Was Bill Cowher that great a coach?

The Game Room
41

I think it depends on what you’re into. Jon Gruden had one very good season in Tampa, a half-dozen average ones, and two horrible ones. That, for me, is not good. I would rather contend every year and not win than win once and never contend otherwise.

Andy Reid, Marv Levy, Marty Schottenheimer and Cowher are, for my money, among the best coaches in league history. They turn(ed) out competitive teams every single year and didn’t do well in the playoffs. Well, big deal. Regular season records are much better indicators of success than playoff records because they’re a bigger statistical sample.

Cowher should get extra props since he coached the Steelers, meaning he could never spend money on the league’s elite players. If he wanted elite talent he had to draft it and nurture it himself.

42

Yeah, I’d have to admit the toughest game in 2005 was vs the Bengals, and we dodged a bullet there. We had the Indy game won except for that fluke fumble. We could have just kneeled and won.

While people criticize the refs in 2005, dangit, we deserve it for when O’Donnell threw the game in 1995.

43

I keep imagining what that game would have been like if Palmer hadn’t had his knee shredded on the second play of the game (a 60 yard completion to Chris Henry, also severely injured on that same play). Jon Kitna fucking sucks, he has always sucked, he has never been a good QB. Damn I hated having Kitna in there on the most important game of the Bengals young “new and improved-ness”.

44

Kitna doesn’t suck. He was an ideal backup. He was just on the very low end of the starter continuum.

45

Ah, my bad. Yeah, I fail to see what’s wrong with making the conference finals on a consistent basis and being in the elite tier of teams.

46

This is America. You’re supposed to reach the highest highs and the lowest lows, and nothing else will do. Some people just need to have Donald Trump coaching their teams. Me, I’ll stick with Warren Buffett.

47

If by ideal backup you mean his small hands attached to his noodle arm can hold a clipboard and his football IQ can help mentor more physically gifted QB’s from the sideline, then I’d agree.

48

I think that Cowher was a good coach, but not a great one. He was good enough that the Steelers were regularly a dominant team, but he was just not able to see them through to the end with a great deal of success.

He was certainly given a great deal of talent to work with during his tenure, and he consistently came up short. I think that failure to get over the hump has to be laid almost entirely at his doorstep.

I have a great deal of disdain for him because he clearly phoned it in in 2006 after winning the SB once. That increased dramatically when he sided with the Hurricanes over the Pens during the Stanley Cup run.

49

Why?

50

If all the parts are in place and function well enough to get to the championship game 7 times and win the SB once, what other factor than the head coach can account for that?

51

Other AFC teams being better?

52

Variance. They got to the Championship game six times (not seven). Given that, they should expect to win 1.5 Super Bowls. They actually one 1.0. If, instead, they’d actually won 2.0 would you say that the Steelers’ ability to win in the clutch “has to be laid almost entirely at his doorstep”? After all, they’d be just as far above their expectation as they’re now below it.

Sometimes, you’re just not going to have the better team. Other times, you *will *have the better team, but it will have a bad day (or the weaker team will have a great day). It happens.

53

On what do you base the expected outcome of 1.5 SB wins? What variance are you talking about?

54

Team X goes to 6 Conference Championship Games (CCGs) over 15 years. Knowing only this, and assuming that, on average, the team will be a fairly typical CCG participant (i.e., that it will sometimes be better than its competition, sometimes worse, and sometimes about the same [for ease of calculation, we’ll assume that, as one of four remaining teams, the Team X has a 25% chance to win the Super Bowl every time it gets to a CCG, even though it will sometimes be higher and sometimes lower]), how likely is it that the team will win 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 Super Bowls?

If you run the numbers, this is what you get:

**0: **17.8%
**1: **35.6%
**2: **29.7%
**3: **13.2%
**4: **3.3%
**5: **0.4%
**6: **0.02%

You can take the weighted mean of these probabilities to see that the average number of Super Bowls won is 1.5 (Of course, the easier way to do it is 6*.25 = 1.5, but I wanted to create the table above.)

As you’ll notice, Cowher’s achievement (1 Super Bowl win out of 6 CCGs) is the single most likely outcome. Perhaps more importantly, a team in that position will win 1 or fewer Super Bowls most of the time. Therefore, Bill Cowher’s Steelers did not significantly underperform at the end of the playoffs.

The only way around this is to argue that the Steelers typically had a better than average chance to win the Super Bowl when they got to a CCG. So let’s look at it.
In '94, were they better than the Chargers team they lost to? Maybe a little, maybe about the same. Were they better than the 49ers team that they would have had to face in the Super Bowl? Not even close.

In '95, were they better than the Colts team they beat? Absolutely. Were they better than the Cowboys team they lost to? Absolutely not.

In '97, were they better than the Denver team they lost to? No. Were they better than the Green Bay team from the NFC? No.

In '01, were they better than the Patriots team they lost to? Yeah, probably. Were they better than the Rams team they would have faced in the Super Bowl? No.

In '04, were they better than the Patriots team they lost to? Probably not. Were they better than the Eagles team from the NFC? Probably.

In '05, were they better than the Broncos team they beat? Maybe, it’s close. Were they better than Seattle? Maybe, it’s close.
Now, they were at home for 5 of the 6 CCGs, which does count for something, but I only see two years there when they were even *arguably *the best team in football, and those aren’t close to being gimmes. I think that getting 1 Super Bowl win out of the above scenario is entirely respectable.

55

Actually, there is another way around it, and that is to posit that on average Pittsburgh was a typical CCG participant, but that there was a very high degree of variance in their teams’ relative quality. For instance, if those six years had yielded three teams that were by far the best out of the remaining four, along with three teams that were by far the worst, then on average their teams would be typical, but they’d still most likely win 2 or 3 Super Bowls.

This is pretty obviously not the case here, but I wanted to mention it for the sake of completeness.

56

This is a strange application of statistics and odd set of assumptions to make. When you say variance, I assume that you are speaking somehow of the properties of a distribution, or the difference of individual scores from the average.

But the question we are addressing concerns the qualities of an individual coach. Is he good or not? Sure, there will be an average number of wins among all coaches and a percentage likelihood of winning, but that washes over the individual differences that are key to the question at hand. Why is the average what it is? Why is the percentage likelihood what it is? Because of the qualities of the individuals within the data set.

So, what do you make of Bill Belichick, who went to five AFC Championship games, won four of them, and won three Superbowls? How about Chuck Noll, who went to 7 AFC Championship games, won 4 and won 4 SB? What about Brian Billick, who won the Superbowl 100% of the times he went to the AFC Championship game?

Why do they differ from Bill Cowher so significantly in their percentage wins in the big game? Random chance? Or is it individual differences in terms of the quality of coaches, such that the coach actually does have some role in how well their team performs in big games?

If you are going to make assumptions about how often a team “should” win, you have to be able to answer for why your model fits the data so poorly.

57

I wish I could find a list of all coaches who have more than, say, 3 championship game appearances, so that we could compare the records of those coaches.

Just going by a list of successful coaches gives us the following results, though (the numbers in parentheses are conference game appearances, wins, SB wins):

Bill Parcells (4,3,2)
Bill Walsh (4,3,3)
George Seifert (5,2,2)
Dan Reeves (5,4,0)
Don Shula (8,6,2)
Tom Landry (10,5,2)
Marv Levy (5,4,0)
Joe Gibbs (5,4,3)
Mike Holmgren (4,3,1)
Dick Vermeil (2,2,1)
Jimmy Johnson (2,2,2)

So, clearly in terms of Conference Championship Appearances vs Wins, Bill Cowher (6,2,1) is going to be at the other end of the distribution.

Unless, again, you want to argue that random chance or luck explains the individual difference in coaches’ conference championship and SB winning percentages.

58

Frankly, this is a hard question to answer. Cowher was only a head coach for one team - and that team has a certain philosophy toward its management and team-building that is largely responsible for its success.

The Steelers changed their running backs coach in 2006 when Dich Hoak retired. Hoak had served as a coach in the organization since 1972, serving under both Noll and Cowher. Prior to this he was a Steeler running back - he collected paychecks from the Rooney family for 45 years with only a two year break.

Joe Greene still works for the operation as a special assistant - he heads up most of the scouting. As such he collected his sixth ring earlier this year, four of which he earned as a player.

The Steelers value competence and stability in the organization - and they seem to believe you can’t have one without the other. No other team in the NFL in the modern era have had so few head coaches and such stability at other parts of the organization.

If Cowher worked for Dan Snyder, he likely would have failed - but this wouldn’t have been as accurate a reflection of his coaching abilities. No coach seems to do well with the Redskins lately, and many seem to do fine when they leave.

I think Cowher might coach again and do well, but the lesson here frankly is that more teams should adopt a management model that promotes success no matter who is in charge. I have suffered down years with the Steelers - but I have never felt the woe of a Lions or Browns fan. I hope I never do, and I have hope I won’t as long as the team is run the way it is now - with good scouting, team building through the draft, systematic coaching, and management committed to the good of the league and its fanbase.

59

Who did fine after leaving the Redskins other than Schottenheimer? I guess Norv Turner’s regular-season record with the Chargers is pretty good, but the consensus is that they’re winning in spite of him rather than because of him.

60

Not for what we’re talking about, no. The average expected result can’t be anything other than what the numbers dictate, because it’s a zero-sum contest and we’re necessarily counting the successful coaches along with the unsuccessful ones, the great teams with the merely good.

Naturally, for each *individual *team/coach, the expectation will be different. I broke down the generic probabilities because they belie the notion that Cowher’s Steelers were notably unsuccessful deep in the playoffs. Unsuccessful compared to what? Cowher’s teams performed about as well as we should expect them to, *unless *you posit that those six teams were unusually good compared to the types of teams one typically finds in the Conference Championship Games. And I think that’s a very hard case to make.

There is conspicuous hole here. Football is not chess: a team succeeds or fails *mostly *because of its players, not it’s head coach, and you have seemingly written the players out of your analysis. I think that Noll and Belichick led substantially better, more dominant *teams *than Cowher ever had, and that’s the main reason they did so well in the playoffs. Were they better coaches than Cowher? It’s very hard to evaluate the coach’s performance independent of the team around him, so I don’t know, but probably the answer is yes. Again, though, compared to what? If you’re just arguing that Bill Cowher was a worse playoff coach than the most successful playoff coaches of all time, that’s a point I’ll happily concede.

Ultimately, I’m not sure this exchange was necessary. FoieGrasIsEvil boiled the issue down to it’s essence in post #51: Cowher’s Steelers “only” won 1 championship because other teams were better. IMHO, the only year Cowher had the best team out of the final four was in 2005, when he won the Super Bowl. How about that?
At the risk of muddling the issue, an aside: random chance does play a roll, especially from a coach’s point of view. If his sure-handed RB fumbles the ball, if his kicker shanks a huge field goal, if he loses the overtime coin toss, if his team plays very well but runs into an opponent that plays great, etc. There’s so much that’s out of the coach’s hands that can absolutely decide the outcome of a close game. In the long run these types of things balance out, but you never *get *to the long run when it comes to CCGs and Super Bowls. Even the best, most consistent, and longest tenured coaches just get a handful of opportunities. You catch only a few more breaks, and all of sudden you’re 4-2 in CCGs instead of 2-4, and nobody thinks of you as the guy who can’t get over the hump, even though you’re the exact same coach whether you catch those breaks or not.