Every college football program has certain natural constraints that a coach can affect little, and if at all, over the long run. These include facilities, the glamour of the program, university support, fan base, the level of competition, and the like.  So, if you are a good coach, you can take your program's success above what would be its "natural average."  If you are a bad coach, you take the program below its natural average.  So, for instance, if you are a coach at a program that has a natural average of .300 and your average is .400, you are probably in an absolute sense a better coach than someone who has a win rate of .600 at a school that has a natural average of .700.

Of course, natural averages change some over the very long haul, so comparing coaches across centuries is not fair. And sometimes programs do make dramatic leaps forward, like Miami in the 1980's.  But more often than not, there really isn't much of a change.

If you look at the N.D. coaches of recent times who have either been excellent or very good coaches, Ara, Devine and Holtz, their records at other schools indicate that they are indeed good coaches in the sense that they can take their programs above their natural average.  Interestingly, the people who have scorned the comparisons of Willingham to Ara are quite right. In fact, comparing ANYONE to Ara appears to be unfair. Ara on any measure turns out to be one of the greatest coaches of his or any time. Without all of the boring details, Ara's average of .507 at Northwestern well exceeds that of any coach since him or any of his predecessors within any reasonable time frame. Ditto for his average of .859 at Miami of Ohio (which was the jumping off places of many legendary coaches including both Woody and Bo).  And his record at N.D. stands unequaled in modern times.  Ara clearly is, as someone else said, the "gold standard."

Devine also turns out to be an excellent coach on this measure.  His .697 win average at Missouri has not been equaled since nor was it by any of his then-recent predecessors. And, of course, his win rate of .764 at N.D. is essentially identical to Holtz's .765. This comparison is slightly unfair to Holtz, though, because his first year he was 5-6 cleaning up Faust's mess (more on that later), and if you omit that year, Holtz's rate jumps to a stellar .798.

Holtz, too, turns out to be a fine coach wherever he goes, but you have to look a little harder to see it. The major problem is that he moves around so much that he has quite a few years like his first year at N.D. (5-6), South Carolina (0-11), Minnesota (4-7) that it holds his percentages down. His win rate of .735 at Arkansas is actually similar to the coach that preceded him (Broyles .708) and succeeded him (Hatfield .760). But both of them were good coaches on any measure, and taking a longer view .735 at Arkansas is quite remarkable. If you eliminate Holtz's 0-11 first year at South Carolina he is 17-7, which is a remarkable winning rate for that program.  In fact, 17 wins in two years is a record there, and considering that those juniors and seniors set (as freshmen and sophomores) the two-year record for losses at South Carolina (21) Holtz begins to look all the more remarkable.

Now, to look at the other side of the coin, consider Gerry Faust, with his win rate of .535, which is quite similar to Bob Davie's .585. Immediately one suspects that Faust is a bad coach, in fact an unusually bad coach, because the coaches on either side of him -- Devine and Holtz -- had essentially identical .765 averages, and the team under Faust immediately got worse, as the previous year's Sugar Bowl (9-2-1) squad went 5-6.  Davie too has this distinction as in Davie's case Holtz's 8-3 team went 7-6 under Davie.

In fact, further confirmation that Faust is an unusually bad coach and that a roughly 55% winning rate is well below N.D.'s natural average comes from Faust's subsequent history at Akron.

Akron, it turns out, once was a decent football program (in its history it is still about 30 games over .500) and Faust was preceded by an apparently good, or at least average, coach named Dennison, who compiled an 80-62-2 record (.563). Dennison's last 4 years he was 6-5, 8-3, 4-7 and 8-4, so he was leaving the program in reasonably good shape. Faust took over, and immediately repeated his performance at N.D. of driving the program below its natural average. Akron did move from Division I-AA to I-A in 1987, but its schedule did not undergo any radical transformation. Akron continued to play many of the same teams and only occasionally faced a major conference opponent. Here are Faust's records:

1986: 7-4
1987: 4-7
1988: 5-6
1989: 6-4-1
1990: 3-7-1
1991: 5-6
1992: 7-3-1
1993: 5-6
1994: 1-10

Total: 43-53-3 (.449)

If you throw out Faust's first year, his record at Akron drops to a quite bad 36-49-3 (.426). Faust also managed 5 losing seasons in 9 (5 of 8 if you ignore his first year) -- at a program that had suffered only 4 in the previous 25. Faust's successor (Lee Owens) also has a sub-.500 record, though if you throw out his first 2-9 year and throw out Faust's 7-4 first year, Owens appears to be better, and has had two winning seasons in his last 3, whereas Faust managed only one winning season in his last 5. One suspects that if Owens stays at Akron he will prove to be a coach that can at least restore Akron to its natural average a bit over .500.

For present purposes, how does Willingham stack up at Stanford?  Willingham appears to be a good coach who can take a program above its natural average, though -- as was said before -- he's no Ara, at least yet. Here are the averages of Willingham's predecessors:

Walsh: .585
Dowhower: .500
Wiggins: .364
Elway .464
Green: .471
Willingham: .549

Walsh, of course, had two tours of duty, one at 17-7 in the late 1970's and then 17-17-1 as Willingham's predecessor in the mid 1990's. Interestingly, unless one makes the assumption that Walsh was a worse coach the second time around, it may be that Stanford's "natural average" was actually in decline, perhaps because of lack of support for the program and the like. Now, of course, Walsh really might have been a worse coach on the second try, because he was less interested in recruiting and the like. It's hard to say, of course. Walsh II at .500 was probably a reasonably good coach, but not as remarkable as his first stint. Moreover, of course, Walsh turned out to be one of the best pro coaches of all time (3 Superbowls and leaving behind a team that won it the next year) and Denny Green, Walsh II's predecessor, while a decent coach (perhaps a little above Stanford's natural average), has turned out to be quite a fine pro coach.

Another interesting measuring stick of the Stanford program is Jack Elway's tenure as head coach. Immediately before coming to Stanford, Jack Elway had been coach at San Jose St. and had amassed a .624 win rate. San Jose St. has usually been a pretty good football program, actually beating Stanford the last two years it was quarterbacked by Jack Elway's famous son, John (Stanford was only 15-18 with Elway at quarterback, despite Elway's near-Heisman performances in his junior and senior years). So let's put San Jose St.'s natural average in the high .500's, indicating that Jack Elway was probably a bit better-than-average coach. Jack Elway could only manage .464 win rate at Stanford. All of this seems to be confirmation that the natural average at Stanford is in the low .400's -- let's put it at .425.

So where does that leave the future? Figure that Notre Dame's "natural average" against its traditional level of competition is somewhere in the high .600's. Let's put it at .675. A truly remarkable coach like Ara is a +.150. Very good coaches like Holtz and Devine are roughly +.100. Holtz, perhaps, should get rated a little higher than Devine, because if you pitch his first year, he's almost at .800, so perhaps he's a +.125. Bad coaches like Davie are -.100 or so. Truly awful coaches like Faust (confiirmed by his Akron record) approach the -.150 range.

One would expect, therefore, Willingham based on his roughly +.100 to +.125 performance at Stanford, to win at about the same clip as Holtz or Devine.

Bill Snyder of Kansas State is truly remarkable, winning at a .696 clip before this year at a program that generously had a .350 natural average. Snyder also has done it over a quite long haul (12 years or so). He belongs in the college football hall of fame, no question. Now, I'm not willing to elevate him above Ara because he had so much more headroom than Ara did. If you want to look it this way, both Ara and Snyder took their teams roughly half as far up as humanly possible. Ara's remarkable .836 against a natural average of roughly .675 is halfway from there to 1.000, just as Snyder's elevation of KSU to the high .600's has been roughly half of what could've been humanly accomplished. Snyder is all the more remarkable if you throw out his dismal first season. Snyder, in my opinion, could've gone down as one of the gods of college football if he'd gotten a chance at a decent program.

Dennis Franchione of Alabama has been remarkable but not quite so comprehensively as Snyder. Franchione's win rate at TCU.was in the .600's, but TCU's natural average is much closer to .500 and so his win rate in the .600's there (over not nearly as long a career as Snyder and fueled by a tremendous final seaon) is excellent, but his tale will be told much more fully over the long haul at Alabama.

Rick Neuheisel of Washington has very, very little to recommend him, which is the reason I was aghast when his name surfaced as a candidate at ND. Especially if you throw out his 10-2 first season at CU, he weighs in as truly average. Ditto for his performance at Washingon -- there he's probably a bit above average, but he's at best at the very low end of the good coach range. He's young, and he may turn out to be good, but his record is inflated by having had the great good fortune to take over two programs that had high natural averages and were in quite good shape. He is far, far less qualified for the job than Willingham.

Houston Nutt, unless he has headcoaching experience prior to Arkansas, just doesn't have enough to evaluate yet. His win percentage in the high .600's looks promising, but is certainly not remarkable, and his small number of seasons (smaller yet if you toss the first one) would caution one to stay away from his for a big time hire like ND.

Much as I find him personally unlikeable, Steve Spurrier's record at Florida and before at Duke is a good example of the degree to which a coach can, and cannot, affect a program's fortunes. Spurrier's record at Duke before coming to Florida was an unexciting 20-13-1 (.603) -- including a blowout bowl loss in his last game. Duke turns out to be a place with a low natural average, however, perhaps about .350. Now, it probably isn't fair to put anyone in the +.250 category, because at programs with such a low natural average (Kansas St. prior to Snyder is another good example of this) you have a tremendous amount of headroom. Ara, interestingly enough, was able to generate the same sorts of +.150 or better improvements over the natural average both at Miami of Ohio and Northwestern. But, in any event, you'd predict based upon this that Spurrier would've been an excellent coach at Florida, perhaps in the +.150 range or better.

Sure, enough, here are the coaching records starting in 1960 for full-time coaches:

Graves .686
Dickey .573
Pell .556
Hall .686
Spurrier .828

Florida's natural average thus appears to be somewhere between .600 and .650, so Spurrier's .828 was quite remarkable, and quite consistent with his Duke performance. Simply taking his Duke winning percentage of .603 and using that as a basis for predicting his Florida record would have been a poor and unsophisticated predictor. Ditto for Ara's .507 at Northwestern and Willingham's .549 at Stanford. Both of these were well above the school's natural average (though for various reasons Ara's record is more impressive). In fact, like Ara at N.D., Spurrier was probably at Florida long enough and did well enough that he may have moved the natural average up over time. Spurrier, however, never achieved Ara's knack for getting his team over the hump in the national championship, winning only one despite several years in serious contention.