Illinois head coach Tim Beckman was on the coaching hot seat for most of the 2014 season when, after his Illini won its last two games and qualified for a bowl, his boss gave him a reprieve. Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, meanwhile, appeared to be on the outs with his boss earlier this year until a contract extension solidified his status moving forward.
Combined, Beckman and Whittingham took whatever kind of momentum they gained successfully traversing the choppy administrative waters and turned it into a positive on the recruiting trail.
Last year, Illinois and Utah finished 75th and 67th, respectively, in the Rivals.com team recruiting rankings. In the 2015 rankings, the Illini improved a whopping 30 spots (to 45th) while the Utes jumped 26 places (to T-41st); that marked the biggest jumps for any Power Five program from last year to this, with Mississippi State (+21, to 16th) the only other P5 with a gain of 20 or more.
There were, though, five other programs that saw a double-digit increase, with a pair of Pac-12 schools leading that particular pack: Washington State (+19, to T-51st), Cal (+17, to 29th), TCU (+16, to 34th), Northwestern (+12, to 56th) and West Virginia (+12, to 33rd).
Conversely, several P5 schools that didn’t make coaching changes (I’ll get to those shortly), saw double-digit dips in their recruiting rankings, “led” by Kentucky (-18, from 17th in 2014) and Miami (-14, from 12th), the latter of which surely displeased the growing number of Al Golden detractors and possibly even his defenders. Others with 10-plus drops included Arizona (-13, from 28th), Iowa State (-12, from 56th), Oklahoma State (-11, from 27th), Syracuse (-11, from 51st) and Indiana (-10, from 38th).
Each of the five P5 programs that underwent a change in head coach prior to National Signing Day understandably took a double-digit tumble in the rankings, although none more so than Pittsburgh, which went from 44th in 2014 during Paul Chryst‘s final recruiting class to 72nd in Pat Narduzzi‘s first. The only program with new a head coach to fall further than that was Colorado State (-45, from 77th to 122nd).
Jim McElwain was the head coach of CSU in 2014, and moved on to the same position at Florida. UF also saw a double-digit drop, but McElwain did incredibly well to keep it at a loss of just 15 spots, from 8th to 23rd. Michigan (-18), Oregon State (-16) and Kansas (-11) were the other P5 teams working with new coaching staffs.
Arguably the most impressive job of anyone on the recruiting trail came from a Group of Five program with a new head coach.
Last year under June Jones, SMU pulled in a class that was tied for 99th nationally. This year, with Chad Morris on the job for just a little over nine weeks, the Mustangs finished 81st, an effort that didn’t go unnoticed nationally.
UNLV’s Tony Sanchez, in his first year at UNLV and thanks to a TV show, was almost as impressive, taking a Rebels class that was T-111th in 2014 and pushing the ranking up to 99th in 2015. Troy’s Neal Brown, moving the Trojans from 121st to T-117th, was the only other first-year head coach to improve upon last year’s rankings.
The author of the biggest upward mover overall also came from the G5, with San Jose State going all the way from T-103rd to 60th. UT-San Antonio, 120th one cycle ago, took an impressive leap all the way up to T-82nd thanks in large part to a class that was 37 signees strong.
On the flip side, East Carolina saw the biggest plummet of those schools that didn’t engage in a coaching search, falling to T-112th from 76th just a year ago.