Kyle Whittingham Wins a Lot, and Other Head Coaching Records Ahead of Bowl Season

College football’s bowl season starts tomorrow, and a question we’ll be asking as we watch the odds on these is: What does each team want from the game?

Bowls aren’t as straightforward as other college football games. They’re more a celebration. They’re more a proving ground—for draft hopefuls, for future playing time hopefuls, for interim head coaches and assistants playing out of position. They’re funkier, with riskier play calling executed by lineups thinned by transfers and draft declarers. They’re almost all on neutral sites, but sometimes it’s just a neutral-ish site, and every now and then a team gets a home game. There’s a long off period before them. Coaches spend much of that time focused on recruiting. Bowls are weird football. The fundamentals, numerically, don’t perfectly apply.

Wanting to put some quantification on this, we looked through the bowl records today of every one of this year’s head coaches (with the exception of the playoff coaches, for whom the games are much more normal, oddly enough—those games are to no one exhibition contests). The idea here is that coaches’ past performance might be our best barometer of how much they “coach to win” in the bowl game, and while a better way to do this would adjust for the quality of the opponent, there’s probably an extent to which coaches find themselves in similar situations in bowl games, especially if they’ve built up a solid sample size. A few things that stood out:

• Eight of the 84 bowl-playing teams are undergoing a coaching transition, meaning they’ll be coached by someone other than their current of former permanent head coach.
• I believer 26 of the 84 bowl-playing teams are coached by someone head coaching their first ever bowl game, though I may be missing one or two who coached as an interim somewhere.
• Of all the non-playoff coaches, Mack Brown has been the head coach for the most bowl games: 23. He sports a 14-9 record.
• Behind Brown are, in order, Bob Stoops (9-9, but has never coached a bowl as an interim), Dabo Swinney (10-7, and yes we counted playoff games), Kirk Ferentz (9-8), Mike Leach (8-8), Mike Gundy (10-5), Kyle Whittingham (11-3), and Bronco Mendenhall (7-7). I hope I’m not missing anyone here.
• The only coaches four or more games above .500 in bowl games who are coaching non-playoff games this year are Whittingham, Jimbo Fisher (8-2), Gundy, Brown, Paul Chryst (6-2), Scott Satterfield (4-0), and Neal Brown (4-0).
• Only two coaches are four or more games below .500 in bowl games and are coaching bowl games this year. They’re Dana Holgorsen (2-6) and Rick Stockstill (2-6), the latter of whom coaches Middle Tennessee State.
• For the four playoff coaches, counting playoff games the records are 17-10 for Nick Saban, 3-5 for Jim Harbaugh, 4-2 for Kirby Smart, and 2-2 for Luke Fickell.
• This isn’t a coaching record note, but Jackson State should probably be the biggest favorite in any bowl game this year.

We’ll see if this has any bearing or not, by which we mean we might see—again, this is a pretty unscientific exercise. It’s interesting to see who’s coached how many games, though, and how they’ve done. Would be a little nervous if I was Ohio State, going up against Whittingham, who’s still 5-2 since Utah joined the Pac-12. Here’s our full table, for those curious (apologies if we messed anything up):