Kyle Whittingham's won-loss record as a head coach

[LA Ute]

Now the Deseret News has published a piece by a "contributor," a guy named Trevor Phibbs who is a senior at the U., entitled "Utah football: 60% of Kyle Whittingham's wins come against losing teams. (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865589912/Utah-football-60-percent-of-Kyle-Whittinghams-wins-come-against-losing-teams.html)"


At first glance, Whittingham’s resume is impressive. He has accumulated a 75-36 record since inheriting the program in 2005 and is 7-1 in bowl games with two BCS victories, including the 2005 Fiesta Bowl.


However, when looking deeper, it can be argued that his record is inflated with wins against slumping programs. How much has the 2008 season and a 6-3 record against BYU improved his image?


In his 70 total wins (omitting FCS), 42 have come against teams below .500 when the season finished (assuming Utah State finishes with a winning record in 2013) — 60 percent of his total victories. Even more telling is that 34 were earned against teams that had lost eight or more games that season (48.5 percent).

I'm curious about this. Does anyone know how the records of other head coaches stack up against Kyle's? Without that information it's hard to know what this statistic means. It would have been an admirable act of journalism to include the records of comparable coaches in the article.

[DrumNFeather]

First, this is a bit of a silly argument, and I'm a bit surprised that the DesNews would go there. Second, I think you chalk some of this up to years of playing in the MWC. Third, I reject the notion that Kyle needs 2008 and a 6-3 record over BYU to improve his image. I think his image is fine.

[sancho]

Third, I reject the notion that Kyle needs 2008 and a 6-3 record over BYU to improve his image. I think his image is fine.

Those things certainly help, though. We're talking about a guy who has won national coach of the year. A guy who has taken his team to a top 5 national ranking. A guy who absolutely out-coaches Bronco Mendenhall every time they play head-to-head.


Does anyone know how the records of other head coaches stack up against Kyle's? Without that information it's hard to know what this statistic means.

I used to play the game that this "reporter" is playing. You gather up stats, carve them with a knife, and serve them in just the right way to make your target look bad. It can be done to anyone or any team. I used to cherry pick stats to make BYU look bad. I eventually just got tired of it and quit.

I can already tell you how other coaches stack up in this regard - they are all similar. Of course you win against bad teams. You'd better. The coaches getting fired are the coaches losing to bad teams instead of beating them.

Some things about this "statistic"

1) Coaches have very little say in how good their opponents are. For years, Utah fed on bad MWC opponents. BYU is doing that now with relatively weak independent schedules.

2) Using 0.500 to determine what counts as a "good" win is silly. Utah beat UCLA two years ago. UCLA finished under 0.500, so that's not a good win? But BYU's win over GT does count? It's an arbitrary dividing line that measures next to nothing.

3) Not all victories and losses are indicative of coaching ability. Utah and BYU both beat USU this season, so we both get a quality win, right? Well, which victory required quality coaching decisions, and which relied on a season ending injury to the best player on the field?

4) Are all sub 0.500 wins really equal? Utah beat a 3-9 Oregon State team two years ago. BYU beat an 0-everything New Mexico State. Which win required coaching? Yet, they count the same in this metric.

5) Are all 0.500+ wins really equal? Utah has two wins over top 10 teams over the past 5 years. BYU has none. Aren't Alabama/Stanford wins worth more than an SDSU or a Houston? Not by this measuring stick.

[SoCalPat]

Now the Deseret News has published a piece by a "contributor," a guy named Trevor Phibbs who is a senior at the U., entitled "Utah football: 60% of Kyle Whittingham's wins come against losing teams. (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865589912/Utah-football-60-percent-of-Kyle-Whittinghams-wins-come-against-losing-teams.html)"



I'm curious about this. Does anyone know how the records of other head coaches stack up against Kyle's? Without that information it's hard to know what this statistic means. It would have been an admirable act of journalism to include the records of comparable coaches in the article.

We shall use the record of another in-state coach who is undergoing no such scrutiny. Bronco Mendenhall has 80 wins as BYU's football coach. 27 have come against winning programs. Five have come against FCS programs. That means 47 of his 75 FBS victories have come against losing programs. The math there says nearly 63 percent of Bronco's wins have come against losing programs. For the majority of that time, the schedules the two teams played were basically identical.

Bronco's W-L in this category would be even worse if not for this year, in which BYU will almost certainly have five wins vs. teams with winning records, tying 2009 for the most in a single season in his tenure.

This is a horseshit measuring stick to judge a coach. I'm not going to look it up, but I bet Gary Patterson at TCU had a similar rate of success as well.

[Diehard Ute]

Unless it's from Facer, it's best to skip the Deseret News these days. (And KSL) Allowing anyone to submit "articles" leads to gems like this...or the lead headline on KSL this morning, "Hit The Brakes Or The Gas, Help For Drivers At Yellow Lights" (Which is from Bill Gephardt, who used to be a good investigative reporter before he went to KSL)

[Viking]

Unless it's from Facer, it's best to skip the Deseret News these days. (And KSL) Allowing anyone to submit "articles" leads to gems like this...or the lead headline on KSL this morning, "Hit The Brakes Or The Gas, Help For Drivers At Yellow Lights" (Which is from Bill Gephardt, who used to be a good investigative reporter before he went to KSL)

Kyle is a terrible coach. Fire him now (so we can hire him)

[U-Ute]

What a dumb premise. Plus, they didn't take it far enough. When you look deeper into the numbers, this is actually a good thing.

First of all, the premise seems to be that there is a normal distribution of teams with winning records as losing records. I don't believe that is the case. I believe we will see many more teams with 0-3 wins than we will teams with 9-12 wins. So your chances of even playing a team with a winning record any given week goes down to less than half. Another way of saying it is that more than half of your games are going to be against losing teams. So even if you win all your games, more than half are against teams with less than .500 records.

But, let's assume for the moment that records are evenly distributed. That means that Kyle has 40% of his wins against teams with winning records. Given that he is winning games at a 67% clip, that's an average of 8 wins per year. 40% of 8 wins is 3.2 wins per year against teams with winning records. Even if we assume that those are the worst of the winning records, he's still beating 7-5, 8-4, and 9-3 teams every year, while reaching out and beating a 10-2 team once every 5 years.

That's not too shabby.

[SeattleUte]

The Deseret News and codered. It would be hard to think of an information source I respect or trust less than those two.

[SoCalPat]

What a dumb premise. Plus, they didn't take it far enough. When you look deeper into the numbers, this is actually a good thing.

First of all, the premise seems to be that there is a normal distribution of teams with winning records as losing records. I don't believe that is the case. I believe we will see many more teams with 0-3 wins than we will teams with 9-12 wins. So your chances of even playing a team with a winning record any given week goes down to less than half. Another way of saying it is that more than half of your games are going to be against losing teams. So even if you win all your games, more than half are against teams with less than .500 records.

But, let's assume for the moment that records are evenly distributed. That means that Kyle has 40% of his wins against teams with winning records. Given that he is winning games at a 67% clip, that's an average of 8 wins per year. 40% of 8 wins is 3.2 wins per year against teams with winning records. Even if we assume that those are the worst of the winning records, he's still beating 7-5, 8-4, and 9-3 teams every year, while reaching out and beating a 10-2 team once every 5 years.

That's not too shabby.

Last year, there were 26 teams in FBS that won 10 or more games (I went from 9-12 wins to 10-13 to account for bowls and conference title games), but 21 that won 3 or fewer games (no need to skew a game higher for teams that neither make it to a bowl or a CCG).

I would think that one would almost never see more horrible teams than you will good teams in a single year, because your good teams have the luxury of scheduling down (FCS) and getting automatic wins, while your bad teams, while still able to schedule FCS, frequently lose those games, and almost always lose the body-bag game it has on the roster to help pay the bills. The SEC is the best example of this. It had 6 teams that won 10 or more games, but only two that won 3 or less. In fact, the Pac-12 was the only power conference in which its 10-plus win teams wasn't greater than its 3-wins or fewer teams (2-3).

It's a dumb premise, like you said, mostly because it's hardly unique to the majority of coaches in America. The thing I would like to see is the coach whose percentage of FBS wins vs. losing programs isn't over 50 percent.