Daily Bull 12.30.15 - Fact Finding Mission

This week's #WednesdayTrendsday is a bit of a departure from the norm, mostly in the fact that we will only be using historical data with no projections and that these are all actual facts. You know facts? They're the things that are true and can't read message boards.

Evidently a lot of people want to fire Kevin Sumlin. That's good, because it's always good to gain perspective and have a reminder that people are very silly. This knowledge can help you in your day-to-day interactions with people and keep you safe.

Although at this point the majority of bowls are meaningless in some sense, in aggregate they can still be a useful barometer of the competitiveness of a program on the national scale. In addition to requiring a minimum threshold of performance in order to get invited, bowls allow additional inter-conference play against teams that also met that threshold.

So how does Kevin Sumlin stack up against past Aggie coaches in terms of gaining bowl bids?

Kevin Sumlin is the only coach in Aggie history to have a 100% bowl bid rating. He has only four bowl bid opportunities at this point, but no other coach got a bowl bid in each of his first four seasons and the only other coach to ever get four bids in a row was R.C. Slocum (he did it twice in his 14 years.)

Now as we know, there are more bowls now than there were in the past, a statement that is born out in the obvious upward trend of bowl bids. There are also more FBS teams than there were in the past. Some very fancy mathematics could be pulled to normalize these numbers, but I ain't gonna do it. Instead, let's take a look at these coaches' success once they got into a bowl.

Sumlin now has some company, as he and three other Aggie coaches won every single bowl to which they were invited. Of course Stiteler and Stallings only went to one each, and Wilson went to two. Sumlin's three wins may not be a staggering number at this point, but they are still unprecedented in school history. On a side note, Dennis Franchione has the distinction of having the highest bowl bid rating of the coaches who were blanked in all of those bowls. Way to coach 'em up, Dennis.

Put this all together and what we currently have is the most bowl-successful coach in Aggie history, albeit with a small sample size. That sample size gets bigger by one tonight. BTHOL.