Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 4-6
West Virginia’11W’12L’14L’15W’16L’17L’18LHouston’20L’21W’22W
Show all 10 games
2011Orange BowlW 70-33
2012Pinstripe BowlL 14-38
2014Liberty BowlL 37-45
2015Cactus BowlW 43-42
2016Russell Athletic BowlL 14-31
2017Heart of Dallas BowlL 14-30
2018Camping World BowlL 18-34
Houston
2020New Mexico BowlL 14-28
2021Birmingham BowlW 17-13
2022Independence BowlW 23-16
Poach watch
Every coordinator →Nebraska offensive coordinator, 2026
This winter
Our poach model, on his team’s results so far, how his unit compares with the FBS average this season and last, his program’s standing and his role. Ranked against the 329 FBS coordinators with 3+ games this season. The zone words describe the market’s interest; none of them says he is leaving.
What drives his number
The biggest factors, each against the typical FBS coordinator today.
- ▲ HigherAn offensive coordinator
- ▼ LowerA Power Four program · 69th percentile of FBS in program stature last season
- ▲ HigherHis offense scores 3.9 points a game more than the FBS average · last season his offense scored 1.5 more
How good is this number? It ranks a coordinator who moves up ahead of one who stays 71 to 73% of the time, and its average matches the share who actually move. What it can’t do
Tested on every FBS coordinator from 2018 through 2025, each season scored by a model fit only on the seasons before it: from three games on, given one coordinator who moved up and one who didn’t, it ranked the one who moved ahead 71 to 73% of the time, and its average chance came within a tenth of a point of the share who actually moved.
- Counting a coordinator who follows his hired-away head coach as moving up was decided after the model’s first results were seen.
- Much of the signal comes through his head coach: coordinators often move because their boss is hired away. This site’s number for head coaches is now live, on each head coach’s page, but this number doesn’t use it.
- Moves to NFL coordinator jobs are undercounted in the history it learned from; they were found mainly for coordinators with Wikipedia pages.
- On its own it is weak at picking which coordinator lands a head-coaching job (about 60% on the same test). The number is about moving up by any route.
- It is frozen: it learns nothing from 2026 until a deliberate refit.
Report card
Offense carries it: 53rd percentile offense, below the median defense at 40th.
Houston, 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.
3-0 against his rivals at West Virginia. Winless in 5 tries against Bob Stoops.
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.
2-1 against his rivals at Houston. Winless in 3 tries against Luke Fickell.
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.
5-1 against his rivals. Winless in 5 tries against Bob Stoops.
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 Blackwell/Jones; passed more under Dawson and Naghavi.
3,955 run and pass snaps at Houston, 2019–2023, 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 4 ranked Houston classes of his own have averaged #67 nationally — best #50, worst #82.
West Virginia
HoustonAcross every program: 5 ranked classes of his own, averaging #61 nationally.
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
West Virginia→Houston2019Players 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 2024 roster arrived on his watch — 60 of 116 players. The other 56 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 35% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2019–2024Counting players who have since left: 16% of the 135 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 Houston rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2019–2023). In the three seasons before he arrived, Houston’s line averaged within a few pounds of 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: 53 of 102 signees (52%) across his 2019–2024 tenure, drawn from 16 states in all. Next: GA (10).
60% of his signees come from TX and its 4 border states (LA 6, OK 2).
Off this map: 5 signees to the west (CA 5).
- median hometown distance
- 190 mi
- within 100 mi
- 40%
- within 500 mi
- 67%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 10%
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. Most were someone else’s recruits: 9 arrived under Major Applewhite (7), Tom Herman (2); 3 he brought in himself. 1 went in the first round.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | R2.23 | Patrick Paul | Offensive Tackle |  Miami Dolphins | |
| 2023 | R3.06 | Nathaniel Dell | Wide Receiver |  Houston Texans | |
| 2023 | R5.05 | Clayton Tune | Quarterback |  Arizona Cardinals | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| 2023 | R7.23 | Derek Parish | Fullback |  Jacksonville Jaguars | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| 2023 | R7.37 | Gervarrius Owens | Safety |  New York Giants | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| 2022 | R2.01 | Logan Hall | Defensive End |  Tampa Bay Buccaneers | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| 2022 | R3.21 | Marcus Jones | Cornerback |  New England Patriots | |
| 2022 | R4.36 | Damarion Williams | Cornerback |  Baltimore Ravens | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | R1.28 | Payton Turner | Defensive End |  New Orleans Saints | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| 2021 | R6.19 | Marquez Stevenson | Wide Receiver |  Buffalo Bills | recruited under Tom Herman |
| 2021 | R7.32 | Grant Stuard | Outside Linebacker | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | recruited under Major Applewhite |
| 2020 | R3.08 | Josh Jones | Offensive Tackle | Arizona Cardinals | recruited under Tom Herman |
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
6th-best Houston tenure of 16 by the numbers.
Followed Major Applewhite (2016–2018) · succeeded by Willie Fritz (2024–now).
| Season | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||
| Record | 4-8 | 3-5 | 12-2 | 8-5 | 4-8 | 0-0 | |
| Postseason | — | L bowl | W bowl | W bowl | — | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||||
| OC | Marquel Blackwell / Brandon Jones | Shannon Dawson / Brandon Jones | Shannon Dawson / Brandon Jones | Shannon Dawson / Brandon Jones | Eman Naghavi | — | |
| DC | Joe Cauthen / Doug Belk | Joe Cauthen / Doug Belk | Doug Belk | Doug Belk | Doug Belk | — | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||
| Offense | 42 | 44 | 63 | 93 | 24 | — | |
| Defense | 13 | 45 | 93 | 40 | 29 | — | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 38.2 | 46.2 | 40.7 | 52.8 | 52.8 | — | |
| Red-zone pass% | 37.6 | 44.8 | 46.3 | 55.0 | 50.0 | — | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 25.6 | 44.4 | 37.0 | 44.7 | 48.8 | — | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Brings in bigger-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
2 player-seasons honored (All-America / national award): Marcus Jones (2020), Marcus Jones (2021)
3rd-best West Virginia tenure of 16 by the numbers.
Followed Bill Stewart (2008–2010) · succeeded by Neal Brown (2019–2024).
| Season | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||||
| Record | 10-3 | 7-6 | 4-8 | 7-6 | 8-5 | 10-3 | 7-6 | 8-4 | |
| Postseason | W bowl | L bowl | — | L bowl | W bowl | L bowl | L bowl | L bowl | |
| Coordinators | |||||||||
| OC | — | — | — | Shannon Dawson | — | — | Jake Spavital | Jake Spavital | |
| DC | — | — | — | Tony Gibson | Tony Gibson | Tony Gibson | Tony Gibson | Tony Gibson | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||||
| Offense | 93 | 77 | 26 | 50 | 59 | 61 | 58 | 82 | |
| Defense | 78 | 38 | 53 | 77 | 85 | 70 | 42 | 29 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 56.9 | 51.8 | 44.2 | 44.6 | 35.5 | 35.9 | 50.0 | 49.6 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 50.0 | 42.7 | 33.7 | 38.8 | 32.0 | 35.3 | 50.0 | 41.6 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 32.3 | 47.7 | 18.9 | 23.7 | 24.4 | 28.6 | 35.1 | 35.9 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
25 NFL Draft picks: Bruce Irvin (2012), Najee Goode (2012), Keith Tandy (2012), Tavon Austin (2013), Geno Smith (2013), Stedman Bailey (2013), Charles Sims (2014), William Clarke (2014) + 17 more
All-time wins
Wins at programs this site tracks, 1936–present — one consistent count for every coach, not each program’s own historically reported total.
3rd all-time at West Virginia
Was he good?
Every angle here comes back inconclusive — not enough separation from zero to call it either way.
+1.6 pts at Houston · #569 of 1290 · middle half