Players That Arkansas Coaches Helped into NFL Draft

Bret Bielema and his newly assembled University of Arkansas football coaching staff including the additions of Barry Lunney, Jr. and Mike Smith have played roles in at least 128 college players being drafted by the NFL.

Without evaluating the relative value of each of the pro player, some big names are easy to spot… Drew Brees, Ray Lewis, Warren Sapp, Darren Sproles, Brandon Meriweather, Terrence Newman, Micheal Bush, and J.J. Watt. Feel free to pick out some of the others and comment below. Twenty five were first round draft picks with the highest two being offensive lineman Joe Thomas out of Wisconsin going No. 3 overall in 2007 and Terrance Newman out of Kansas State taken in the 2003 NFL Draft with the 5th overall pick. 58 players were drafted in the first three rounds.

An explanation of how the chart was complied is below. Each segment has two sets of column labels. The first is the Coach, the beginning and ending years at a position, then the years for drafts after the coach leaves, the coaching position and school. The second set of column labels identifies the players drafted by year, round number, overall pick, team, name and school.

Clearly the two major components are a solid understanding of each coach’s job history, by year, job responsibility, and school, and the NFL Drafts for the relevant years.

The easy part was to acquire all of the NFL Drafts for the last 20 years (1993-2012) since Randy Shannon’s experience went back that far. Through the main NFL Drafts, supplementals were ignored, the NFL Drafted 4,996 players over that time. The list came from NFL.com Full Draft History and then the information was managed so it could be sorted.

The coaching histories are in Arkansas Football Staff Previous Coaching Positions At-A-Glance. The source information is below the charts in that post. Mike Smith’s bio came from Kansas State and primarily from this link. Barry Lunney, Jr.’s came from the University of Arkansas press release.

A few things are important to understand. In the charts above, a coach only gets credit for a player within his responsibility. If the coach is assigned to tight ends, then he does not get credit for offensive linemen. A defensive or offensive coordinator has responsibility for the entire side of the ball so he gets credit for the entire side of the ball while a head coach is credited with the entire lot of a team’s draftees. Graduate assistants may have responsibility practically but are not one of the recognized NCAA positions so a coach gets no credit for being a GA for a player who was drafted. Players are not counted twice toward the 128 number (but may be listed twice above) and are credited to the higher ranking coach. The primary conflict came between Brett Bielema and Chris Ash.

A coach only needs to have coached a player for one season to get credit for the player. The easy part is to look at all NFL Drafts between the first draft following the coach’s first season at a position to the one following his last season at the position. For instance, looking at Joel Thomas’ history, he coached for John L. Smith and Bobby Petrino at Louisville in 2002 and 2003. The main drafts are the 2003 and 2004 drafts. The extended drafts are 2005 through 2007 which capture players who had the coach for their first season(s). In Joel Thomas’ case, four players who logged stats under him in 2002 and 2003 were drafted, so they count toward his total.

Because of information availability, only game records could be tracked back to the year 2000. It’s important because of the certainty of the influence over the player. Continuing with the Joel Thomas example, you’ll find that Thomas coached Michael Bush in 2003 through 13 games where Bush rushed for more than 500 yards as a freshman. Bush was ultimately drafted in 2007, so Bush counts.

With players before 2000, efforts were made through Fanbase to verify that the player was on the roster for the earlier season. Some were cut because they were Juco signees who were eventually drafted, but the coach never saw. However, the certainty with stats logged in games isn’t there. Even in this group, there is more certainty with some than others. For instance, Warren Sapp was drafted as a Defensive Tackle in the 1995 NFL Draft but the issue is whether he played for Randy Shannon in 1992 when Shannon’s responsibility was for defensive linemen. It would seem likely that Sapp did play for Shannon since Sapp was an All Big-East player in 1993 & 1994 and was a sophomore in 1992. Sapp surely saw Shannon in 1992.