Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 2-3
2011Gator BowlW 24-17
2012Sugar BowlL 23-33
South Carolina
2016Birmingham BowlL 39-46
2017Outback BowlW 26-19
2018Belk BowlL 0-28
Coordinator years
Defensive coordinator across 3 programs, 3 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.
Report card
Above the median on both sides of the ball — 54th percentile offense, 65th percentile defense.
South Carolina, 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.
1-5 against his rivals at Florida. Winless in 3 tries against Mark Richt.
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.
1-7 against his rivals at South Carolina. Winless in 4 tries against Dabo Swinney.
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.
2-12 against his rivals. Just 1-5 against Jimbo Fisher.
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.
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
Passed more than the situation called for under McClendon/Roper and McClendon.
3,831 run and pass snaps at South Carolina, 2016–2020, 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 3 ranked South Carolina classes of his own have averaged #18 nationally — best #17, worst #18.
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 2020 roster arrived on his watch — 121 of 121 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
This coach's entire tenure (2016-2020) 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.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his South Carolina rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2016–2020). In the three seasons before he arrived, South Carolina’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: 38 of 102 signees (37%) across his 2016–2020 tenure, drawn from 12 states in all. Next: GA (23).
72% of his signees come from SC and its 2 border states (GA 23, NC 12).
Off this map: 6 signees to the west (CA 2, LA 2, others), 6 to the south (FL 6) and 5 to the north (IL, MD, others).
- median hometown distance
- 124 mi
- within 100 mi
- 40%
- within 500 mi
- 83%
- 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.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. He brought in 9 of them himself; 3 arrived under Shawn Elliott (2), Steve Spurrier (1). 3 went in the first round.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | R1.08 | Jaycee Horn | Cornerback |  Carolina Panthers | |
| 2021 | R3.40 | Ernest Jones | Inside Linebacker |  Los Angeles Rams | |
| 2021 | R6.20 | Shi Smith | Wide Receiver | Carolina Panthers | |
| 2021 | R6.43 | Israel Mukuamu | Cornerback |  Dallas Cowboys | |
| 2020 | R1.14 | Javon Kinlaw | Defensive Tackle |  San Francisco 49ers | |
| 2020 | R3.17 | Bryan Edwards | Wide Receiver |  Las Vegas Raiders | |
| 2020 | R4.11 | D.J. Wonnum | Defensive End |  Minnesota Vikings | |
| 2020 | R7.24 | TJ Brunson | Inside Linebacker |  New York Giants |
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | R2.04 | Deebo Samuel | Wide Receiver | San Francisco 49ers | recruited under Steve Spurrier |
| 2019 | R6.28 | Rashad Fenton | Cornerback |  Kansas City Chiefs | recruited under Shawn Elliott |
| 2019 | R6.39 | Dennis Daley | Offensive Tackle | Carolina Panthers | |
| 2018 | R1.25 | Hayden Hurst | Tight End |  Baltimore Ravens | recruited under Shawn Elliott |
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.
Inheritor inherited a power and neither built it higher nor let it collapse · Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
3rd-best South Carolina tenure of 19 by the numbers.
Followed Shawn Elliott (2015) · succeeded by Mike Bobo (2020).
| Season | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||
| Record | 6-7 | 9-4 | 7-6 | 4-8 | 2-5 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | W bowl | L bowl | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||
| OC | Kurt Roper / Bryan McClendon | Kurt Roper / Bryan McClendon | Bryan McClendon | Bryan McClendon | Mike Bobo | |
| DC | Travaris Robinson | Travaris Robinson | Travaris Robinson | Travaris Robinson | Travaris Robinson | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||
| Offense | 32 | 32 | 61 | 12 | 43 | |
| Defense | 54 | 77 | 23 | 62 | 4 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 40.3 | 47.0 | 44.4 | 45.8 | 42.4 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 32.7 | 41.0 | 51.6 | 37.8 | 31.2 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 32.7 | 26.8 | 43.8 | 30.2 | 28.6 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
3rd-best Florida tenure of 22 by the numbers.
Followed Urban Meyer (2005–2010) · succeeded by Jim McElwain (2015–2017).
| Season | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||
| Record | 7-6 | 11-2 | 4-8 | 6-5 | |
| Postseason | W bowl | L bowl | — | W bowl | |
| Coordinators | |||||
| OC | — | — | — | Kurt Roper | |
| DC | — | — | — | D. J. Durkin | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||
| Offense | 11 | 37 | 16 | 20 | |
| Defense | 72 | 78 | 67 | 98 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||
| 1st-down pass% | 37.6 | 29.4 | 27.2 | 32.1 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 39.2 | 36.4 | 32.1 | 32.7 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 13.5 | 14.9 | 21.6 | 23.9 | |
22 NFL Draft picks: Jaye Howard (2012), Chris Rainey (2012), Sharrif Floyd (2013), Matt Elam (2013), Jonathan Bostic (2013), Jordan Reed (2013), Jelani Jenkins (2013), Mike Gillislee (2013) + 14 more
Was he good?
The data leans negative: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-4.9 pts at South Carolina · #1003 of 1290 · bottom quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.