Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-1
2004Silicon Valley Football ClassicW 34-21
2006Poinsettia BowlL 7-37
Report card
Above the median offense — 52nd percentile.
Northern Illinois, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
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.
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.
8-14 against his rivals. Just 1-6 against Tom Amstutz.
Signature games
These losses tie at the model's current max -- an editorial pick among a real tie, not a clean ranking.
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.
1,495 run and pass snaps at Northern Illinois, 2004–2007, 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. Play-by-play starts in 2004, so his earlier seasons there aren’t in it.
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
Three numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2007 roster arrived on his watch — 32 of 32 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (1996-2007) predates 2021, when transfer-portal tracking begins in this database. Portal usage cannot be measured for this tenure at all -- this is not the same as '0% portal'.
“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: 53 of 105 signees (50%) across his 2002–2007 classes on record (his tenure ran 1996–2007), drawn from 11 states in all. Next: WI (18).
82% of his signees come from IL and its 5 border states (WI 18, MO 8, IN 7).
Off this map: 8 signees to the south (FL 6, AL, others) and 2 to the west (CA, KS).
- median hometown distance
- 91 mi
- within 100 mi
- 50%
- within 500 mi
- 100%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 0%
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. None can be traced to who brought them in — there’s no roster record for these players here.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | R3.29 | Garrett Wolfe | Running Back |  Chicago Bears | Estimated |
| 2007 | R4.23 | Doug Free | Offensive Tackle |  Dallas Cowboys | Estimated |
| 2004 | R5.22 | Michael Turner | Running Back |  San Diego Chargers | Estimated |
| 2002 | R7.14 | Darrell Hill | Wide Receiver |  Tennessee Titans | Estimated |
| 2001 | R4.23 | Ryan Diem | Offensive Guard |  Indianapolis Colts | Estimated |
| 2001 | R4.29 | Justin McCareins | Wide Receiver |  Tennessee Titans | Estimated |
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.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Builder meaningfully raised a program that wasn't one
4th-best Northern Illinois tenure of 13 by the numbers.
Followed Charlie Sadler (1991–1995) · succeeded by Jerry Kill (2008–2010).
| Season | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||||||||||
| Record | 1-10 | 0-11 | 2-9 | 5-6 | 6-5 | 6-5 | 8-4 | 10-2 | 9-3 | 7-5 | 7-6 | 2-10 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | W bowl | — | L bowl | — | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||||||||||
| Offense | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 45 | 74 | 12 | 21 | |
| Defense | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 62 | 58 | 38 | 16 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 29.9 | 36.3 | 43.2 | 38.3 | |
| Red-zone pass% | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 32.4 | 34.7 | 50.5 | 39.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 12.5 | 29.5 | 37.5 | |
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.
1st all-time at Northern Illinois
Was he good?
Only one of the usual three angles is measurable for this era — raised the program.
+12.2 pts at Northern Illinois · #168 of 1290 · top quarter