They say it takes three years to properly evaluate a head coach. For coaches hired in the winter of 2011-12, year three is here. While the collective opinions of alumni, fans and the media help shape the narrative a coaching staff exists in, only one group's opinion truly matters: recruits. If you want to know which way the wind is blowing on a given coaching staff, go find the nearest highly athletic 17-year-old football player.
Fortunately, that leg work has been done for us. Recruiting services are far from perfect and will always have their misses mixed in with the hits, but they provide a worthwhile barometer for a global recruiting picture. Generally, if a team is playing winning football today it's because it signed talented recruiting classes in the two and three years prior, and vice versa.
With that in mind, we've gathered the Rivals rankings for each of the 12 remaining Power Five conference head coaching hires before the 2012 season (the 13th, Bill O'Brien, is no longer in college football).
As you'll note below, the 2012 signing class, which these coaches scrambled to put together in a month or less, is often a crapshoot. But after that, coaches that upped their recruiting rankings from the final two years under the previous staff have seen a similar uptick in the on-the-field product. These are the guys who you'd expect to still be in these jobs six years from now if someone else doesn't snatch them up first.
Kevin Sumlin
Jim Mora
Todd Graham
Rich Rodriguez
Hugh Freeze
Mike Leach
And then there's the second group, where recruiting did not experience an immediate uptick and, consequently, the on-the-field product has mostly maintained its status as it did under the previous staff.
Dana Holgorsen
Larry Fedora
Tim Beckman
Charlie Weis
Kyle Flood
Paul Chryst