Ten Win Breakthrough Profiles: An Introduction

As usual, I am delivering the promised goods a month or so late.

Nevertheless, here they are!

Last year, four different power conference programs had their first ten-win season in at least a decade. Two of them had their first ten-win seasons ever! Two were in the Big Ten. One was in both groups.

The Indiana Hoosiers headlined the quartet with their first year with 10 wins in the history of their football program, overshadowing the Iowa State Cyclones who did the same. Meanwhile, Arizona State joined the Hoosiers in the playoffs on their resurgent 10-win campaign, and Illinois won the Citrus Bowl to cap off their first 10-win season since 2001.

Here's a graph of what the programs' winning percentage looks like with 2024 plus the prior 5 years:

Below is the same graph but only the current coach is shown:

As you can see, a few different stories are told here: the incomplete story of Matt Campbell turning Iowa State around and maintaining long-term success through a few leaner years; the story of Bret Bielema producing an 8-win renaissance, losing the stars of that team, gaining experience and surging to 10 wins; the story of Kenny Dillingham assembling talent and experience for a shocking turnaround; the story of Curt Cignetti immediately lighting Indiana on fire. The epilogues have yet to be written.

But many such stories DO have complete epilogues, and I set out to find those stories. I wanted to see if I could quantify what happens to schools that win 10 games for the first time in over a decade to predict what might happen in the near future to these four. I gathered every such instance since 1995 and it's an anthology of 58 separate stories (54 excluding the four above), each with its own twists and turns. The variance of outcomes was wild. Here's a graph.

That mass of spaghetti is what I'm tasked with summarizing. But that would be boring, which is why I'm doing it in this article:

Of the 54 for whom any data is available, 34 experienced an increase in average win percentage in the 5-year period following the 10-win breakout compared to the 5-year period preceding it, while 20 experienced a decrease in the same.

13 ten-win breakouts saw their head coaches fired within five years, while 11 had their coaches hired away in that same time period.

Whenever the hell I get around to it, I'm going to try and tell as many of these stories as I can. I'll group them into like sets wherever possible because there are such wild variances in outcome.

Multiple teams saw a win percentage increase of over 100% following the ten win breakout. One of those teams fired their coach!

One team saw a 38% decrease in winning percentage and paid for their 10-win breakout for quite some time.

Some coaches did it twice! Some schools did it twice! One school did it thrice! No coach ever did it twice at the same school.

In any case, I'm going to be telling those stories. Here's the same graph with only the 10-win coach's tenure included: