Replacing Managers Helps in Sports?

The Game Room
1

This may be a General Question with a real answer, but since we have a thread called “Firing Principals of underperforming schools is going to improve results. Is this magical thinking?” in this IMHO Forum, I figured this spin-off discussion should go here as well. Mods, if you transfer this, please let me know.
My initial reaction to that thread title was a sarcastic, “Why not? It works for corporations and major league sports so it should work everywhere.”

Then I realized, if the team managers are principals then the coaches are the teachers. That means the players are equivalent to the students(?) And while it’s still possible to hire and fire managers/principals and coaches/teachers, it’s not possible to trade out players, rotate them on and off the sidelines, or send them off to the minor leagues. So that’s the first place the analogy breaks down (and things get worse from there).

But then I began to wonder: Does it even work for sports teams? Admittedly, I’m not enough of a sports fan to have a broad knowledge but, other than Don Coryell, I don’t know that a replacement manager has radically turned a team’s performance around (and I only knew about Coryell because I grew up in San Diego). Are the owners replacing managers of losing teams to punish the manager, or because they believe the next manager will improve the team?

–G?
It doesn’t seem to work much for corporations, either.

2

Moving over to the Game Room.

3

Withdrawn, as I misread the OP.

4

There have been a few studies that conclude replacing your coach/manager doesn’t help. That said, I think there are a number of exceptions in sports where you will likely get better than average returns (eg. the team gives up on the old coach).

However, while I think the management structure in sports is similar enough to education to make the comparison fair, I think it is less instructive for a few reasons.

  1. Sports are zero sum. Even if a coach is slightly better, he must still be better than his direct competition to get more wins. Since his gains are someone else’s losses, the measured effects may not be accurate. Principals can makes a school better without another school having to be worse.

  2. Sports outcomes are bimodal. Since we largely judge coaches by wins and losses, a better performing team may not be reflected in the record. Marginal gains by principals can be measured incrementally.

  3. Coaches are generally risk averse, because there is little job security and because there are small sample sizes.

5

Sometimes, replacing a manager is just a really easy way for an owner to appear to be doing something meaningful.

6

Amen brother.

And not just in sports.

7

I’m sure I’ve posted a screed almost exactly like this one before, but I’ll repeat it.

First, are there any genuine studies determining whether firing a coach or manager in mid-season helps teams start winning? I don’t know. I can offer only anecdotal evidence and personal observation.

Are there any examples of a struggling team turning things around in mid-season with a new manager? Sure- my Yankees were in disarray in mid-1978. They had fallen way behind the surging Red Sox, everybody on the team was fighting, and Billy Martin seemed to have lost control of the team. The Yanks fired Martin, and hired the much mellower Bob Lemon as manager. The Yankees relaxed, started playing great ball, and went on to win the World Series.

Logic tells me that, over the long run, good teams win, bad teams lose, and mediocre teams hover around .500 no matter who the coach or manager is. So, it really SHOULDN’T make a huge difference if an underachieving Yankees team fires Joe Girardi the first week of August. It SHOULDN"T matter if the Bengals fire Marvin Lewis after a blowout loss in week 11. It SHOULDN’T matter if Texas fires Rick Barnes after the Longhorns basketball team starts the season 10-12.

And yet… firing the coach often DOES help, at least for a litttle while! It’s very common to see a team that had been struggling go on a winning streak after a mid-season coaching change.
A Yankee squad that had been 45-57 might well go on a tear and flinish 81-81 under the interim manager! The Bengals might finish the season strongly under an interim coach and contend for the last wild card spot. The Longhorns might start playing lights out under the interim coach, and grab a 14th seed NCAA spot.

SOMETIMES, management will decide that the interim coach did such a great job that he deserves the head coaching job! But… it almost always turns out that the interim coach has lost his “magic touch” and the team struggles again the next season. It USUALLY turns out the interim coach wasn’t such a genius after all. (Any of my fellow Giants fans remember John McVay?)

So, why DO underachieving teams sometimes start playing better after a mid-season coaching change?

a) SOMETIMES, it’s just dumb luck, and the Law of Averages. The 1978 Yankees were an extremely talented team that had some injuries and some bad luc early on. The Red Sox, who were ALSO an extremely talented team, had played over their heads. It was almost inevitable that, eventually, the Red Sox would cool off, Reggie Jackson would start hitting again, Catfish Hunter and Eddie Figueroa would start pitching well again, and the Red Sox’ huge lead would narrow. MAYBE the calming presence of Bob Lemon helped everyone cool down and focus on baseball again… but MAYBE the Yanks would have started playing like champs again if Billy Martin had been given a little more time.

b) SOMETIMES, the stress and strain of losing brings out the worst in everyone, including coaches. If a talented team with a Type A coach is struggling, he may start screaming and yelling and questioning guys’ manhood to the point where all the players are tense, walking on eggshells, constantly second-guessing themselves. If he gets fired and replaced by a calmer, nicer assistant, everybody may relax, take a deep breath, and start to have a little fun. For a little while, that can make them play better.

c) SOMETIMES, the firing of a coach gives athletes incentive to work harder and play better. If, say, the Jets were to fire Rex Ryan next month, a lot of his players would think, “Cripes, at the end of the season, the GM and the new coach are liable to clean house and bring in their own guys. I’ve gotta get cracking and play a lot better, to make sure I still have a job next year!” In the same way, many college athletes know their scholarship won’t necessarily be renewed if a new coach comes on board next season. They have a lot of incentive to play well so the new coach keeps them around next season.

8

There’s no reason to think that the replacement coach would be an inherently “better” coach than the fired one. If he had a positive expected “Wins Above Replacement” he’d probably have a job already.

Frankly, the fact that replacements don’t do noticeably worse gives credence to the idea that the incumbent coach was pulling the team down. A guy walks in, has to implement a whole new system, work with other coaches he may not have worked with before. He doesn’t get a chance to get his system in place with training camp and exhibition games, it’s a few days and you’re in the fire.

As an aside, we sometimes forget that sports is entertainment, are the fans more enterained, more interested if you change the coach? If they are, then changing the coach is a good thing, even if the W/L doesn’t change very much. You’re giving fans some of what they want, even if you can’t do much for the record itself.

9

Of course, Bob Lemon was only available that year because the White Sox had fired him. Owner Bill Veeck was unsatisifed with the team’s 34-40 (.459) record. Veeck replaced Lemon with Larry Doby, under whom the Sox went 37-50 (.425).

And there’s the problem–we remember the manager changes that worked (2003 Marlins, anyone?) and forget those that didn’t. Who the hell remembers the 1978 White Sox? Nobody. I barely remember them myself, and I was a fan.

We also forget the many, many teams which didn’t fire their manager and improved dramatically in the second half of the season.

There is a new book out, specific to baseball, called When in Doubt, Fire the Skipper: Midseason Managerial Changes in Major League Baseball. There are no reviews of it online, so I don’t know the conclusion. Given the results for other sports posted above, I doubt the book will find any net positive effect.

10

Sometimes a culture change is in order. See Bob Lemon example above, or 49ers transition from Singletary to Harbaugh. Sometimes your manager is simply incompetent. See Red Sox from Valentine to Farrell.

I actually think managers have a great deal of cultural effect in baseball because the play such a long, grueling season. They play a game almost every day for 6 months.

Edit: My examples obviously are not mid-season changes. Sorry if that was the subject.

11

No, I don’t remember only when coaching changes work. I merely gave one instance where the change seems to have worked. But I said myself, the 1978 Yankees were a very talented team, and the Law of Averages suggests that they were bound to get their act together EVENTUALLY, just as the Red Sox were bound to cool off and come back to the pack eventually.

MAYBE Lemon deserves credit for getting the team to relax and just play ball. MAYBE he deserves some credit for getting his pitching staff straightened out (he’d been an excellent pitcher and pitching coach in the past). Or maybe the team would eventually have gone on a tear by themselves, regardless of who was managing. We’ll never know.

I can think of plenty of other instances where a coaching change accomplished virtually nothing (i.e. a lousy team continued to play lousy for the interim guy), or made things worse (a talented but underachieving team completely went to hell under the interim guy).

And as I said, even when a team starts to play better for the interim guy, the results rarely carry into the next season. When teams decide to give a successful interim coach the head coaching job the next year, they generally regret it. Look at what happened to the Knicks after Mike D’Antoni was fired. They played a lot better under interim coach Mike Woodson- but when Woodson got the job full-time, the Knicks didn’t do much better than they had under D’Antoni. Woodson is unemployed again.

12

I see it helping sometimes with football (soccer) here in the UK - mainly with respect to relegation. Unlike you socialists in the US, we don’t have any parity mechanisms like the draft, or a salary cap, to try and level the playing field. So a relegation can be a devastating event - put the club out of business in the worst case. So if the club is on the slide there’s massive pressure to make a change at the top.

There’s a cohort of managers here who basically know how to manage a premiership football team, but they don’t know how to run a top level team (e.g. Pulis, Allardyce, Bruce, McCarthy etc). One of these guys will usually be available, and they will be affordable. If a relatively unproven manager is struggling with a team in the relegation zone, his position will become untenable wrt replacment with one of these safe pairs of hands.

It’s still always going to be an anecdotal assessment on whether the manager helped, as there’s no control experiment. The premier league is quite a step up from the championship, though, so you do sometimes see guys that are out of their depth and just not fielding a competent football team.

13

Another thought- there are different reasons for firing coaches in mid-season in different sports.

In college football, recruiting is probably the biggest single job a coach has. As soon as the regular season is over, college football coaches have to get cracking recruiting top high school athletes to come to their schools. Sometimes, that means that you can’t afford to wait until the end of the season to hire a new coach. You want to get the new coach on board before recruiting season begins.

So, IF Florida were to decide to fire Will Muschamp, they might well decide to do so in the first week of November. NOT because they think the interim coach would do a better job, but so that they could start trying to lure the BIG name coach they really want, and have him in place to hit the recruiting trail.