the above regression.
Offensive coordinator changes
Changing head coaches resets your program to a degree. That makes sense. But here’s something I found particularly interesting: The correlation — again, between your recent performance relative to a historic baseline and your performance for the next season — for an offensive coordinator change is nearly as strong for an offense (-0.509) as it is for changing head coaches.
If you overachieved against your historic average on offense last season and changed offensive coordinators (perhaps because the OC left for a better gig), your offense is probably going to get worse. But if you underachieved dramatically against that historic mean — like, say, Oklahoma did in 2024, fielding its worst offense since the 1990s — and you change coordinators, your offense is likely to rebound a good amount. And interestingly, the correlation actually gets stronger if you only look at the heavy transfer portal era, which I would define as 2022-24.
Setting aside the schools where the head coach also changed, there are likely 36 offensive coordinator changes for the remaining FBS schools this offseason. (This is an unofficial count, as not every school has updated its coaching staff information on the school website yet, and titles can be a pretty nebulous thing. Some schools name just coordinators, some list co-coordinators, and some list co-coordinators in addition to the coordinator. It’s a tricky game. But we’re looking at around 36 of them.) Let’s look at some of last year’s outliers.
Teams with new offensive coordinators that are likely to improve
Oklahoma Sooners
2024 performance: 75th in offensive SP+
OffensiveSP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -15.8 points
Coordinator change: From Seth Littrell to Ben Arbuckle
One of the best schools for offense in the 21st century (or, really, the last 75 years) veered off course in 2024, plummeting from eighth to 75th in offensive SP+ and ranking both 109th in success rate (efficiency) and 133rd in percentage of plays gaining 20-plus yards (explosiveness). The defense improved, but the Sooners averaged just 14.4 points per game in seven losses. For a team that averaged an offensive SP+ ranking of 9.0 over the previous 25 years (!), this was tough to watch.
In response, head coach Brent Venables brought in a couple of key Washington State imports: Ben Arbuckle, a 29-year old playcaller who already has a lot of success on his résumé, and quarterback John Mateer, who threw for 3,139 yards and rushed for 1,032 (not including sacks) in 2024. The offensive line needs drastic improvement, and the Sooner receiving corps took on a big overhaul, but progression toward the mean could create significant improvement in Norman.
Houston Cougars
2024 performance: 118th in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -15.1 points
Coordinator change: From Kevin Barbay to Slade Nagle
Houston made progress defensively in Willie Fritz’s first season in charge, but the Cougars collapsed offensively, ranking 118th in offensive SP+ just two seasons after ranking 12th. Like Brent Venables, Fritz made a pretty logical decision, moving on from Kevin Barbay and bringing back Slade Nagle, his offensive coordinator at Tulane when the Green Wave went 11-3 in 2023. In 17 seasons from 2006-22, Houston ranked in the offensive SP+ top 30 11 times. Houston’s not used to bad offense.
Florida State Seminoles
2024 performance: 114th in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -11.6 points
Coordinator change: From Alex Atkins to Gus Malzahn
It probably won’t shock you to find out that both Florida State’s offense and defense are on the “likely to improve” list. The Seminoles’ offense disintegrated, falling from 23rd to 114th, and though it’s hard to know for sure what will happen next, they’ll have almost no choice but to improve.
UCLA Bruins
2024 performance: 103rd in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -10.2 points
Coordinator change: From Eric Bieniemy to Tino Sunseri
UCLA is a blank slate in 2025, especially on offense, where those responsible for only 49 of last year’s 132 starts return but nine new transfers (plus probably more after the spring portal window) move in. DeShaun Foster’s hire of Tino Sunseri makes a lot of sense — the 36-year-old put in multiple years with Nick Saban and Curt Cignetti in his young career — but he’ll also have likely progression to the mean on his side.
Louisiana Tech Bulldogs
2024 performance: 128th in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -9.7 points
Coordinator change: From Sonny Cumbie to Tony Franklin
Like Oklahoma and Houston, Tech was both better defensively and worse offensively than normal in 2024. And to right the ship in the points department, Sonny Cumbie is ditching playcalling and handing the reins to a wise old sage. Tony Franklin, 67, has been OC everywhere from Auburn to Army’s sprint football team, and he, too, might be walking in to a situation quite likely to improve.
Teams with new offensive coordinators that are likely to regress
Texas State Bobcats
2024 performance: 20th in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 13-year team average: +13.8 points
Coordinator change: From Mack Leftwich to Landon Keopple
On the list of schools with new offensive coordinators (but not new head coaches), a lot more were underachievers than overachievers last year. And Texas State was the only one that overachieved by a rather significant amount, even if we have to compare the Bobcats’ offensive performance to a mere 13-year FBS average, not the typical 20.
That head coach G.J. Kinne is an offense guy himself — he was a coordinator at Hawaii and UCF — could dampen the impact of losing Mack Leftwich to Texas Tech, but this is typically a situation in which a sudden overachiever falls back to earth a bit.
South Alabama Jaguars
2024 performance: 47th in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 13-year team average: +8.4 points
Coordinator change: From Rob Ezell to Paul Petrino
South Alabama found something unique under Rob Ezell and head coach Major Applewhite last season, averaging more than 34 points per game with young quarterback Gio Lopez, receiver Jamaal Pritchett and a pair of strong backs. Ezell left for Wake Forest, and Pritchett graduated, but Lopez and one of the backs return to star for Paul Petrino. The bar’s awfully high after last year, though.
Kansas Jayhawks
2024 performance: 33rd in offensive SP+
Offensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: +5.0 points
Coordinator change: From Jeff Grimes to Jim Zebrowski
Last year was already a step backward for KU: The Jayhawks slipped from 17th to 33rd in offensive SP+ in Jeff Grimes’ only season running the show after Andy Kotelnicki’s departure for Penn State. With Grimes off to Wisconsin and longtime Lance Leipold assistant Jim Zebrowski taking over, they will try to avoid a second dip. Returning quarterback Jalon Daniels will help, and KU’s sustained awfulness in the 2010s (which has obviously dragged down their 20-year average) is farther in the rearview.
Defensive coordinator changes
The story is the same on defense as it is with head coach and offensive coordinator changes, though the correlation of -0.468 isn’t quite as strong, and early indications are that a defensive coordinator change isn’t quite as predictive of impending change in performance.
As with offensive coordinators, I’m counting 36 defensive coordinator changes (where there weren’t head coaching changes) for 2025, but unlike what we saw on offense, where a lot more teams are likely to rebound after poor performances than slip after good ones, we’re seeing the opposite for defenses here. You’ve got schools like Oklahoma State and, of course, Florida State looking to rebound, but quite a few schools are in precarious situations after overachieving and losing their DCs.
Teams with new defensive coordinators that are likely to improve
San Diego State Aztecs
2024 performance: 105th in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: +5.9 points*
Coordinator change: From Eric Schmidt to Rob Aurich
(* Because we’re talking about defense, and SP+ is based on the scoring scale, positive numbers are bad, and negative numbers are good.)
Between Brady Hoke and Rocky Long, SDSU was led by a defensive head coach for well over a decade, so the shift to Sean Lewis, a well-regarded offensive coach, was perhaps always going to be a tricky one. It certainly was in 2024, where Lewis didn’t have nearly what he needed to operate on offense and the defense, which had already collapsed in Hoke’s final season, fell even further. SDSU’s strong defensive history — the Aztecs averaged a defensive SP+ ranking of 29.9 from 2014-22, with three rankings of 17th or better — might not apply as well with such an overall identity shift, but SDSU is still a rebound candidate.
Oklahoma State Cowboys
2024 performance: 102nd in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: +5.5 points
Coordinator change: From Bryan Nardo to Todd Grantham
In 2021, under Jim Knowles, OSU’s defense nearly led the team to a College Football Playoff bid. But it has fallen by at least 20 spots — first to 47th in 2022, then to 69th in 2023, then to 102nd — in every year since. Head coach Mike Gundy’s gamble in bringing in small-school dynamo Bryan Nardo didn’t pay off, so now he’s skewing hard in the other direction with Todd Grantham, the blitz-happy old hand. On paper, it should generate improvement simply because OSU’s defense was horrendous last fall.
Florida State Seminoles
2024 performance: 58th in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: +5.2 points
Coordinator change: From Adam Fuller to Tony White
The Seminoles’ defense carried them late in 2023 after quarterback Jordan Travis got hurt, and it didn’t collapse to nearly the same degree as the offense in 2024. But it still wasn’t good. We’ll see if Tony White and a heap of transfers up front can straighten things out.
Teams with new coordinators that are likely to regress defensively
Northern Illinois Huskies
2024 performance: 32nd in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -8.9 points
Coordinator change: From Nick Benedetto to Rob Harley
NIU didn’t lose its head coach like Bowling Green and Ohio did, but head man Thomas Hammock couldn’t hold on to a dynamite DC in Nick Benedetto, who left for Fresno State. The Huskies had averaged a 117.0 defensive SP+ ranking in Hammock’s first four seasons but spent the past two years in the top 50. Rob Harley, most recently of Arkansas State, has plenty of experience, but there’s almost nowhere to go but down in DeKalb, especially with the nation’s worst returning production percentage.
Louisiana Tech Bulldogs
2024 performance: 67th in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -7.8 points
Coordinator change: From Jeremiah Johnson to Luke Olson
Just as Tech’s offense was far worse than normal, the Bulldogs’ defense was far better thanks to Jeremiah Johnson, the former Northern Iowa star assistant who left for the same gig at Coastal Carolina. Olson comes to Ruston from Rich Rodriguez’s Jacksonville State staff, where his Gamecocks defense was fifth in Conference USA in yards allowed. Regression here will offset potential offensive improvement, but at least Tech will be more Tech-like.
Houston Cougars
2024 performance: 54th in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -6.9 points
Coordinator change: From Shiel Wood to Austin Armstrong
Just like Louisiana Tech, Houston was a backward version of itself, scoring far less than normal but allowing fewer points too: The Cougars allowed just 14.8 points per game in their four wins. Shiel Wood left for Texas Tech — the Red Raiders did a great job of nabbing two of the better up-and-coming coordinators — so Willie Fritz went for Austin Armstrong, who spent the past two years at Florida.
Minnesota Golden Gophers
2024 performance: 11th in defensive SP+
Defensive SP+ rating compared to 20-year team average: -6.2 points
Coordinator change: From Corey Hetherman to Danny Collins
P.J. Fleck is used to replacing coordinators and still playing good defense: Minnesota has produced top-15 defensive SP+ rankings with four different coordinators in the past nine seasons. So maybe Danny Collins, a longtime Fleck assistant, can step right in and thrive. But the bar’s still high here.
