I think most of you know that I love giving myself research projects. Well the other day, while watching college football, I started thinking about interim coaches. I wondered if it made sense to bet against teams whose head coach would not be coaching them for the bowl game (especially in those pick ’em pools you might be in).
So I started looking up interim coaches. Unfortunately, I could not find much information. I decided to use the information I could find on actual coaching changes and look back at the bowl game that team was in to see who was the coach. I started with this year and worked my way backwards. Fortunately I found sports-reference.com, which has a college football coach section. That made it a little easier (any coach with either a 1-0 or 0-1 record must have coached the bowl game that season, so I just had to go back and find that game to confirm).
My first thought was just to go back to 2000, but once I started, I could not stop. I ended up going back to 1932. I stopped there when I realized the Rose Bowl was the only bowl game.
Here is what I found:
Interim Coaches are 43-34 in bowl games.
However, the nature of interim coaches has changed in the past decade or so. The first interim coach Danny Ford in the 1978 Gator Bowl. He took over when Charley Pell left Clemson for Florida. Here is the thing though, schools would hire either promote a coach, who would take over the team for a few more years. Those coaches are 14-8 in bowl games.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that even if a coach did leave for another job, they would still coach their old team for the bowl game. I did not count those coaches in this project. Also, they would sometimes have the new coach that was hired coach in the bowl game, how weird is that? In fact, here is a cool story: in 2006 Brian Kelly was the coach of Central Michigan, he left there to coach Cincinnati since Mark Dantonio left for Michigan State. Central Michigan had played Western Michigan during the season and Cincinnati was playing them in the International Bowl. I believe that Brian Kelly is the only coach to ever beat the same team twice with different teams in the same year.
Actual interim coaches are 29-26 in bowl games. The first coach who did not actually become the head coach was Mac McWhorter, who coached Georgia Tech in the bowl game when George O’Leary left for Notre Dame in 2001, which ended well.
There have been two teams that have played a bowl game with an interim coach four times: Pittsburgh and Houston. A few other schools have given them a run for their money. However, Arkansas State lost a head coach in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
The coolest thing about this little project has been seeing some of the powerhouse coaches as they rose through the ranks. Urban Meyer (who actually coached Utah in the bowl game despite being hired by Florida–he was a co-coach for the bowl game), Nick Saban, Brian Kelly, and Mark Dantonio were all small time coaches who had to leave their teams hanging for that bigger job.
So what did I learn? Well not a whole lot. You cannot really use the interim coach as a predictor for how a team will perform in the bowl game. Okay, so I guess I learned that, which is somewhat helpful. But other than that? I just learned a bunch of college football history, which is always cool.
Oh and in case you were wondering. Penn State had an interim coach for a bowl game once, but I did not count Tom Bradley because he also coached the final game of the year. And if you are curious, Penn State 1-2 against teams with an interim coach.
