All’s well that ends well.

Good question in this week’s Andy Staples’ mailbag ($$):

What tends to be more successful for major programs when they hire head coaches: the hot Group of 5 coach or the hot Power 5 coordinator? Seems like a lot of the G5 guys are “builders,” which often isn’t needed at a blueblood program, while the coordinators are more “salesmen,” having already gone through the grind of recruiting to a major program.

Kind of takes me back to the “decision” facing Greg McGarity after he canned Richt.  (The quote marks are, I think, understandable, to say the least.)  The hire was great; the process, not so much.  But I digress, sort of.

Andy went back and did some useful math to come up with an answer.  “I examined all the coaches hired by power conference programs* from 2005-19 to see if we can glean anything from empirical data.”  Here’s what he came up with:

There were 153 such hires in that 15-year period, but obviously, not all of the coaches getting hired fell into either of those categories… Of the hires, 43 were coaches whose achievements as a non-power conference FBS head coach won them the power conference head-coaching job. Meanwhile, there were 52 assistants hired as power conference head coaches…

So who fared better? The assistants had the edge. They had a median win percentage of .528 in their power conference head coaching jobs, while the median win percentage of the non-power conference head coaches was .500.

Not so fast, though.

But context matters. I also calculated the median win percentages of the assistant group for the coaches who came in after a firing instead of after a predecessor resigning (not because of losing), retiring or leaving for a better job… Taking away the assistants who took over mostly stable situations left 26 coaches, and their median win percentage dropped to .453. Meanwhile, the 35 Group of 5 head coaches who took over a power conference program after a firing had a median win percentage of .515.

He doesn’t count Kirby Smart as one of the assistants who came into a stable situation, which makes Smart’s performance well above average in that regard.

There’s one other group in that 153 Staples takes into account.

Of those 153 hires, 41 were hired primarily because of what they’d done previously as power conference head coaches. This group includes South Carolina-vintage Steve Spurrier, Alabama-era Nick Saban, Ohio State-era Meyer, Bill Snyder 2.0 at Kansas State, Michigan-era Jim Harbaugh and Penn State-era James Franklin. That group had the highest median win percentage at .539.

In other words, of all the options facing Butts-Mehre post-Richt, the road taken was the statistically riskiest.  It may have been something of a gamble for Georgia to hire Smart, but it paid off in spades.  We all wanted McGarity to be good with his hiring/firing, but I’ll certainly take lucky in this instance.