This is my best attempt to provide the full history of Coach Steve Mariucci. Only the data will be supplied here without any inferences by yours truly so as to encourage reader(s) and others to draw their own conclusions about his viability as the head coach of Your Washington Redskins. I'm loose on that issue, right now, though by the time this post is over will hopefully have reached a thoughtful conclusion.
1996 Head Coach California Golden Bears: Steve Mariucci's brief tenure at Cal wasn't that impressive on its own -- he finished 6-5 in the regular season but closed out .500 with an Aloha Bowl loss to Navy, 42-38 -- but perspective should be registered. He was preceded by Keith Gilbertson who, for one season of his four year tenure was pretty good though, for the rest, was pretty bad. Cal went 9-4 in 1993 under Gilbertson which turned out to be an anomaly. In '94 the team was 4-7 and then followed that up with a 3-8 year.
With this seemingly dismal team that was two years removed from a winning season (which itself was preceded by disappointment; 4-7 in '92) Steve Mariucci finished the regular season as a winner and lost a very narrow bowl game. In Pac-10 play Mooch was just 3-5 and scored 224 points to the 288 his team allowed. This is better, but not by matters of degree, than his total season margin of 382 scored to 407 given up. Without having on hand any overall CFB data for the year of 1996, I'm left with only the raw numbers: Mooch's Bears scored over 31 points a game and thus more than anyone until Jeff Tedford, who has turned out to be a very solid CFB coach. Mooch was giving up nearly 34 points a game. As an absolute number, 407 points was the most any Cal team had given up in the history of the program, to that point, and remains 2nd in school history. By contrast, Tom Holmoe's (who turned out to not be so good for Cal) winless 1999 team gave up 254 points over 11 games; 10 points less per game than Mooch's 1996 squad.
All that said, it should be remembered that the team returned to mediocrity after Mariucci skipped town for San Fransisco; his successor, the aforementioned Tom Holmoe, went 3-8, 5-6, 0-11, 3-8, and 1-10. Whether that tells us that Steve Mariucci was an overachiever at a bad program or merely that he was a better coach than Tom Holmoe, I leave to readers. But Mariucci's 1996 team was successful despite being surrounded on both sides by 2 years of losers.
In 1997, Mariucci inherited a very good team from George Seifart and perhaps made it even better. In 1996 while he was at Cal, the 49ers were accumulating a 12-4 record and 1-1 postseason showing. Mariucci followed in '97 and '98 (and 2002, incidentally) with 1-1 postseason records, but the team was better in the regular season at 13-3. Summary by year going Record, Off. Yards rank, Off. Points rank, Def. Yards rank, Def. Points rank, postseason record:
1997 - 13-3, 12th, 5th, 1st, 3rd, 1-1
1998 - 12-4, 1st, 3rd, 23rd, 13th 1-1
1999 - 4-12, 10th, 22nd, 28th, 30th, nope
2000 - 6-10, 4th, 6th, 29th, 28th, nope
2001 - 12-4, 4th, 3rd, 13th, 9th, 0-1
2002 - 10-6, 8th, 13th, 14th, 18th, 1-1
Overall - 57-39, 6.5th, 8.6th, 18th, 19th, 3-4
The 49ers went into a nosedive after Mariucci left, going 7-9, 2-14, 4-12, etc. They have yet to have a winning season since the team fired him after his 6-31 loss to the Bucs in '02. Didn't they win the Super Bowl that year? Yea, they did, and their margin of victory in the Super Bowl was even larger than their first round stomping of the 49ers. Good call, San Fran, how's that worked out?
The Lions wasted no time hiring Mariucci in 2003 where he remained through the some of the 2005 season, having been fired partway through the season in November of that year. Summary:
2003 - 5-11, 32nd, 26th, 24th, 25th, nope
2004 - 6-10, 24th, 24th, 22nd, 18th, nope
2005* - 5-11, 27th, 28th, 20th, 21st, nope
Overall figures should be easy enough to tell: they simply weren't very good. However, they weren't very good when he got there, either. Mariucci's 5-11 season was actually a 2 win improvement on the prior year, a 3 win improvement on the year prior to that. Hard to believe but after Mariucci left Detroit in '05 they actually got worse than 5-11, returning to a 3 win team in 2006.
Overalls in the NFL: 72-67 (.518), 3-4 in the postseason, with two division titles to his name. Conclusions will be left entirely up to reader(s) though expect some of my own before the entire hiring process is over. Redskins Insider says Steve Mariucci is one of the four guys competing for this Head Coaching position as of this moment. The Post says: Mariucci and team will talk this week.
Also, go read this.
* Dick Jauron took over for Mooch, as I said, in November. I'm not going to look up the statistics for individual games Steve coached since that's too time consuming.