D.J. Durkin
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 0-1
2016Quick Lane BowlL 30-36
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 5 programs, 8 stints, before and after wearing the head-coach hat — every season measured on the same axis, whether he personally ran the unit or someone else did.
How to read this. Coordinator seasons come from our coordinator career records; head-coaching-era seasons are the same unit's FBS-relative percentile for those years, regardless of who coached it, read directly from the staff assignments record. A role change (a “hinge”) is a fact, never a performance verdict — only the season-by-season data itself is colored by outcome.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
1-2 against his rivals.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Called about what the situation called for.
206 run and pass snaps at Auburn, 2025–2025, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Building the roster
Two numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2025 roster arrived on his watch — 103 of 116 players. The other 13 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 19% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 12 of 26 signees (46%) across his 2025–2025 tenure, drawn from 8 states in all. Next: GA (6).
81% of his signees come from AL and its 4 border states (GA 6, FL 1, MS 1, TN 1).
Off this map: 1 signee to the west (OK).
- median hometown distance
- 131 mi
- within 100 mi
- 40%
- within 500 mi
- 80%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 3%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Inheritor inherited a power and neither built it higher nor let it collapse · Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
Followed Hugh Freeze (2023–2025) · succeeded by Alex Golesh (2026–now).
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on offense and outperforms his recruiting talent on defense.
Brings in bigger-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
AI Narratives — “Auburn's Portal Math and 2025 Outlook” and 4 more on the team page.
Followed Randy Edsall (2011–2015) · succeeded by Matt Canada (2018).
| Season | 2016 | 2017 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 6-7 | 4-8 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||
| OC | Walt Bell | Walt Bell | |
| DC | Andy Buh | Andy Buh | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 35 | 13 | |
| Defense | 32 | 25 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 40.3 | 38.4 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 40.0 | 43.5 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 42.4 | 42.9 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
2 NFL Draft picks: D.J. Moore (2018), Jermaine Carter (2018)
Followed Will Muschamp (2011–2014) · succeeded by Jim McElwain (2015–2017).
8 NFL Draft picks: Dante Fowler Jr. (2015), D.J. Humphries (2015), Chaz Green (2015), Matt Jones (2015), Max Garcia (2015), Neiron Ball (2015), Andre Debose (2015), Trent Brown (2015)