Ten Win Breakthrough Profiles: Happily Ever After
This is how everyone thinks it will go!
In this series, which I introduced in yesterday's article, I'll be breaking down the profiles of schools who had their first winning season in at least 10 years and what happened in the 5 years before and after that breakout season.
Thumpasaurus
Today, I'm covering the profile that everyone who lives through a breakout 10-win season believes is their destiny: Happily Ever After!
These are teams who saw at least a 35% increase in 5-year winning percentage after their 10-win breakthrough (defined as the first 10-win season in at least a decade) as compared to before. There's a lot of variability in these; some, like Greg Schiano at Rutgers, turned a loser into a winner, while others such as Dabo Swinney turned a winning program into a powerhouse.
The high water mark for program improvement belongs to Jeff Tedford, who achieved 10 wins in his third season at Cal in 2004. In 1999, the Golden Bears were winless, and in 2001 they notched only one victory. Tedford immediately posted a winning season upon his hire in 2002, won ten in 2004, did it again in 2006 and maintained a winning program. In the five years prior to 2004, Cal was a .294 program. They won 65.6% of their games in the following five years, an improvement of 122.7%.
There are three National Championships on this list. Swinney led Clemson first to four straight years with double-digit wins, then to the national title game and then finally to the pinnacle five years after that 10-win breakthrough. USC was dormant when Pete Carroll arrived, but his breakthrough 2002 campaign was just a prelude to the 2003 and 2004* national titles. Bob Stoops had a perfect season in his second year at the helm of Oklahoma, which was also their 10-win breakthrough. His improvement mark was 96.7%.
*Don't argue semantics. I know what I saw happen on the field
Quite a few 10-win breakthrough seasons led losing programs to winning pastures. David Cutcliffe gave Duke their first winning season in program history and sustained a winning record through some struggles after that. Schiano at Rutgers, Dennis Erickson at Oregon State, Ralph Friedgen at Maryland, Mark Stoops at Kentucky and Kirk Ferentz at Iowa were among those whose 10-win breakthroughs marked a transition from losing to winning.
Mark Dantonio took over a Michigan State program that was just under .500 and turned it into a .791 average program, which is roughly the same mark reached by Jim Harbaugh at Stanford from a .381 starting point. After the breakout 2010 season, Stanford won 108% more often than in the five years prior.
Harbaugh and Tedford are two of the coaches who saw a ten win breakthrough and a win percentage increase of more than 100% on the other side of it. The third is not one you'd guess.
"Happily Ever After" criteria include Art Briles at Baylor. On the chart below, you can see Baylor fall apart after he's fired in disgrace four years after his breakthrough season. Perhaps it wasn't so happy ever after at all...though you could argue the program is still benefitting from his tenure.
If you exclude the bizarre and anomalous 2020 season, nothing actually changes so I won't bother including that chart. I never mentioned Bill Snyder, whose rebuild of Kansas State took such a long time that they had a 5-year winning record by the time of his breakthrough 1995 season.
And then there's the curious case of Mike Macintyre, the only coach on this list to be fired for performance.
In 2016, in his fourth year at Colorado, his Buffaloes won ten games. Just two years later, he was fired after two 5-7 seasons. The Buffaloes were a .450 team in the five years after their 2016 breakout...which seems modest until you consider that they had been a .224 team in the five preceding years. Drop their 6-2 2020 campaign and that's still a .396 team. While that's not the 100% improvement of the including-2020 case, that's still a 76.4% improvement!
Mike Macintyre took a team that had won 22.4% of its games over five years to a 10-win season and that bought him two years.
You will see 2016 Colorado in QUITE A FEW of these categories. It's one of the strangest timelines I've ever seen.
Next up: Nothing Fundamentally Changed
