Coaching triva...

[IUHarselCo]

Guess who has the 2nd best record against Purdue in the entire 128 year history of IU? Yep, Kevin Wilson. Only Ewald Stiehm during his five seasons as coach from 1916-1921 was better with a 3-0-1 record. Wilson in his 5th season with PU yet to play, is 3-1. Terry Hoeppner, many peoples ideal coach, was 0-2.

There was a time just a few decades ago when beating PU was IUs only standard of success. Why not when the last statistically winning coach was Bo McMillin, at a whopping .561% over 14 seasons ending in 1947. Stiehm, .526 and James Sheldon (1905-1913), .570, are the only three coaches in the 20th century to have career wins at IU over .500%!!

Mallory has the highest winning percentage since McMillin at .473% over 13 seasons! We screwed up firing him.

What does it all mean? For me it means any coach we have or hire has one giant uphill battle to get us anywhere near just a .500 ball club. And it's going to take longer than five years. Top coaches all had long tenures except Stiehm. Odds say stick with Wilson a bit longer than five years.

And the coach who gets us over the .500 mark to anything like 7-8 wins a season, will be the first since 1897.

Let that sink in a moment or two, eh?

 

[MJE]

I didn't understand the 1897 reference.

BTW, Mallory was 7-6 vs PU but never had more than a two game win streak. If IU beats them this year, it will be our first three-game win streak vs PU since... 1947. McMillin was 9-4-1, including a four game streak to close out his tenure.

There's the whole decade of the 50s (actually 1948-1961) which was a long series of P links, with one tie. Glad I wasn't alive to experience that period.

 

[inward2half]

Guess who has the 2nd best record against Purdue in the entire 128 year history of IU? Yep, Kevin Wilson. Only Ewald Stiehm during his five seasons as coach from 1916-1921 was better with a 3-0-1 record. Wilson in his 5th season with PU yet to play, is 3-1. Terry Hoeppner, many peoples ideal coach, was 0-2.

There was a time just a few decades ago when beating PU was IUs only standard of success. Why not when the last statistically winning coach was Bo McMillin, at a whopping .561% over 14 seasons ending in 1947. Stiehm, .526 and James Sheldon (1905-1913), .570, are the only three coaches in the 20th century to have career wins at IU over .500%!!

Mallory has the highest winning percentage since McMillin at .473% over 13 seasons! We screwed up firing him.

What does it all mean? For me it means any coach we have or hire has one giant uphill battle to get us anywhere near just a .500 ball club. And it's going to take longer than five years. Top coaches all had long tenures except Stiehm. Odds say stick with Wilson a bit longer than five years.

And the coach who gets us over the .500 mark to anything like 7-8 wins a season, will be the first since 1897.

Let that sink in a moment or two, eh?

So 3 of his 6 Big Ten victories during his tenure are against Purdue.

 

[IUHarselCo]

So 3 of his 6 Big Ten victories during his tenure are against Purdue.

Vbg...didn't mention his total record. Goes to show you how stats can distort. However, my following comment is still apropo.

 

[IUHarselCo]

I didn't understand the 1897 reference.

BTW, Mallory was 7-6 vs PU but never had more than a two game win streak. If IU beats them this year, it will be our first three-game win streak vs PU since... 1947. McMillin was 9-4-1, including a four game streak to close out his tenure.

There's the whole decade of the 50s (actually 1948-1961) which was a long series of P links, with one tie. Glad I wasn't alive to experience that period.

The 1897 reference is when Coach Madison Gonterman finished two years of coaching at IU with a .781% record.

 

[82IUGraduate]

Sorry to correct your stats but Wilson is 2-2 against Purdue. We lost in 2011 and 2012. A great place to look up this stuff is college football data warehouse.com. I wish you were correct though. Another piece of trivia to add, Ewald Jumbo Stiehm also coached the IU men's basketball team for a short time IIRC. He was bought away from Nebraska because they did not want to up his salary or at least I thought I read that in one of Ken Bikoffs stories. Love the history and trivia stuff by the way.

82

 

[IUHarselCo]

Sorry to correct your stats but Wilson is 2-2 against Purdue. We lost in 2011 and 2012. A great place to look up this stuff is college football data warehouse.com. I wish you were correct though. Another piece of trivia to add, Ewald Jumbo Stiehm also coached the IU men's basketball team for a short time IIRC. He was bought away from Nebraska because they did not want to up his salary or at least I thought I read that in one of Ken Bikoffs stories. Love the history and trivia stuff by the way.

82

All stats come from Wikipedia via Google. Right or wrong. Nice bit on Stiehm...thx!

 

[82hoosier]

One could also say the no coach in IU's history has ever taken the field against a worse collection of Purdue football teams.

 

[oldcougar77]

One could also say the no coach in IU's history has ever taken the field against a worse collection of Purdue football teams.

That may be true to some extent but Bill Mallory certainly benefitted from a bad period of Purdue football as well. From 1981 - 1996 Purdue had exactly two winning seasons and finished higher than 6th in the Big Ten only once. The Boilers had a bad season in Jim Young's last year, then one decent year under Leon Burtnett in his second or third year. It was all downhill from there and most years Purdue finished from 6th through 9th in the league until Tiller arrived in 1997.

Mallory never beat the Boilers more than twice in a row in that stretch. So if he represents the gold standard for IU football that some posters frequently use as a measuring stick, a win over the PUkes this year would be uncharted territory, regardless of how bad the Boilers might be.