Ranking the Hardest Working SEC Coaches

Jul 15, 2015; Birmingham, AL, USA; General view of a microphone with an SEC logo while Kentucky Wildcats safety A.J. Stamps (background) speaks to media during SEC media day at the Wynfrey Hotel. Mandatory Credit: Shanna Lockwood-USA TODAY Sports

There has been a lot of talk around the country about what it means to be a hard worker. When Paul Ryan was elected to be Speaker of the House, he was described as one of the hardest working politicians in Washington.

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry was offended by this. She went on to talk about how classifying someone as a hard worker is demeaning to people who truly work hard like slaves and mothers who raise children without healthcare.

Mike Rowe even offered his opinion. His basic point is slaves didn’t have a choice. They were forced into what they did. They certainly worked hard, but they were going to because they had no choice in the matter.

Regardless of how you feel, I think we can all agree SEC coaches work hard to get their teams on the field and prepared to take the competition. But who works the hardest? And how would you even begin to quantify that?

I decided to give it a shot. The hardest part of this was figuring out a way to rank the coaches without it being totally subjective. So this is the system I came up with.

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The first thing I did was to average where each school ranked according to 247 Sports since 2011. I included 2011 because 5th year seniors from that class would be on this year’s team. I then determined the winning percentage of the current coach since that coach has been there. I threw out Jim McElwain of Florida and Shawn Elliott of South Carolina because we have less than a year with them.

I then compared where each school was in terms of their winning percentage to their recruiting ranking. So if a school was 6th in the SEC in average recruiting ranking, but 5th in winning percentage, they got a hard working rating of +1. And if they were 7th in the SEC in recruiting but 9th in winning percentage, they got a -2.

It’s probably not perfect, but trying to quantify a topic that isn’t easy to quantify is not a simple task. It’s the best way of rating coaches in this field I could come up with.

Next: In 12th Place...