Chicken, Egg, Coach, QB
Firing coaches is difficult, expensive, and often fruitless. But landing the right QB in an increasingly transactional landscape isn't quite so tough and can have a far bigger impact.
We’re now 8 weeks into the season, and Clemson and Florida State are both 3-4.
If you had that predicted before the season, good work. But you’re in a distinct minority.
With so much disappointment at each school, there is, not surprisingly, a lot of frustration with the coaches, too. Dabo Swinney isn’t going anywhere (unless by his own choice) but he’s pretty openly criticizing his offensive coordinator, Garrett Riley. Mike Norvell seems like he’s almost certainly on his way out, but AD Michael Alford will wait until the end of the season before making any formal decisions.
And all of this comes on the heels of firings at Penn State, Florida, UCLA, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma State, Arkansas and Stanford.
Schools are spending a ton of money to make coaches go away, which is, of course, as engrained in the DNA of modern college football as the spread offense.
But here’s my question: Dabo Swinney won two national championships. Did he forget how to coach? Mike Norvell won 19 straight games. Has the sport passed him by in less than two years?
Heck, there have only been 22 coaches at the power level to win 19 straight, and all but three -- Norvell, Kalen DeBoer and Terry Bowden -- have a natty on their resume. It can’t be that easy, right?
So what gives?
We had a pretty spirited conversation with the great Jeff Cameron on this week’s Inside ACCess, and he offers a pretty long laundry list of issues -- most of which start with the head coach. That’s fair. He’s not wrong in his depiction of the current situation, including players tuning out Norvell’s message.
And perhaps it’s just the nature of sports that coaching changes need to happen because things grow stale. Maybe change is good.
Of course, when that change also costs, as has been reported for FSU, about $100 million, it feels less good.
Now, that figure is almost certainly inflated a good bit, but whatever the figure, it’ll be many tens of millions for a school that simply doesn’t have that kind of cash laying around.
Wasting money on fired coaches could at least be explained away a little easier in the olden days of college football -- way back in 2019 -- but in the revenue-sharing/NIL era, it just seems foolish.
For one, giving massive buyouts to coaches is dumb. We know this. ADs know this. Jimmy Sexton knows this. And yet, it will keep happening because, as with so many other things in this stupid industry, people simply can’t help themselves.
The fact of the matter is, there are a small handful of legitimately elite head coaches -- guys who make a difference to a team’s ceiling on an annual basis -- and even those (as Dabo shows) have diminishing results over time. The vast majority of coaches fall somewhere between “good enough to win with elite players” to “good enough to make average players seem better than they are.” Gene Chizik has more national championships than Bo Schembechler, Bill Snyder or Frank Beamer.
But again, throwing money at a coach made sense when coaches and facilities were really all you could throw money at. That’s not true now, and I’d argue there’s a much bigger asset schools should invest as much as they possibly can into. I wrote a little about the FSU situation earlier this week and probably undersold what might’ve been the biggest takeaway:
We all knew the DJU experiment was a huge risk (and I can’t help but wonder how differently things might’ve gone if they’d just ponied up for Cam Ward). I was dubious of the investment in Tommy Castellanos from Day 1, too, and while I think he did give the team some needed confidence, he’s just not a good enough passer to win at a high level. And if there’s a through line from Fisher’s apex to Taggart to Norvell’s downfall, it’s the lack of anything resembling good QB play, save the Travis era.
Everyone intuitively gets that you need to have good QB play, but I’m not sure anyone realizes just how signifiant it is. Here’s a graph of Total QBR vs. team win% in the playoff era.1
The R-squared here is .551, which suggests about 55% of the variance in win percentage can be explained by Total QBR. For a single statistical metric, that’s pretty absurd. For example, something like sack totals is about 23%. Yards-per-rush is about 13%. QB play greatly impacts outcomes.
Now let’s consider the QBs Florida State has had since Jameis Winston. It’s an ignominious list.
High-school recruits:
2013: None
2014: JJ Cosentino
2015: Deondre Francois, De’Andre Johnson
2016: Malik Henry (4, No. 4 dual)
2017: James Blackman, Bailey Hickman
2018: None
2019: None
2020: Chuba Purdy, Tate Rodemaker
2021: None
2022: AJ Duffy
2023: Brock Glenn
2024: Luke Kromenhoek
2025: Luke Sperry
Francois and Blackman played a lot, but neither was all that good. Aside from that, FSU hasn’t come close to actually developing a high school QB since Jameis.
Here’s the stat line for that group while at FSU: 31-26 W-L, 48.3 Total QBR, 57.2% completions, 6.01 yards/dropback, 106 TD passes, 71 INT
And for their careers: 44-66 W-L, 46.5 Total QBR, 58.4% completions, 5.93 yards/dropback, 158 TD passes, 114 INT
That’s awful. Like very, very awful.
Now here are the transfers: Everett Golson, Wyatt Rector, Jordan Travis, Alex Hornibrook, McKenzie Milton, DJ Uiagalelei, Tommy Castellanos, Jaylen King
Obviously Travis was exceptional. But he was not a transfer Willie Taggart cared about, and he was ready to move to WR before Mike Norvell salvaged his career. Take Travis out of the equation, and here’s the stat line for all those transfers: 13-14 (Golson was 7-1) with a 49.8 Total QBR, 61.8% completions, 35 TD, 22 INT
Or let’s put this another way...
It’s crazy to think that Jimbo Fisher had three straight FSU quarterbacks drafted in the first round -- Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and Jameis Winston -- and since then, Travis is the only Noles QB drafted at all, and he never played a down in the NFL.
Now FSU is ready to spend tens of millions to fire Norvell, but two Decembers ago it wouldn’t dig deeper to find another half-million or so to land Cam Ward then settled for Tommy Castellanos this season at QB.
So, to recap, three different coaches -- two of whom have had 19+ game winning streaks with an elite QB, have come through the program and all ultimately have been lambasted by fans eventually.
Is the problem the lack of the right coach or the lack of a decent QB?
Let’s look at Clemson.
Clemson’s Total QBR during the halcyon days of Swinney’s success from 2011-2020 was 78.6, fifth-best among Power Five schools, trailing only Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio State and Oregon.
Clemson’s Total QBR since 2021, as the Tigers have fallen from elite to good to mediocrity, is 60.9, 48th among Power Five schools, just ahead of West Virginia and a tick behind Mississippi State.
So is Dabo now a lesser coach or does he simply have a lesser QB? Have the last three coordinators at Clemson all been bad -- including one who now has a top-20 team in the ACC -- or have they just not had the right guy at the most important position on the field?2
Norvell has made his share of mistakes over the past two years. Uiagalelei was a horrible decision, and most folks outside FSU knew it. Gus Malzahn and Castellanos was aiming too low given all the issues surrounding the Noles, too. That Castellanos has been banged up and not eager to run as much lately is also something pretty easily predicted. That the new era of the portal has made it harder to find true diamonds in the rough like Jared Verse is certainly an issue, the lack of development for high school recruits is a problem, and the lack of a message that’s connecting with his locker room is probably the death knell.
And yet, a decent quarterback -- like, say, Cam Ward last year -- almost certainly covers all that up, at least enough that we’re not talking about a coaching change right now, and we’re certainly not talking about a loss to Stanford.
Manny Diaz caught heat at Duke for investing as much as $8 million in Darian Mensah, but that’s actually a pretty good strategy, I think. For one, Mensah’s been awesome (even if the success has been somewhat wasted as Duke is 4-3), but even if he wasn’t, Duke would be out about $4 million and can start over next year without the potential of losing a full recruiting class and overhauling an entire roster3 rather than spending $70 or $80 million to fire a head coach.
Obviously there’s a lot of complexity to all of this, and coaches play a big part in selecting, signing and developing their QBs, too. But it’s also probably long past time we stopped tossing aside coaches with big contracts and started investing a lot more resources into finding the right QB for the job.
On this week’s Inside ACCess
In addition to the great conversation with our pal Jeff Cameron, we welcomed Wake Forest coach Jake Dickert to the show, and I thought he was really insightful, particularly on the topic of winning after a coaching change.
Dickert didn’t directly address his colleague in Chapel Hill there, but it’s notable that he was hired at Wake on Dec. 18 and has put together a pretty competitive roster at a place that had not previously been easy to bring in transfers. Bill Belichick, on the other hand, was hired on Dec. 11 and has complained that he came in so late he couldn’t get any good transfers or recruits.
Wake’s got a big one this week against SMU, and it’s not a great matchup for the Deacons. But barring an epic collapse down the stretch, they’ll almost certainly go bowling this season, and that’s a good bit better than I had assumed before the year. Dickert’s done a really nice job.
And a reminder, if you missed this week’s show, you can listen in podcast form. Please consider liking, subscribing, rating, hugging, buying it a drink, etc. HERE.
What’s David reading?
Manny Diaz was discussing this last week: In the era of expanded conferences, it’s increasingly problematic to expect a team to go 11-1, 12-0 every year. There are more hard games for everyone. As Diaz told me, there are 12 teams in the SEC who think they should make the playoff each season, and one of them has to finish 12th.
Well, my pal Ralph Russo expanded on that idea for The Athletic, and his piece on lowering expectations of what constitutes a good season may be necessary for fans to understand.
We hear a lot about the analytics and strategy revolution in college football. Did you know a suburban dad in Pennsylvania is at the heart of a lot of it? Fun piece from The Wall Street Journal.
I largely find most AI to be pretty useless beyond being a better version of Google, but the notion of quantum computing really could be a world-altering innovation. And as the New York Times reports, Google appears on the brink of a massive leap forward.
You may never have heard of Drew Struzan, but you’ve certainly seen his work. The creator of some of the coolest movie posters of all time died last week.
A man in Illinois was arrested for pretending to be Sammy Hagar, and honestly, most of us will go our entire journalism careers without getting a quote half this good.
“He said he was on tour but needed to cash a royalty check,” a bank teller told police. “He was wearing red sunglasses and smelled faintly of margarita mix, so I thought it was actually him.”
What’s David listening to?
If you’re a fan of good, old-fashioned, fun, straightforward rock-and-roll, consider Brian Dunne’s new album “Clams Casino.” Bunch of bangers on it.
Dunne is also a member of Fantastic Cat, and I’ve been listening to them a bunch lately, too. Their cover of Lindsay Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” is worth a listen even if you’re not into anything else, but their latest album, “Now That’s What I Call Fantastic Cat” is a funny, fun, rollicking and occasionally poignant collection that goes from Sturgill-esque rockabilly to Head and the Heart-style harmonies.
Week 9 ACC picks
No change in the standings last week, as we all went 5-3, leaving Andrea still 8 games back in the race to not jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
As for this week…
Iowa, the statistical outlier in every offensive chart in history.
In fairness here, the answer is, it’s complicated. A lot of coaching and scheme fit goes into making an elite QB, and good coaches adjust what they do to fit the QB they have.
Which is basically what happened with Maalik Murphy last season.