Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 0-1
2021New Mexico BowlL 24-31
Report card
Offense carries it: 37th percentile offense, bottom-quarter defense at 19th.
UTEP, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
Pick a job to see its years on their own.
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 at Wyoming. Just 1-2 against Fisher DeBerry.
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 at Houston. Winless in 3 tries against Mack Brown.
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.
Winless in 5 tries against Seth Littrell.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
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.
2-4 against his rivals. Winless in 5 tries against Seth Littrell.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
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.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Ran more than the situation called for under Canales and Ohara.
4,303 run and pass snaps at UTEP, 2018–2023, 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.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Six numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 5 ranked UTEP classes of his own have averaged #122 nationally — best #111, worst #129.
His class — he had the full signing cycleTransition — he was hired mid-cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his; inherited and mid-transition classes still show here, faded, but stay out of the average.
Followed him here
Wyoming→
Houston2000Players who transferred from his old program to his new one through the portal in the same year he made the move. Name-matching across data sources misses some, so every count is a floor, not an exact number.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2023 roster arrived on his watch — 122 of 122 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 2% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2018–2023Counting players who have since left: 3% of the 117 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
This tenure spans the 2021 transfer-portal tracking floor: seasons before 2021 structurally cannot be classified portal-vs-not (they land in 'unknown' below), so the portal-share figure understates how many pre-2021 arrivals might have been transfers under the pre-portal-tracking transfer rules.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his UTEP rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2018–2023). In the three seasons before he arrived, UTEP’s line averaged 9 lb heavier than the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 75 of 149 signees (50%) across his 2018–2023 tenure, drawn from 21 states in all. Next: CA (40).
52% of his signees come from TX and its 4 border states (LA 1, NM 1).
Off this map: 5 signees to the east (FL, MD, others).
- median hometown distance
- 608 mi
- within 100 mi
- 21%
- within 500 mi
- 28%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 11%
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.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. He brought in 2 of them himself.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | R4.18 | Tyrice Knight | Linebacker |  Seattle Seahawks | |
| 2024 | R6.44 | Elijah Klein | Offensive Guard |  Tampa Bay Buccaneers |
A pick counts toward his tenure when the player’s final college season was one he coached, a checkable rule rather than a claim about who developed the player. A blank note means the player is on a verified roster and arrived on his watch. “Estimated” means no roster record, so the final season is assumed to be the year before the draft.
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.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
17th-best UTEP tenure of 20 by the numbers.
Followed Mike Price (2017) · succeeded by Scotty Walden (2024–now).
| Season | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||
| Record | 1-11 | 1-11 | 3-5 | 7-6 | 5-7 | 3-9 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | L bowl | — | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||||
| OC | Mike Canales | Mike Canales | Mike Canales | Dave Warner | Dave Warner | Scotty Ohara | |
| DC | Mike Cox | Mike Cox | Mike Cox | Bradley Dale Peveto | Bradley Dale Peveto | Bradley Dale Peveto | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||
| Offense | 4 | 36 | 37 | 65 | 44 | 36 | |
| Defense | 44 | 2 | 52 | 50 | 58 | 30 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 34.0 | 43.8 | 32.1 | 33.4 | 39.7 | 32.1 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 26.2 | 38.1 | 14.9 | 30.9 | 35.6 | 31.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 22.2 | 38.5 | 42.1 | 31.2 | 44.7 | 48.8 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Brings in smaller-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
16th-best Houston tenure of 16 by the numbers.
Followed Kim Helton (1993–1999) · succeeded by Art Briles (2003–2007).
1 NFL Draft pick: Hanik Milligan (2003)
5th-best Wyoming tenure of 22 by the numbers.
Followed Joe Tiller (1991–1996) · succeeded by Vic Koenning (2000–2002).
Was he good?
Every angle here comes back inconclusive — not enough separation from zero to call it either way.
-1.3 pts at UTEP · #765 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.