David Shaw is done at Stanford. And while the Rose Bowl victories and Pac-12 Championships are nice, we all know that his foremost achievement was the seven Mythical California Cups in his twelve years as head coach. Before things went pear-shaped in the last two years he owned Cal (eight game winning streak before 2019) and UCLA (nine game streak before 2019). That went a long way to locking up hardware even in seasons when Stanford wasn’t otherwise great. Before Fresno State’s victory last year Stanford and USC had traded every title since 2006.
Is seven titles the most for one coach though? CFBD has a coaches API so let’s see if we can bolt on a check. I added a straightforward diff to include coach on the season-ending summary line. Here’s the new full resultset with coaches for all the years we’ve done “officially” so far:
$ python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -c -s 1941 1941, 16, Santa Clara, 5-1, Buck Shaw 1942, 20, UCLA, 4-1, Babe Horrell 1943, 33, March Field, 4-0, No coach found 1944, 15, March Field, 2-0-1, No coach found 1945, 9, USC, 4-1, Jeff Cravath 1946, 14, UCLA, 5-0, Bert LaBrucherie 1947, 10, USC, 3-0, Jeff Cravath 1948, 12, California, 5-0, Pappy Waldorf 1949, 14, California, 5-0, Pappy Waldorf 1950, 25, California, 5-0-1, Pappy Waldorf 1951, 20, San Francisco, 5-0, Joe Kuharich 1952, 13, USC, 3-0, Jess Hill 1953, 10, UCLA, 2-1, Red Sanders 1954, 10, UCLA, 3-0, Red Sanders 1955, 10, UCLA, 4-0, Red Sanders 1956, 8, USC, 2-1, Jess Hill 1957, 9, Stanford, 4-0, Chuck Taylor 1958, 8, Pacific, 2-0, No coach found 1959, 9, UCLA, 3-0, Bill Barnes 1960, 8, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1961, 9, UCLA, 3-0, Bill Barnes 1962, 9, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1963, 9, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1964, 8, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1965, 8, UCLA, 3-0, Tommy Prothro 1966, 9, UCLA, 3-0, Tommy Prothro 1967, 9, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1968, 10, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1969, 22, San Diego State, 6-0, Don Coryell 1970, 27, Long Beach State, 5-1, No coach found 1971, 25, Long Beach State, 5-1, No coach found 1972, 18, San Diego State, 4-0, Don Coryell 1973, 18, USC, 3-0, John McKay 1974, 18, San Diego State, 4-0, Claude Gilbert 1975, 23, UCLA, 3-0, Dick Vermeil 1976, 23, San Diego State, 5-0, Claude Gilbert 1977, 23, Fresno State, 5-0, Jim Sweeney 1978, 21, USC, 3-0, John Robinson 1979, 19, USC, 2-0-1, John Robinson 1980, 17, Long Beach State, 4-0, Dave Currey 1981, 18, San José State, 6-0, Jack Elway 1982, 21, UCLA, 4-0, Terry Donahue 1983, 20, Cal State Fullerton, 4-0, Gene Murphy 1984, 22, Cal State Fullerton, 4-0, Gene Murphy 1985, 21, Fresno State, 4-0, Jim Sweeney 1986, 22, San José State, 5-1, Claude Gilbert 1987, 23, San José State, 6-0, Claude Gilbert 1988, 22, Fresno State, 4-0, Jim Sweeney 1989, 22, Fresno State, 4-0, Jim Sweeney 1990, 20, San José State, 5-1, Terry Shea 1991, 21, Fresno State, 4-0, Jim Sweeney 1992, 16, Stanford, 4-0, Bill Walsh 1993, 12, California, 4-1, Keith Gilbertson 1994, 12, Fresno State, 2-0, Jim Sweeney 1995, 16, UCLA, 4-0, Terry Donahue 1996, 12, Stanford, 4-0, Tyrone Willingham 1997, 10, UCLA, 3-0, Bob Toledo 1998, 11, UCLA, 3-0, Bob Toledo 1999, 10, Stanford, 3-1, Tyrone Willingham 2000, 11, Fresno State, 2-1, Pat Hill 2001, 9, Stanford, 4-0, Tyrone Willingham 2002, 10, USC, 3-0, Pete Carroll 2003, 9, California, 2-1, Jeff Tedford 2004, 9, USC, 3-0, Pete Carroll 2005, 10, USC, 4-0, Pete Carroll 2006, 9, San José State, 3-0, Dick Tomey 2007, 8, Stanford, 3-1, Jim Harbaugh 2008, 10, USC, 3-0, Pete Carroll 2009, 10, Stanford, 3-1, Jim Harbaugh 2010, 7, Stanford, 3-0, Jim Harbaugh 2011, 11, Stanford, 4-0, David Shaw 2012, 10, Stanford, 5-0, David Shaw 2013, 10, Stanford, 3-1, David Shaw 2014, 10, USC, 3-1, Steve Sarkisian 2015, 11, Stanford, 4-0, David Shaw 2016, 10, Stanford, 3-0, David Shaw 2017, 11, USC, 4-0, Clay Helton 2018, 11, Stanford, 4-0, David Shaw 2019, 11, USC, 4-0, Clay Helton 2020, 5, Stanford, 2-0, David Shaw 2021, 11, Fresno State, 3-0, Kalen DeBoer 2022, 10, USC, 4-0, Lincoln Riley
There are a few weirdo years missing coaches but it looks pretty good. I decided to keep the default output without flags as the previous style without coaches. If you want coaches add the -c flag. From a data-normalization point of view the coach is a subordinate lookup “join” based on {team, year} whereas all the other fields are intrinsic to the definition and calculation of the MCC.
So who is our champ? Because I am lazy, and because I have taken the forward-looking step of making the final outputs a clean CSV, I elected to drop them into google sheets rather than write any more narrow-purpose data aggregation tools here. Google sheets has a very cool “column stats” button which gives us a one-click to answer questions like this. It turns out David Shaw is tied with USC legend John McKay:
David Shaw 7 John McKay 7 Jim Sweeney 6 Pete Carroll 4 Claude Gilbert 4
Jim Sweeney was the longtime coach of Fresno State. Claude Gilbert is interesting because he won two titles at San Diego State and two at San Jose State.
While we’re clicking column stats, here’s the overall team leaderboard:
USC 21 Stanford 15 UCLA 14 Fresno State 8 San Jose State 5 California 5
I added one more small diff to correct what had been a code hand-edit: now you can switch the virtual conference among our pre-defined team sets with an environment variable.
Who won the 2022 Mythical Texas Cup? TCU of course:
$ MCC_CONFERENCE=TEXAS python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -v North Texas 31 at UTEP 13 on Aug 27, 2022 Houston 37 at UT San Antonio 35 on Sep 03, 2022 SMU 48 at North Texas 10 on Sep 03, 2022 Houston 30 at Texas Tech 33 on Sep 10, 2022 Texas State 7 at Baylor 42 on Sep 17, 2022 UT San Antonio 20 at Texas 41 on Sep 17, 2022 TCU 42 at SMU 34 on Sep 24, 2022 Texas 34 at Texas Tech 37 on Sep 24, 2022 Rice 27 at Houston 34 on Sep 24, 2022 North Texas 27 at UT San Antonio 31 on Oct 22, 2022 Baylor 45 at Texas Tech 17 on Oct 29, 2022 UTEP 30 at Rice 37 on Nov 03, 2022 Texas Tech 24 at TCU 34 on Nov 05, 2022 Houston 63 at SMU 77 on Nov 05, 2022 TCU 17 at Texas 10 on Nov 12, 2022 TCU 29 at Baylor 28 on Nov 19, 2022 UT San Antonio 41 at Rice 7 on Nov 19, 2022 Baylor 27 at Texas 38 on Nov 25, 2022 Rice 17 at North Texas 21 on Nov 26, 2022 UTEP 31 at UT San Antonio 34 on Nov 26, 2022 North Texas 27 at UT San Antonio 48 on Dec 02, 2022 2022 final standings TCU 4-0 UT San Antonio 4-2 SMU 2-1 Texas Tech 2-2 Texas 2-2 Baylor 2-2 Houston 2-2 North Texas 2-3 Rice 1-3 Texas State 0-1 UTEP 0-3 2022, 21, TCU, 4-0