A bunch of local friends and acquaintances feel various ways about our NFL team’s coach being fired. I don’t follow sports closely, and this is something I’ve always wondered about.
Does firinga coach and bringing in a new coach generally have a measurable effect on team performance?
Probably even more than a star QB, an NFL head coach is the single person who has the biggest effect on a team’s success. A great coach can get an average roster into the playoffs (maybe even deep into the playoffs), while a bad coach will struggle to make the playoffs even with a great roster.
Maybe. It depends on what the team’s problems are.
Every person on the team has some set of skills that they’re supposed to be providing to the team. The skill set the coach is supposed to be providing is making sure the players and his staff are using their sets of skills at their best possible level. If the coach isn’t doing that, it’s probably a good idea to replace him.
But it’s possible to have a team where the coach has everyone working at their best possible level - and their best possible level isn’t good enough. If that’s the case, the coach isn’t the problem. You need to keep the coach and replace the people around him.
Yes, of course. Changing coaches fundamentally changes the team.
Now, whether that change is positive or negative is a bigger question.
I think you missed the question the OP was asking. Obviously it doesn’t help if it causes a negative change to the team.
Most research, in most sports, indicates that changing coaches is largely ineffective. Is Changing the Coach Really the Answer? from Freakonomics covers it briefly.
In a study of coaching changes in college football from 1997 - 2010 it was found that:
The OP was pretty poorly authored, but you can paraphrase it as “does the head coach really matter?” In contrast to sports like soccer and hockey, the NFL coach is hugely important to everything.
Does firing a NFL coach help? No, it doesn’t. Does HIRING a NFL coach help? Maybe, depends who it is. Does it change the team dramatically? Absolutely.
I’d say it’s almost never a good idea to get rid of a coach just because the team’s not doing well, but then I think of the Rams. Years of awful play under Jeff Fisher then the first year that he’s gone they win their division. I seriously think he should have been canned years ago and would’ve been if he wasn’t so well-liked and connected.
Making a coaching change is sometimes the best thing for an NFL team. This year’s Rams were already mentioned. When the 49ers made the change from Mike Singletary to Jim Harbaugh, the team immediately and drastically improved.
On the flipside:
Tom Landry’s first 6 seasons were busts. Had they fired him, they likely would have lost a lot of great potential.
On the other hand, they fired Tom Landry, who was stinking up the joint in the late ‘80s, to make room for Jimmy Johnson.
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It may or may not help the team do better, but it makes the owner, and probably a good portion of the fan base, feel better. Someone has to take the fall for failing to make the playoffs, and the head coach is one of the most central figures on the team.
Tangentially, NFL Head Coach has to be one of the most stressful and demanding occupations around, and given the vagaries of the team itself (injuries, talent, chemistry, etc), to have a long run with a good coach and tight team, along with a winning record, seems to be a rarity.
What about, say, KEEPING a coach past his prime that causes a negative effect?
A columnist I’ve read for years makes a related argument, especially concerning perennial powerhouses like Green Bay, Pittsburgh, and New England: they don’t have to fire the coach, because the wolves will only howl so loud. Oh, they’ll complain and bitch and whine when you don’t win the Super Bowl, or even - on rare occasions - miss the playoffs, but they won’t stop filling the stadium. Granted, there might be turnover in WHO is filling the stadium, but top tier teams with consistent success have waiting lists for tickets best measured in decades. That’s a LOT of people to just give up and walk away, even if you have several bad seasons in a row. That ability to roll with the punches during a down year can help a HC stay focused on the team and not his job, thus leading, generally, to a rather quick turnaround. Unfortunately, the same effect can lead to a coach sticking around longer than they should - looking at you, Capers.
Is a coaching change ALONE going to fix things permanently? No. You’ll never see an extremely talented NFL team go 2-14 solely because the coach is an idiot, nor will a terrible team ever turn around and win the Super Bowl with identical personnel just because the new coach is a genius.
But a coaching change COMBINED with the right new system and the right new players CAN turn things around.
Not sure how this applies to New England. They were a pretty poor team before Belichick although they did make it to two Super Bowls where they lost badly. Their only powerhouse years have been under a single coach, and he’s had 17 straight winning seasons. Before Belichick they fired plenty of coaches from poor teams.
Right, but imagine having Belichek without Brady all those years, and instead, you had Andy Dalton.
We’d probably all be debating whether or not Andy Dalton is the GOAT.
We might, we might.
Yah, fucking right.