- Sep 8, 2014
- 25,434
- 59,384
Florida Gators, Jim McElwain building like Clemson, not Alabama
https://www.seccountry.com/florida/florida-is-building-its-program-like-clemson-not-alabama
QB Malik Zaire’s transfer to the Florida Gators is the safe, but wrong choice for coach Jim McElwain. Florida needs to focus on 2018 rather than bringing in a stop-gap quarterback for 2017.
This wasn’t a popular opinion. Your responses of “always play the best player” were overwhelming, so much so that I started wondering whether I was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.
How quickly do head coaches win championships?
I thought back to something I wrote back in January. That piece explored recruiting, especially for programs that win national championships.
Taking that concept further, I decided to examine how long it took coaches to win their first national championship with a program. Note that NA means that the coach has a previous championship with that team.
The year at the school that a coach won his first national championship. (Will Miles/SEC Country)
There is one outlier on that list: Clemson’s Dabo Swinney.
There was a lot of commotion after Clemson won the national title that they won despite sub-elite recruiting. The knock on Swinney’s recruiting was true for his early years. He took over a struggling team from Tommy Bowden in 2008 and proceeded to put together recruiting classes ranked 31, 28 and 10 according to the 247Sports composite rankings.
Jim McElwain’s situation at Florida is similar: He brought in recruiting classes ranked 21, 12 and 11 in his first three years, according to the 247Sports rankings. While these rankings are not as poor as Swinney’s initial classes, McElwain the recruiter is nowhere near the standards set by Nick Saban (13, 3 and 2) or Urban Meyer (5, 2 and 3) in their first three years at Alabama and Ohio State.
Measuring progress in a college football program
Expected wins is a way of quantifying how good a team really is by looking at points scored and allowed rather than wins and losses. This allows for a look at how a team is improving independent of factors outside of that team’s control.
And if you look at Swinney’s results from ’08-’10, it’s amazing that he continued to get a chance to build the Clemson program. Part of that is because the program was in a state of perpetual rebuilding prior to his promotion. But cooler heads saw progress evident in the chart below.
Expected wins vs. actual record for Clemson under Dabo Swinney. (Will Miles/SEC Country)
Swinney had to survive ’10. The team showed improvement in ’09, but cratered to a 6-7 record in ’10. And, had he not gotten lucky, he probably would have been dismissed after ’11.
That team had a fairly poor point differential but managed to win 10 games against a light schedule. Big losses to Virginia Tech (38-10) and West Virginia (70-33) also skewed the point differential.
But the major difference was that Swinney found a quarterback. Tajh Boyd threw 63 passes in ’10, but didn’t see significant playing time. Swinney went with Boyd out of the gate in ’11, and Boyd performed better than any Clemson QB under Swinney or his predecessor Tommy Bowden.
The success under Boyd set the stage for consistent, although not spectacular, recruiting. Clemson should have won an average of 8.1 games per season in Swinney’s first three years. That climbed to 9.2 wins per season the next three years. That helped Clemson recruit blue-chip players like Sammy Watkins, DeAndre Hopkins, and eventually, Deshaun Watson.
Now Clemson boasts back-to-back national championship game appearances. Those have not been flukes. Clemson managed 11.7 expected wins per year the last two seasons.
Swinney has built a program, and he has done it in a way different than his peers.
Application of Clemson model to Florida
Swinney is not equal to Meyer or Saban as a recruiter. He’s probably behind Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher as well. Still, he found a quarterback who would be around long enough to start to attracting elite recruits. Then, he got fortunate to bring in Deshaun Watson, a transcendent player.
If this sounds familiar to Gators fans, it should. Nobody is going to confuse Jim McElwain’s recruiting ability with Saban, Meyer or Fisher. But he is an unbelievable in-game coach, and has started to bring in high-level offensive talent despite the hole at quarterback.
And if you look at where the program has been under former coach Will Muschamp to where it is now, the similarities continue.
Expected wins vs. actual record for Florida under Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain. (Will Miles/SEC Country)
Muschamp averaged 7.5 expected wins in his four years in Gainesville. Despite the offensive futility, McElwain’s teams have averaged 8.7 expected wins. The issue is that much of that success came from the defense, and that defense just lost 7 starters to the NFL. Thus, this is the year McElwain must survive, just as Swinney survived ’10.
But the more I look at it, the more I think Swinney got lucky. Boyd had little experience coming into ’11. Had he been just average (QB rating of 120) instead of excellent (QB rating of 141.2), Swinney gets canned after ’11.
Saban has been able to recruit well enough to win consistently with quarterbacks like John Parker Wilson. Teams not named Alabamadon’t enjoy that luxury. They need transcendent quarterbacks to win championships: Watson, Jameis Winston, Cam Newton or Tim Tebow.
So McElwain probably has a tough balance to strike this season. Zaire gives him a better chance to win against Michigan. But Franks has to get some meaningful reps, or else McElwain will have to rely on an unknown in ’18 much the way Swinney did with Boyd.
Or perhaps, McElwain already has realized Franks is not going to be his Deshaun Watson or even his Tajh Boyd. And if that’s the case, the addition of Zaire buys him more time to find and recruit that player.
https://www.seccountry.com/florida/florida-is-building-its-program-like-clemson-not-alabama
QB Malik Zaire’s transfer to the Florida Gators is the safe, but wrong choice for coach Jim McElwain. Florida needs to focus on 2018 rather than bringing in a stop-gap quarterback for 2017.
This wasn’t a popular opinion. Your responses of “always play the best player” were overwhelming, so much so that I started wondering whether I was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.
How quickly do head coaches win championships?
I thought back to something I wrote back in January. That piece explored recruiting, especially for programs that win national championships.
Taking that concept further, I decided to examine how long it took coaches to win their first national championship with a program. Note that NA means that the coach has a previous championship with that team.
The year at the school that a coach won his first national championship. (Will Miles/SEC Country)
There is one outlier on that list: Clemson’s Dabo Swinney.
There was a lot of commotion after Clemson won the national title that they won despite sub-elite recruiting. The knock on Swinney’s recruiting was true for his early years. He took over a struggling team from Tommy Bowden in 2008 and proceeded to put together recruiting classes ranked 31, 28 and 10 according to the 247Sports composite rankings.
Jim McElwain’s situation at Florida is similar: He brought in recruiting classes ranked 21, 12 and 11 in his first three years, according to the 247Sports rankings. While these rankings are not as poor as Swinney’s initial classes, McElwain the recruiter is nowhere near the standards set by Nick Saban (13, 3 and 2) or Urban Meyer (5, 2 and 3) in their first three years at Alabama and Ohio State.
Measuring progress in a college football program
Expected wins is a way of quantifying how good a team really is by looking at points scored and allowed rather than wins and losses. This allows for a look at how a team is improving independent of factors outside of that team’s control.
And if you look at Swinney’s results from ’08-’10, it’s amazing that he continued to get a chance to build the Clemson program. Part of that is because the program was in a state of perpetual rebuilding prior to his promotion. But cooler heads saw progress evident in the chart below.
Expected wins vs. actual record for Clemson under Dabo Swinney. (Will Miles/SEC Country)
Swinney had to survive ’10. The team showed improvement in ’09, but cratered to a 6-7 record in ’10. And, had he not gotten lucky, he probably would have been dismissed after ’11.
That team had a fairly poor point differential but managed to win 10 games against a light schedule. Big losses to Virginia Tech (38-10) and West Virginia (70-33) also skewed the point differential.
But the major difference was that Swinney found a quarterback. Tajh Boyd threw 63 passes in ’10, but didn’t see significant playing time. Swinney went with Boyd out of the gate in ’11, and Boyd performed better than any Clemson QB under Swinney or his predecessor Tommy Bowden.
The success under Boyd set the stage for consistent, although not spectacular, recruiting. Clemson should have won an average of 8.1 games per season in Swinney’s first three years. That climbed to 9.2 wins per season the next three years. That helped Clemson recruit blue-chip players like Sammy Watkins, DeAndre Hopkins, and eventually, Deshaun Watson.
Now Clemson boasts back-to-back national championship game appearances. Those have not been flukes. Clemson managed 11.7 expected wins per year the last two seasons.
Swinney has built a program, and he has done it in a way different than his peers.
Application of Clemson model to Florida
Swinney is not equal to Meyer or Saban as a recruiter. He’s probably behind Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher as well. Still, he found a quarterback who would be around long enough to start to attracting elite recruits. Then, he got fortunate to bring in Deshaun Watson, a transcendent player.
If this sounds familiar to Gators fans, it should. Nobody is going to confuse Jim McElwain’s recruiting ability with Saban, Meyer or Fisher. But he is an unbelievable in-game coach, and has started to bring in high-level offensive talent despite the hole at quarterback.
And if you look at where the program has been under former coach Will Muschamp to where it is now, the similarities continue.
Expected wins vs. actual record for Florida under Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain. (Will Miles/SEC Country)
Muschamp averaged 7.5 expected wins in his four years in Gainesville. Despite the offensive futility, McElwain’s teams have averaged 8.7 expected wins. The issue is that much of that success came from the defense, and that defense just lost 7 starters to the NFL. Thus, this is the year McElwain must survive, just as Swinney survived ’10.
But the more I look at it, the more I think Swinney got lucky. Boyd had little experience coming into ’11. Had he been just average (QB rating of 120) instead of excellent (QB rating of 141.2), Swinney gets canned after ’11.
Saban has been able to recruit well enough to win consistently with quarterbacks like John Parker Wilson. Teams not named Alabamadon’t enjoy that luxury. They need transcendent quarterbacks to win championships: Watson, Jameis Winston, Cam Newton or Tim Tebow.
So McElwain probably has a tough balance to strike this season. Zaire gives him a better chance to win against Michigan. But Franks has to get some meaningful reps, or else McElwain will have to rely on an unknown in ’18 much the way Swinney did with Boyd.
Or perhaps, McElwain already has realized Franks is not going to be his Deshaun Watson or even his Tajh Boyd. And if that’s the case, the addition of Zaire buys him more time to find and recruit that player.
