Just what the title says. I don’t mean if it was the first domino to fall in a series of moves that eventually led to a Super Bowl. Has it ever turned a team around the season it happened?
I don’t think the goal is really to turn the season around - it’s to get a jump on interviewing for the next hire.
But they can’t. Not legally anyway. There are rules regarding when they can start interviewing prospects. The teams that fire coaches at the end of the year do it immediately and everyone starts the process at the same time. Only if they think the interim coach is the answer that would make sense.
They can’t do formal in-person interviews or reach out to candidates currently working for other teams, but they can do pretty much everything else.
That includes setting up their search committee, hiring external consultants, doing background research on likely candidates, etc. That’s a little harder to do with the current coach in the building and you want as much time as possible to set that up - not try to do it all in a week or two after the season ends. Not impossible but it’s not a great situation to set up your head coaching search while the current job holder is right there.
Also, if the candidates are internal, aren’t currently working for another team, and aren’t working for the NFL head office, they can be interviewed now - virtually or in-person. Once the season ends, the restrictions on contacting coaches working for other teams are eased, though there are a few rules about coaches on playoff teams.
Of course, top candidates will include current offensive and defensive coordinators, so teams will generally not make decisions before those people can be interviewed first, but as long as they satisfy the Rooney Rule, there’s nothing stopping a team from hiring an out of (NFL) work coach now. For example, if the Jets wanted to offer Eric Bieniemy the HC position right now, they can do that. Or to take the interim tag off Jeff Ulbrich.
@Great_Antibob has the primary reason. A secondary reason is to demonstrate that a new leaf is being turned over.
If by “worked” you mean only win/loss record, then probably not. But it might have an impact on other important metrics like tickets sold and viewership. Maybe there’s a little bump in renewed interest to see if anything changes.
With no promotion or relegation, how much does anybody care if you halt a plummeting decline, win a few games and manage to finish just outside the bottom 25%?
The people who go to a game or watch it on TV usually care if it’s a win or not. It’s not just about the final record or making the playoffs.
Statistically, it does usually result in a better performance.
Define “worked”.
As @Moriarty has cited, it’s not uncommon to see a team have at least a short-lived bump following an in-season firing. It’s impossible to truly explain why this tends to happen. The interim coach is almost always already in the building, and you have the same players, scheme and one less coach to help you prepare so you might think it’s at best a neutral move, but there’s an undeniable pattern of immediate improvement - even if for only one or two games. Maybe the guy you fired was a complete buffoon so it’s addition by subtraction, but I would guess that’s not typical. More likely the players and coaches have a come-to-jesus moment that leads to a brief adrenaline boost and more intense focus on preparation.
But again, it all comes down to how you define “worked.” Only the GM and owner (or HC in the case of an OC/DC firing) can really tell you what the goal is, and it will be different for every situation. If you’re firing someone in say the first half of the season you have a different goal than if you’re firing a guy in the final handful of games.
Some hypothetical goals:
Show the fans and media that you’re a results-oriented organization.
This one is basically bullshit, but it definitely happens. Anyone paying attention knows that the season is already lost, but you want to send the message that you’re not just waving the white flag. Firing a coach tends to be the only real move you can make mid-season. For better or worse, this almost always “works”.
You want to change the media narrative.
This is probably just a sibling of the previous one without the MBA/PR filter. The GM/Owners are getting lambasted in the press after a string of truly embarrassing losses. So, in order to have a proper scapegoat you fire someone. The fans, for a little while, start blaming that idiot for the losses and spend a few weeks speculating about what the new guy will change. The media starts writing stories about the designated scapegoat, or about the super-professional discussions that led to the firing, or about how qualified the interim guy is, or about what we can expect to change, etc. It is a ready-made narrative and it buys the bosses some air cover. This too always “works.”
You get a new play-caller.
Sometimes the problem you’ve identified is that the guy with the headset has lost the thread. Teams have your number and everyone in the locker room can see it. This one is one of the few “real” reasons to fire a guy. And when the HC is calling plays for the offense or defense, often the only way to get someone else to call plays is to fire the guy. If you’ve correctly diagnosed the issue, and the Coordinator who steps in to call plays actually has new ideas, you often will see a real improvement. It isn’t going to save the season in most cases, but you might stay out of the crosshairs and salvage whatever culture you have in the building. We’ve definitely seen this one “work” in a real way, though it’s not like those teams are making deep playoff runs. But they might beat their rivals and play spoiler.
Save the locker room.
This one is probably a kissing cousin of the previous one. There’s definitely examples of this, where the existing HC is toxic as hell. Players are openly revolting. When leadership sees this, they need to nip it in the bud or risk having a mass exodus of talent in the offseason. Like every business, you need to be a place talented people want to work. So the goal may be to simply defuse a potential catastrophe. Whether this leads to a better product on the field is secondary. This usually “works”.
You signal that you’re a landing spot for the next guy.
This one is tough to quantify, and might be dubious, but firing your coach gives the “hot” HC candidates several extra months to start visualizing themselves coaching your team. When the season ends and 6-7 coaches are fired it’s often a mad scramble to line up interviews. And most HC candidates are in the middle of playoff runs and don’t want to spend a ton of energy picking the next job. But if there’s 2-3 vacancies already in November or December, those coaches and their families can start having dinner table conversations about what it would be like to live and work in city X. You can’t negotiate with employed coaches, but you can definitely start rolling out the red carpet. Talk to their agents off the record, leak stories to the press about the type of candidate you might want, do whatever you can to make yourself seem like a team ready to invest in success. I think this is another one that always “works”. Whether you successfully hire your top coaching candidate in the offseason or not, it definitely ensured that you were in the conversation any time some pundit talks about rising stars. It also ensures that you’re never perceived as having stabbed a coach in the back if you get caught evaluating or enticing other coaches.
Win 2-3 extra games.
I doubt most organizations really value this one, but ironically it might be one of the more reliable objectives. From a hardcore fans POV, maybe going from 4-13 to 6-11 isn’t viewed as a good thing. You get a worse draft pick and you’re still not sniffing a playoff game. But some highly competitive GMs might actually take pride in not being a bottom 5 team. Those extra wins feel good on gameday and when their career is over they might be the difference between having 100 wins or 98 wins, or from having a .520 winning percentage from a .485 winning percentage. And let’s face it, some casual fans aren’t thinking about draft picks. Winning an extra game or two means more viewers, more tickets sold and more social media posts. As we said above, there’s a really good chance you’re going to improve a little bit so maybe you pull the trigger. If you’re more interested in not finishing last in the division than you are drafting in the top 5, this one can definitely “work”.
If you define “work” as going out there and winning the division or securing a wildcard berth, then no, that would be highly unlikely. And it’s really rare for an interim HC to retain the job. It’s really rare for anyone to hire a new HC from outside the building mid-season, so you’re not bringing in an unemployed guy like Belichick in week 13. So firing the old coach mid-season doesn’t accelerate you finding the next successful guy.
If there is a truly toxic coach that is a very valid reason. It may save you from losing free agents that can go the next season. However you are still dealing with all the old coach’s staff so it may not help. That’s probably the least likely scenario.
A team that fires its head coach is going to be a losing team. Firing mid-season makes them look like a dumpster fire. I think that will cut down on the coaching prospect pool. There will always be some coaches who will take the chance but you might not get the pick you want. A team choosing to go in a different direction at the end of the season seems normal. A team that fires in week 9 seems disfunctional. That may also carry over to free agents that don’t want to become part of the mess.
Yes success is measured in winning. In baseball teams have had a change in management and made it to the playoffs. Obviously a lot more games involved. In football when there are 8 or 9 games left it seems at least possible. Depending on the division that year sometimes you barely need a winning record to move on.
It’s hard to imagine Jeff Ulbrich winding up with a better record than Robert Saleh with the Jets.
Saleh was 2-3 when fired (.400). Ulbrich is currently 1-5 (.167). Even if you look at Saleh’s overall record with the team (20-36, .357) it’s difficult to imagine the Jets surpassing that this year with Ulbrich.
Another reason for owners firing coaches mid-season: they’re pissed off that their toy is no longer bright and shiny and are dismissing the coach because of pique. Woody Johnson purportedly was trying to salvage the Jets’s season but his move seems to have had the opposite effect.
A lot of it is just regression to the mean though. You fire a coach because he is underperforming and usually there is some luck/poor circumstance at least partially related. IF a team just reverts back to normal luck/performance you will see an improved record.
Two recent examples of this that I can think of:
- Urban Meyer getting ousted in Jacksonville late in the 2021 season. By all accounts, Meyer was strongly disliked by his players and coaches, and had off-field issues, too. Canning Meyer didn’t help that season (they were already 2-11 when he was fired), but they were able to go 9-8 the following two seasons.
- Jon Gruden leaving the Raiders in 2021, in his second stint with the team. To be entirely fair, he resigned after five games, rather than being fired, but that was probably just a formality, as it was due to a series of horrible emails from him which were released publicly (and if he hadn’t quit, he would undoubtedly have been fired). After Gruden left, special-teams coach Rich Bisaccia became the interim coach; they went 7-5 under him, and made the playoffs (something that Gruden had not managed to accomplish).
The other reason firing mid-season may lead to immediate improvement is because usually the interim head coach, typically a guy who was already offensive or defensive coordinator, has been hearing all the players’ complaints all along. Wrong scheme, timid strategy, too much micromanagement, keeps starting a guy who shouldn’t be starter, whatever. So once the head coach is fired, this interim guy is free to immediate implement all the things he knows the players have been wanting all along.
I really doubt that is a factor at all. Going with what the players want is usually a recipe for disaster.
Right. There are many ways to define “worked” as mentioned by you and others. I know someone who sold season tickets for the Astros suites. It’s easy now, but tough when they lost 100 games in a season for several years. You need those ticket buyers (big companies mostly) to renew/be interested in renewing and doing sometimes literally anything gives the impression of change for now and next year. You certainly want real change and it’s necessary to sell suites and seats, but the impression of change can be a short term-fix.
It’s not really sport related answer, but certainly it “works” in the sense the owner is selling a product that needs to make the owner money and this can help do that. It’s only short-sighted if you don’t also have a longer term fix in the works (like the Astros did with their young, unknown and cheap talent).
Not NFL, and earlier than mid-season, but the St.Louis Blues fired their head coach 2 months into the season in 2019(?) and ended up winning the Stanley Cup that year.