So you seem to be arguing two opposing sides: The Steelers lost most of the time because they were not the best team, but also at the same time coaches’ losses are due to random chance.
I would also argue strongly against the assertion that the Steelers as players were not dominant. Under Cowher’ s tenure, they regularly had a league leading defense and, until the latter years, a rushing offense that also was routinely among the top in the league. Of course, the old adage is that defense wins championships, but that wasn’t the case for Bill Cowher.
You realize I’m sure that FoieGras is a Bengals fan. His opinions about the Steelers are very likely to be biased by that fact (see for example his complaint about “We Dey”.
But it’s true that there are strong elements of random chance in the coaches’ results. If Scott Norwood hits a fairly easy field goal, Marv Levy looks like a better playoff coach than Bill Parcells. Since he didn’t, he doesn’t.
I forgot to note the oddity of the assertion that the Steelers lost because they were not the best team when most of those AFC Championship game losses were at home. That means that they had the better seed than the team they lost to.
Well, I am a Bengals fan, yes, the “we dey” complaint was largely hyperbole (although I was pretty incensed at the time), but my original point stands.
I hate the Steelers, but I have always respected them as an organization, a team and as an opponent against my favorite team, much like I did with the Dallas Cowboys for the many years I was a Foreskins fan from about 1980-1993, about which time I moved to the Cincy area and adopted the Bengals as my new team.
That said, I do think that the Steelers were the inferior teams the years they were beaten in the 1995 Super Bowl (Cowboys), and the couple times they lost to the Patriots and the Broncos, etc in the AFC title games.
I labeled that as an aside, and I said that random chance “plays a role.” Clearly, the above is an inaccurate description of what I actually wrote.
Again, we’re talking about teams that are in the conference championship games. They all have a league-leading X, and a Y that’s among the best in the league. Do you think that Cowher’s Steelers were as superior to the competition as Noll’s, or Belichick’s Patriots?
Yeah, I wasn’t quoting him as an authority, just pointing out that he happened to be right for the most part.
Why? They certainly were seeded higher, and in the Broncos and the first Patriots AFC game, they were clearly favored. They had beaten the Broncos just one month prior, 35-24. They were favored in 2001 over the Patriots, who advanced that year over the Raiders due to the tuck rule. And if you think that the 1994 Chargers were the superior team that year, you’re frankly insane.
Because in 1995 the Cowboys were the better team and the Steelers QB was mediocre. Because against the Broncos it was Elway’s last hurrah, they had Terrel Davis and the Steelers had a mediocre QB. Against the Patriots, you were going to beat Tom Brady, Bill Belicheat and their coming out party? Twice?
I’ll give you 1994. Stan Humphries was no Brady, Elway or Aikman.
Anyway, I’m not going to* totally* disagree with Steelers fans whom were less than impressed with Cowher, but he had a pretty remarkable run. I think you guys are guilty of having somewhat unreasonable expectations relative to your success, though. I guess that’s another thing this Bengals fan can envy the Steelers organization: having those kinds of “problems”.
None of this is very logical, and seems to be all post hoc ergo propter hoc kind of stuff. The Broncos won and the Patriots won, therefore the Steelers were an inferior team.
By the same token, I assume that you would say that the Steelers were superior to the Bengals in 2005 and were destined to win that playoff game because it was Jerome Bettis’ last hurrah.
You could look at it a little more simply, and arrive at the same answer.
All else being equal*, a team has a 50% chance of winning each game. So, if a team gets to the CCG, there’s a 50% chance that it’ll advance to the Super Bowl…and, then, a 50% chance, from there, that they’ll win the SB.
So, for such a team, there’s three possible outcomes (percentages are based on the probability of the outcome, before the CCG is played):
Lose CCG: 50% chance
Win CCG, win SB: 25% chance
Win CCG, lose SB: 25% chance
So, with 6 CCG appearances, each of which has a 25% chance of yielding a SB win, you wind up with an “expected value” of 1.5 SB wins.
and, yes, of course, they’re not equal, but this is a theoretical exercise.
Whether or not it’s fair, that’s a weird criticism for you to make, since it’s the same kind of argument you’ve been making: Cowher won only 2 out of 6 championship games, therefore he’s a bad big game coach. Just as a team can be superior to its opponent but lose the game anyway, so can a coach have no problem coaching the biggest games but still come up short more than we think he should.
The simple answer to this seeming paradox is that 6 games is not a valid statistical sample. How’d Tennessee look after six games this year?
ETA: The greater point, of course, being that judging coaches on their success in big games is generally a pointless exercise. Now, Marty Schottenheimer might be fairly judged on his poor playoff record, because he’s coached so many playoff games.
A “statistical” sample is necessary for drawing inferences about a larger population. In this case you don’t have to do that, because you can pretty much look at the whole population of coaches in conference championship games and rank order them. Cowher comes up very poorly in that comparison.
They are what they are, and descriptives tell the whole story. Statistical inference is unnecessary.
Pretty much the main point of this thread:
How many of the good things should he take credit for, and how many of the bad things should he be blamed for?
Personally, I think they made some incredibly good decisions on defense, but some incredibly bad decisions on offense and special teams.
Cowher took over for a great coach (Chuck Noll) and had quite a bit of success himself. That doesn’t happen too often (Phil Bengston succeeding Vince Lombardi or Ray Handley succeeding Bill Parcells). There are a few others such as Don Shula succeeding Weeb Ewbank in Baltimor and in baseball Tommy Lasorda replacing Walter Alston. I guess you could say the Montreal Canadiens had Toe Blake after Dick Irvin Sr, although I’m not sure how great he was. Refused to trade a young Maurice “Rocket” Richard probably his best move. Even the New York Yankees don’t have a flawless succession after Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy or Casey Stengel leave.
The Rooney-owned Steelers were horrible before the early 1970s. Never made the playoffs in something like 44 years. Since then they have been usually one of the best and seldom among the worst. That says something for everyone involved, including Cowher. They are a stable organizations and when that includes some brains (and luck), you are one step ahead of the competition. Too often sports teams waste time and resources chasing their own tails.
Cowher and the Steelers wasted too much time trying to make Kordell Stewart an NFL QB. That was probably because in the 1950s they gave up on some great QBs too soon: Johnny Unitas, Len Dawson, Jack Kemp. They held onto Terry Bradshaw in the early 1970s ignoring pleas to start local hero Terry Hanratty or Joe Gilliam and were eventually rewarded.
I’m confident that you wouldn’t accept my explanation, but I can’t let this pass without noting that there are several things in this post that are very, very wrong.
Advice: trying to argue that a 2-4 record in CCGs proves both that Cowher’s Steelers were bad at playing big games, *and *that that failure was specifically Bill Cowher’s fault, is a total dead end. You’d do much better by arguing that those Steelers teams really were so dominant that, absent a choking coach, they clearly would have won two or three more Super Bowls. You’d even do better by arguing that you watched every Steelers game and you noticed specific mistakes that Cowher only made in big spots, and I’d notice them too if I was watching all the games or was more observant.
Nonsense. It’s quite enough to note that over the span of 14 years with a variety of different players, Cowher ranks very poorly in terms of his win/loss record in big games, especially when these teams were statistically superior, seeded higher, and often playing at home as a result.
Why would we be looking at that? Then the question wouldn’t be “Was Bill Cowher that great a coach?” It would be “Would Bill Cowher be that great a coach if he coached more conference championship games.”
Honestly, who ever heard of evaluating someone’s record based on what he or she might hypothetically do in the future? His record is his record. That’s what you judge him on.
Right, and his overall or regular season records are much better gauges of coaching ability. I’m not the one arbitratily tossing out 90% of his body of work.
