Which new FBS head coaches are most likely to succeed?

Among the many emails former Tennessee athletic director John Currie received when he began to search for a coach to replace Butch Jones was one from an Alabama athletic department staffer with the subject “Head Coaching Analysis.”

It included six pages of charts, graphs, numbers and pictures that told the story of every head coach hired since 2000 by the “Top 25 historic football programs,” determined by using decades of The Associated Press rankings .

Using a weighted formula that combined winning percentage, percentage of top10 finishes in the AP poll and percentage of seasons winning a national championship, and putting extra emphasis on the most recent five seasons, each coach’s stint at a school was given an efficiency rating.

What the numbers revealed was mostly what we already know: Nick Saban is doing great at Alabama; Urban Meyer’s tenure at Ohio State has been excellent; and hiring Pete Carroll worked out really well for Southern California.

The numbers also showed that coaches most likely to succeed at those schools had previous Power Five head coaching experience. Also, coaches who were previously a Power Five assistant had higher efficiency ratings than coaches who were previously a head coach at a Group of Five school.

While far from scientific, the research is interesting and probably useful.

Instead of grading the newly hired head coaches in college football —a truly flawed and impossible exercise— here is another approach: A most-likely-to-succeed list that takes into account program expectations and recent history, along with that coach’s potential and fit for the job.

With that, the most likely to succeed list among the head coaches starting new jobs in 2018:

UCLA is one of the nation’s most confounding programs. With all that talent around them, the Bruins are rarely relevant nationally, and haven’t played in a Rose Bowl game since 1999. It is fair to question whether Kelly can recreate his Oregon success (46-7), but it’s not as if he returns to a Pac-12 with imposing obstacles.

Sky-high expectations and Taggart’s .485 winning percentage make for some skepticism about this marriage. But at every place Taggart has worked, the team was bad before he took over and got better during his tenure. The native Floridian has already showed he is capable of recruiting at an elite level. Mullen benefits from taking over a program that has been underwhelming since Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow flirted with repeat national titles. At Mississippi State, Mullen consistently maxed out a program that lags behind the rest of its division competition in tradition, history and resources. Now he moves toward the front of the pecking order in the SEC East.

Moorhead comes to Starkville from Penn State, where he was offensive coordinator for two seasons, but he also has been a head coach at FCS Fordham — a tough place to win where he went 38-13 in four seasons. In the SEC West, Mississippi State fans generally have the most realistic expectations for their favorite team. Mullen raised the standards. Moorhead seems well-situated to continue to meet them.