<sigh> last time I'm going through this.
Will Miles has ran the numbers as have I and the results are the same. It's about Jimmie's and Joe's not X's and O's.
I looked at every SEC game from 2005 through 2019 (15 seasons) asking the question did the coach win or lose against teams with more or less talent as determined by the 247 team talent composite which takes into account only the players that are available at the end of fall camp. So it's not biased by guys that were recruited but never made the team or left early etc. AND it accounts for transfers.
You end up with a spread sheet for
each year that looks something like this:
View attachment 35774
Then you figure out the averages and compare each coach to that. There are exceptions. Every coach, even the mighty Saban, performs poorly in their first season. We throw that out. Also the year a coach is fired is a mess, plus it requires figuring out which week they were fired and whose got time for that. Anyway it doesn't change the numbers much but it simplifies things.
In the end you get the two following averages:
Against teams with more talent the average winning % is 27.7%.
Against teams with less talent the average winning % is 77.6%.
So now we can see how all the SEC coaches performed.
There are three coaches that did better against teams with less talent AND against teams with more talent.
Saban 88.1% and 70%
Mullen 87% and 35.4%
Stoops 81.8% and 33.3%
Nobody else did better in both categories.
At first blush Saban's 70% against better teams may seem remarkable but take into account that it is a small sample size - only 10 games in 15 seasons. More importantly bamas opponents with more talent
barely had more talent. It's certainly not the difference in talent between UK v UF or UF v bama. Plus Saban's army of assistants don't hurt either.
Barry Odom was very good at beating teams with more talent at 37.9% (the only coach better then the top three - except Saban of course) and was a respectable 75% the rare times he had more talent.
Ogre was 83.3% when he had the talent but a paltry 11.8% when he didn't.
Smart was 78.1% with more talent and is 0% when he doesn't (that being when he plays bama).
TLDR If talent is so obviously and overwhelmingly important to success why the hell doesn't Mullenz put more effort into recruiting.