Ten Win Breakthrough Profiles: Jury's Still Out
The most recent case studies with any data past the breakthrough
On Monday, I put out part 2 of my series on Ten Win Breakthrough Profiles. If you need a refresher on what that means, here's the introductory post.
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The idea is that a school returning to (or coming for the first time to) the promised land of 10 wins is a turning point in the history of the program. As we covered yesterday, that's not always entirely true.
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The introduction featured four teams that got long-awaited ten-win campaigns in 2024, but there are six other P5 schools that climbed the mountain recently enough that they don't yet have five years of post-breakthrough data.
Those are shown below:
Of these six, two (Pitt and Wake Forest) already had their breakthrough coaches (Pat Narduzzi and Dave Clawson) more than five years before those breakthrough seasons. 2022 Kansas State was the fourth year of Chris Kliemann taking over for retiring legend Bill Snyder. These three make up the programs that started above .500 at the -5 year mark.
The other three were in varying degrees of dire straits 5 years before their breakthroughs. Tennessee won just four games in 2017, but that was more than Louisville and Oregon State combined for in their 2018 and 2017 seasons respectively. The Scott Satterfield era was up and down and when he and Louisville mutually parted ways, the former Cardinals quarterback Jeff Brohm took over the head coaching job and immediately led the Cards to ten wins and a berth in the ACC championship game. He followed it up with a 9-4 season, which is the only post-breakthrough data point. With very low data fidelity I can say he succeeded in restoring Louisville to the tune of a 55.7% improvement to win rate, but he'll need to win at least 9 a year for four more years to complete that data set.
Kliemann has also done nothing but win nine games a year since his breakthrough season. 2012 was the last elite team of the Bill Snyder era, but K State remained a winner throughout. Kliemann's only losing season was 2020, which was of course the most anomalous season in recent history for everyone but the playoff contenders.
Oregon State faces an uncertain future after being shut out of power conferences following the dissolution of the PAC-12. It's no wonder Jonathan Smith left for an established power school in Michigan State. After Smith's 10-3 campaign in his fifth year, he coached one more posting an 8-5 record before moving to East Lansing. Post-Smith, the Beavers have posted one 5-7 record. The two post-breakout seasons are still a 73.1% improvement over the way things were before, because Oregon State had the fourth-lowest pre-breakout 5-year win percentage of any of the 58 programs surveyed at just .298.
(#3 was pre-2004 Cal with .295, #2 was pre-'95 Northwestern at .264 and the grand champion of pre-breakout futility was Colorado, posting a .224 win rate during the five seasons preceding their 2016 breakthrough)
Jake Dickert also faces an uncertain future as he inherits Dave Clawson's Wake Forest program. After Jim Grobe's Demon Deacons fell off, Clawson took over in 2014 and gradually built the program back into a winner. This culminated in the 2021 season where the Deacs won 11 games and played one of the other teams on this list for the ACC title behind the arm of Sam Hartman.
However, Hartman became illustrative of the problem which would increasingly plague Wake Forest; in the NIL era, Wake has not been able to hold on to their best players. After 2019 they lost dual-threat star quarterback Jamie Newman to Georgia; the next year, Kenneth Walker went to Michigan State and carried the Spartans to eleven wins. Hartman, who remains Wake Forest's all-time passing yardage leader, was poached by Notre Dame following the 2021 season. Clawson has voiced his frustration with being essentially a farm team for programs with more money behind them, and he managed one more 8-5 campaign before logging two forgettable four-win seasons and then hanging it up. Ultimately, that 2021 high water mark would be the last hurrah for Clawson-era Wake Forest.
Josh Heupel took over a flailing Tennessee program in 2021 and revamped their offense, leading them to 11 wins in 2022 for their first double-digit win season since 2007. Nine wins followed, and then last year the Vols won ten before being obliterated by Ohio State in the College Football Playoff.
Then there's Pat Narduzzi. Given that he coaches Pitt, things are bound to be bizarre and inexplicable. If you'll recall from the last edition of this series, Paul Chryst was hired away from Pitt after 2014. Narduzzi replaced him and hovered just above .500 for five years or so. Then in 2021 the whole ACC forgot how to play defense just as Kenny Pickett and Jordan Addison came into their own as a lethal QB/WR duo. This team notched 11 wins and set the ACC on fire, winning the league by piling up points to the tune of a third-best-in-the-nation 41.4 per game.
Narduzzi did not like this one bit. The following offseason, he bemoaned the "lack of balance" in one of the best offenses in the country. He was able to dial back the offense a little in 2022 to a 31.3 ppg average and still win nine games. This, however, did not satisfy him.
In 2023, he finally achieved the balance he set out to attain with 20.2 points per game. While this was 116th in the nation, it was the pace he prefers. They went 3-9. Last year's 7-6 campaign showed that Pitt is still weird.
So there you have it. The jury is still out. The biggest winners following the 10-win breakthrough have been Oregon State, Tennessee and Louisville. Kansas State showed marked improvement, Pitt got slightly worse and Wake Forest fell off a cliff.
Below is the graph without 2020 included, and it doesn't really change any of the narratives from the previous paragraph except Wake Forest gets even worse.
Next up: Modest Improvements
