This is a first of many posts hopefully depending on how much everyone finds it informative and useful. After watching our defense perform the way it did, I couldn’t help but believe that the defensive coach was more so responsible for that performance than our players. In order to dig a little deeper, I put together at a high level historical stats of coach MD.
What the data tells us
Since Mark D’Onofrio started coaching at Miami (2011-2015), his overall team defensive ranking was highly volatile, with the best being at 14 and worst at 89. The overall recruiting class rank relatively stayed consistent or worsened over time. Miami played a strength of schedule between 35 and 45 during his tenure. From 2008 to 2010, Miami averaged a top 10 recruiting class in the nation, leaving Mark with a highly talented pool of players. Mark’s best years as a DC came at Miami in 2011 and 2014. However, majority of his work at Miami would indicate that his defense was not particularly successful seeing that total defense slipped from 22 to 89 between 2011 and 2013. In short, the argument can be made that Mark was neither exceptional nor the worst among the DCs out there. His results are highly dependent on his recruiting classes and considering the ranking of his recruits, he overall under-performed as a coach. From the data above, one can clearly make the judgment that Mark was not exceptional at developing players and may not be the best fit for Houston where the key to success is the development of players.
Let me know what your thoughts are on the data presented and if you would like to see similar stats and analytics.
To the mods, I know you merged all Coach MD’s topics, but I did not want my work to get buried in the posts. It took me time to compile all the data, hope you understand.
How he made these guys into 89 with a top 10 recruiting class the year before is crazy. We since ive remembered have been known for our D but man i knew from the very first game against rice it was going to be more of the same BS. We had them looking like they made drastic improvements in their game. Not to mention that horrible loss to memphis last year and the other loses including our bowl loss. Major is going to have to fire him. If you cant produce a “bad @$$ defense” you lied and you cant do the job. This was supposed to be the year and as Oliver put it DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS. Tech exposed our defense and now you better believe other teams smell blood.
do the same for at least two other DCs at a high-profile P5s since we know recruit rankings differ based on the school doing the recruiting; e.g. Florida State and Auburn
Otherwise, you are looking at a sample size of one and trying to draw conclusions about Coach MD that might not be uncommon among his peers.
Why not go back to his Temple days? Out of curiosity, what does that do to the numbers?
I was focusing more on his recent body of work and following the mantra of “what have you done for me lately”. I would imagines Mark’s experience at Miami held more weight than his time at Temple.
do the same for at least two other DCs at a high-profile P5s since we know recruit rankings differ based on the school doing the recruiting; e.g. Florida State and Auburn
Otherwise, you are looking at a sample size of one and trying to draw conclusions about Coach MD that might not be uncommon among his peers.
To your first point, I took that into consideration but was not able to rank just the defensive players on 247 compared to all the other FBS programs. The 247 sports calculator only allows you to remove players from a class rank in order to get an adjusted ranking. However, you would have to manually go to each FBS program and perform that task to get ranking relative to others. I’ll see if I can get this from another database, but great point.
I planned on doing a similar data aggregation on Todd Orlando to get a sense of the usefulness of this data or even potential DC’s that UH could go after next so that we can get a proper comparison.
Say what you want, but the analytics I did earlier in the year definitely have value. And no, at this point I don’t care for biases built into defensive rankings. Coach MD needs to go and should not have been hired in the first place.
Put ah fork in D’Onoforio … he is done … if Major doesn’t fire him soon then he will by season’s end … or else
We have basically been living on the edge all year on borrowed time with our offense bailing out our defense … and waiting for the second half before the D begins playing … most of the time it works and sometimes it doesn’t
Oh yeah Orlando is doing no better in Austin … he has some of the best defensive players in Texas and the last two games could not do dilly-squat!!! … today was an embarrassment for him … Herman’s honeymoon ended last year and no doubt the orangebloods will be like us and our DC … asking for Orlando’s cabeza on ah platter …
