College football coaches have a particularly hard adjustment period when they take new jobs. They need to get a handle on their current roster, which numbers about 100, and fill out coaching and support staffs that can total a few dozen.
2018’s National Signing Day rankings for 2nd-year coaches show why you should be patient
Recruiting in a short window amid a job change is notoriously difficult.
Erich Schlegel-USA TODAY Sports
And because the season ends in late November, most hires happen in December — two months before the traditional National Signing Day on the first Wednesday in February, and almost concurrent with the new Early Signing Period that started on Dec. 20 in 2017.
Recruiting for new staffs now that the ESP exists is going to be even harder. Even now, most coaches don’t sign their best classes after weeks on the job.
Here’s how the 2017 season’s first-year coaches did in their first two cycles:
How much better new coaches ranked on Signing Day in Year 2
Coach | 2017 | 2018 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geoff Collins, Temple | 119 | 80 | 39 |
| Justin Wilcox, Cal | 70 | 43 | 27 |
| P.J. Fleck, Minnesota | 59 | 37 | 22 |
| Jeff Brohm, Purdue | 72 | 50 | 22 |
| Tom Herman, Texas | 25 | 3 | 22 |
| Luke Fickell, Cincinnati | 63 | 47 | 16 |
| Tom Allen, Indiana | 62 | 48 | 14 |
| Charlie Strong, USF | 76 | 62 | 14 |
| Tim Lester, WMU | 89 | 75 | 14 |
| Butch Davis, FIU | 83 | 70 | 13 |
| Shawn Elliott, Georgia State | 105 | 93 | 12 |
| Jay Norvell, Nevada | 95 | 84 | 11 |
| Matt Rhule, Baylor | 40 | 30 | 10 |
| Brent Brennan, SJSU | 98 | 95 | 3 |
| Mike Sanford, WKU | 82 | 81 | 1 |
| Major Applewhite, Houston | 69 | 72 | -3 |
| Randy Edsall, UConn | 101 | 105 | -4 |
| Ed Orgeron, LSU | 7 | 15 | -8 |
| Jeff Tedford, Fresno State | 84 | 98 | -14 |
| Lane Kiffin, FAU | 60 | 79 | -19 |
247Sports Composite
The average FBS team with a head coach entering Year 2 signed a class that was 9.6 spots higher in the national rankings than his first one. The median jump was 12 spots.
That’s a slightly steeper jump than the 8-spot average and median change for coaches whose second Signing Days were in 2017. That year, 20 of 26 teams with Year 2 head coaches improved their class ranking. This year, 15 of 20 improved.
The biggest riser, Temple, doesn’t come as a surprise.
A huge reason for the Owls’ low class ranking in 2017 — when they were a few months off an AAC championship — was class size. Temple took 18 players in that class, cobbled together while Collins was still unpacking boxes. This year’s Temple class has 29, and the average player rating in it is a few ticks higher.
A few Power 5 teams are positioned to field more talented rosters now.
Purdue, Minnesota, and Cal have long been working with a shorter deck than most of their conference opponents. All of them put pieces in place to move closer to the middle of the field. If you saw what Brohm did at Purdue with one of the worst rosters in the power conferences last year, the notion of the Boilermakers adding higher-caliber players is pretty exciting. The same’s true if you afford Fleck a one-year mulligan and think of him as the guy who led WMU on an undefeated run through the MAC just more than a year ago.
Texas’ class should put to rest questions about Herman’s recruiting.
A year ago, after Texas signed its worst class since they’ve been tracking these things, I wrote:
Tom Herman’s first Signing Day in Austin was objectively not good. Texas’ top available target on the board, four-star defensive end K’Lavon Chaisson, picked LSU instead. The Longhorns didn’t close strong, and they signed America’s No. 26 class. It was Texas’ worst-rated class since classes started getting rated. It led to Herman giving this quote, which is not a quote you want to hear from the coach at Texas:
A year before, when Herman was at Houston, he signed the country’s No. 36 class, a huge achievement for a team outside the power conferences.
Herman is a good recruiter. That’s how he got here. He’s got longstanding roots in Texas, but he only had two months to update and expand them as the head coach at the state’s namesake university. Now, he has a year.
This time, Texas signed 10 of its home state’s highest-rated 13 prospects and finished with the country’s No. 3 class.
Why’d FAU have the steepest drop among any of these teams, despite winning Conference USA and being really fun while doing it?
Kiffin’s original class was already a major outlier, built on a surge of four-star JUCO teammates (who happened to be from Last Chance U), and this new one is still one of the best in school history, despite being small. Either way, Kiffin’s added enough talented transfers that he’ll continue to pile up mid-major wins for as long as he likes.
