Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-3
2018Cheez-It BowlL 7-10
2019Redbox BowlW 35-20
2023Independence BowlL 14-34
2024LA BowlL 13-24
Report card
Defense carries it: 56th percentile defense, below the median offense at 46th.
California, 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
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.
5-4 against his rivals. Just 1-4 against Mario Cristobal.
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
Passed more than the situation called for under Baldwin, Musgrave, Bloesch and Harsin.
6,949 run and pass snaps at California, 2017–2025, 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.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Five numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 8 ranked California classes of his own have averaged #52 nationally — best #28, worst #79.
His class — he had the full signing 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.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2025 roster arrived on his watch — 114 of 114 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 32% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
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.
35% of his 199 new players since 2022 came through the portal (FBS programs, same seasons: 22%) — the 4th-highest share of the 68 Power 4 programs. His share was 13% in 2022 and 54% in 2025.
Graded on the players who arrived and the players who left together, his portal seasons came out better than most FBS programs’ in 3 of the 4 seasons graded. our read
Each player counts once, in the season he arrived. 2021, the first season of portal tracking here, is left off because its arrival records look incomplete (about 31 new players per FBS team, against 52 in 2022). Portal grade: the site’s position-value-weighted scoring (the same engine as the Portal Heat feed and the “Who won the portal” grade): the value of the players who came in minus the value of the ones who left, ranked against every FBS program’s grade that same season. A season with fewer than 4 transfers in and out is not graded.
“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 California rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2017–2025). In the three seasons before he arrived, California’s line averaged 3 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: 94 of 159 signees (59%) across his 2017–2025 tenure, drawn from 21 states in all. Next: TX (19).
69% of his signees come from CA and its 3 border states (AZ 8, NV 6, OR 1).
Off this map: 7 signees to the east (FL 3, VA 2, others).
- median hometown distance
- 647 mi
- within 100 mi
- 20%
- within 500 mi
- 42%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 43%
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 10 of them himself; 5 arrived under Sonny Dykes.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | R5.35 | Hezekiah Masses | Cornerback |  Las Vegas Raiders | |
| 2025 | R3.21 | Nohl Williams | Cornerback |  Kansas City Chiefs | |
| 2025 | R4.04 | Craig Woodson | Safety |  New England Patriots | |
| 2025 | R4.27 | Teddye Buchanan | Linebacker |  Baltimore Ravens | |
| 2025 | R6.07 | Marcus Harris | Cornerback |  Tennessee Titans | |
| 2024 | R6.22 | Patrick McMorris | Safety |  Miami Dolphins | |
| 2023 | R5.24 | Daniel Scott | Safety |  Indianapolis Colts | |
| 2022 | R7.03 | Cameron Goode | Outside Linebacker | Miami Dolphins |
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | R7.33 | Elijah Hicks | Safety |  Chicago Bears | |
| 2021 | R4.20 | Camryn Bynum | Cornerback |  Minnesota Vikings | |
| 2020 | R3.04 | Ashtyn Davis | Safety |  New York Jets | recruited under Sonny Dykes |
| 2020 | R4.28 | Jaylinn Hawkins | Safety |  Atlanta Falcons | recruited under Sonny Dykes |
| 2020 | R6.23 | Evan Weaver | Inside Linebacker |  Arizona Cardinals | recruited under Sonny Dykes |
| 2018 | R7.07 | Devante Downs | Cornerback | Minnesota Vikings | recruited under Sonny Dykes |
| 2018 | R7.14 | James Looney | Defensive Tackle |  Green Bay Packers | recruited under Sonny Dykes |
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
13th-best California tenure of 19 by the numbers.
Followed Sonny Dykes (2013–2016) · succeeded by Tosh Lupoi (2026–now).
| Season | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||||
| Record | 5-7 | 7-6 | 8-5 | 1-3 | 5-7 | 4-8 | 6-7 | 6-7 | 6-5 | |
| Postseason | — | L bowl | W bowl | — | — | — | L bowl | L bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||||
| OC | Beau Baldwin | Beau Baldwin | Beau Baldwin | Bill Musgrave | Bill Musgrave | Bill Musgrave | Jake Spavital | Mike Bloesch | Bryan Harsin | |
| DC | Tim DeRuyter | Tim DeRuyter | Tim DeRuyter | Tim DeRuyter / Peter Sirmon | Peter Sirmon | Peter Sirmon | Peter Sirmon | Peter Sirmon | Vic So'oto / Terrence Brown | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||||
| Offense | 33 | 2 | 50 | 13 | 34 | 48 | 48 | 34 | 58 | |
| Defense | 46 | 97 | 63 | 80 | 72 | 34 | 42 | 60 | 28 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 48.0 | 45.3 | 42.7 | 51.3 | 45.6 | 54.8 | 43.8 | 53.7 | 47.2 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 43.1 | 44.0 | 38.0 | 50.0 | 40.5 | 57.8 | 36.1 | 48.4 | 34.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 29.8 | 34.0 | 32.4 | 60.0 | 54.5 | 42.2 | 59.6 | 29.2 | 43.2 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent on offense and performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on defense.
Typical size for position, once adjusted for position mix.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
1 player-season honored (All-America / national award): Nohl Williams (2024)
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-0.9 pts at California · #740 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 2 programs, 2 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.