Within twenty-four hours of the end of the regular season, Rob Chudzinski, Leslie Frazier, Greg Schiano, Jim Schwartz, and Mike Shanahan were all fired. A couple of more head coaches may join them this week, but all these new openings lead to one question: who will replace them?

From 1990 to 2013, 159 new head coaches were hired. Twelve of them were given full-time coaching duties after a successful stint as interim head coach. ^[1]The list: Romeo Crennel (hired as head coach of the 2012 Chiefs), Jason Garrett (2011 Cowboys), Leslie Frazier (2011 Vikings), Tom Cable (2009 Raiders), Mike Singletary (2009 49ers), Mike Tice (2002 … Continue reading

For the other 147 coaches, I grouped them into seven buckets based on the title they held in the season immediately preceding the year they were named head coach: ^[2]With three exceptions. Steve Mariucci made his name as Brett Favre’s quarterbacks coach from 1992 to 1995, and then became the head coach at Cal in 1996. He was hired by San Francisco in 1997, … Continue reading: Retread (indicating that this was not the first NFL head coaching job for the newly hired head coach), Offensive Coordinator, Defensive Coordinator, College Head Coach, Quarterbacks coach, Offensive Line coach, and Other.

As you can see, the retread approach was the most popular, offensive and defensive coordinators were the next targets, while college coaches filled only 10% of the vacancies: [continue reading…]

Moments after the Jets defeated the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, it was announced that Rex Ryan would return as New York’s head coach in 2014. That was a surprising development: just one week ago, it was reported that Ryan told the team he believed he would be fired at the end of the season. Most observers assumed that John Idzik, hired as the team’s general manager in January, would choose to bring in his own head coach in 2014. (You may recall that Woody Johnson mandated that Ryan be retained for the 2013 season, which already made it a slightly unusual situation.)

Which gets us to a the question I want to examine today: how often do new general managers stick with the coaches they inherit? A simple idea, but a difficult one to research. For some teams, identifying the man is charge is easy; for others, it’s about as easy as identifying the starting running back. I’ve done my best, but I expect some errors or disagreements with the labels I’ve used. ^[1]Here’s an examples of the difficulty of classification: In March 2008, the Broncos fired general manager Ted Sundquist. He was quasi-replaced by Jim Goodman, although in reality Mike Shanahan … Continue reading Marching onward…..

Since 1995, excluding expansion teams, there have been 95 new general managers hired in the NFL. Slightly more than half of those GMs (50) hired new head coaches, served as joint general manager/head coach, or were brought in with a new coach together as part of a regime change. The table below shows the 50 new general managers, along with the coach prior to and immediately after the hiring of the executive.

[continue reading…]

Black Monday is just four days away. This week at the New York Times, I look at which coaches are likely to be coaching their last games with their current franchises on Sunday.

Last season, seven N.F.L. coaches were fired on the day after the regular season, also known as Black Monday, with Jacksonville dismissing Mike Mularkey a couple of weeks later. This season, Houston has already fired Gary Kubiak, and as many as 10 more coaches could be fired Monday.

Likely to be Fired

After an 0-8 start, it seemed inevitable that Greg Schiano would not coach the Buccaneers in 2014. Then Tampa Bay won four of its next five games, becoming just the third team since 1978 to start both 0-8 and 4-9. But with two straight losses, Tampa Bay has lost any late-season momentum, and with it, any seeming justification for retaining Schiano.

After trading for Darrelle Revis and signing Dashon Goldson, the Bucs were a popular pick to win 10 games and contend for the Super Bowl. But with the Panthers and the Saints on the rise, and the Falcons just a year removed from an N.F.C. championship game appearance, Tampa Bay has quickly become an afterthought in the division. Even though he has been there for just two years, expect Schiano to be one of the first victims on Black Monday. The Buccaneers have won just 5 of their last 21 games.

When the Lions hired Jim Schwartz, the team had just finished an 0-16 season. Expectations were low and patience was high. Schwartz won 2, then 6, then 10 games in his first three years in Detroit, but the team has fallen apart since a playoff appearance in 2011. Last season, the Lions finished 4-12, and Schwartz drew criticism for fielding one of the least-disciplined teams in the N.F.L.

Detroit has become known for late-game implosions. Over the last two seasons, it is a league-worst seven games below .500 (6-13) in games decided by 7 or fewer points. This year, after a 6-3 start and injuries to the N.F.C. North quarterbacks Jay Cutler and Aaron Rodgers, the division seemed to be there for the taking for the Lions. Instead, a 1-5 stretch has eliminated them before the final week of the season.

Minnesota Coach Leslie Frazier is low on job security, too. Adrian Peterson’s 2,000-yard campaign helped lead the Vikings to 10 wins in 2012, but the rest of Frazier’s tenure has been underwhelming. In fact, those 10 wins represent half of Frazier’s win total in three and a half seasons in Minnesota. With double-digit losing seasons in two of the last three years, bringing back Frazier would be tough to take for increasingly frustrated Vikings fans.

Perhaps the most puzzling part of the Minnesota decline has been in the secondary. Frazier was a defensive backs coach in Philadelphia and Indianapolis and a defense coordinator in Cincinnati before coming to the Vikings as the defensive backs coach in 2007. But Minnesota ranks last in points allowed, passing yards allowed and passing touchdowns allowed. If Minnesota allows two passing touchdowns to the Lions on Sunday, that will bring the season total to 38 and set a post-merger N.F.L. record.

You can read the full article here.

On Sunday morning, Jay Glazer reported that the Jets head coach told the team that he believes he will be fired after the season. And a few hours ago, I noted that while the Jets have a 7-8 record, that’s not an accurate reflection of the team’s production this year. So one week from today, will new general manager John Idzik decide to go in a different direction on Black Monday?

After making the AFC Championship Game in both 2009 and 2010, Rex Ryan’s Jets have now failed to make the playoffs in each of the last three years. From 1988 to 2012, 62 head coaches went three straight years without making the playoffs while coaching the same team. As it turns out, the head coach returned in 33 of those cases for the following season, but in each of the last five instances, ownership has chose to fire the head coach. That’s the situation Ryan and Mike Munchak are in, and Jason Garrett would join them in that boat with a loss to Philadelphia next Sunday, too.

On average, the teams that fired the head coach won 4.8 games in Year N, and then won 7.4 games in Year N+1. That includes the three new head coaches in 2013 in Buffalo, Arizona, and San Diego.

Of the 32 teams to retain the head coach, the average team won 6.9 games in Year N and then 7.3 in Year N+1. Those are full season results — the table below shows the number of wins by that specific coach in Year N+1.

I’m a bit surprised that so many head coaches were retained after failing to make the playoffs for three straight years, but I think the recent trend shows that the NFL is more of  a “win now” league than ever before.

More to the point for Ryan, 2013 marks the third straight season the Jets have failed to post a winning record. From 2000 to 2012, only 18 head coaches posted three straight years with a non-winning record for the same team. Eleven of them were fired after year three, and two more (Dick Jauron and Mike Nolan) were fired in midseason in year four. Four other coaches were in the AFC South during the Peyton Manning era, and as I’ve noted before, owners appeared to give those coaches long leashes for failing to push ahead of those Colts teams.

The other coach in this group was Marvin Lewis: keeping him may have been the wise decision, but was probably more a reflection of the Bengals ownership than anything else.

Woody Johnson, of course, is not content with mediocrity… or being out of the spotlight. After the Jets failed to make the playoffs in 2007, the team released Chad Pennington and acquired Brett Favre. After the Jets failed to make the playoffs in 2008, head coach Eric Mangini got the axe. After the Jets failed to make the playoffs in 2011, Brian Schottenheimer was the scape goat. After the Jets failed to make the playoffs in 2012, Woody went up the corporate ladder and canned Mike Tannenbaum. With a first-year quarterback, a first-year offensive coordinator and a first-year general manager, there’s only one move left for Johnson to make.

The Jets beat the Browns 24-13 today, bringing New York’s record up to 7-8. With Rex Ryan on the hot seat — more on this in a few hours — some have defended the controversial head coach by lauding his work this season. After all, if the Jets are one of the least talented teams in the NFL, isn’t it the product of great coaching that the Jets got to 7-8?

That would be true if the Jets were playing like a 7-8 team. But that’s not the case. The Jets have been outscored by 110 points this year, which makes them a bottom five team, a level of production more in line with the team’s talent. If Ryan is getting bottom five production out of a team that’s bottom five in talent, well, that’s not nearly as impressive.

But perhaps you want to argue that the Jets have overachieved in record (but not anywhere else) because of Ryan? Let’s investigate that claim. New York has just 4.45 Pythagorean wins, which means that they’ve won 2.55 more games than expected. The table below shows the 24 teams to exceed their Pythagorean record ^[1]Among teams in 16-game seasons by at least two wins while posting a negative points differential. [continue reading…]

Chip Kelly, Bill Belichick and Riverboat Ron (née Rivera) are the three coaches most associated with aggressive fourth down decisions. In week 15, all three faced a key fourth down decision, and each situation provided a good teaching moment.

Philadelphia goes for it on 4th and 1 on their own 24, down by 15, 3rd quarter, 6:26 remaining

This was an unconventional decision, but pretty clearly the right one. Here’s what Kelly said after the game:

“I thought we could’ve made it, and I also thought if we don’t make it we’re in trouble,” Kelly said. “If we can’t get half-a-yard, maybe it tells you what the day’s all about. But you’ve gotta think at 4th-and-half-a-yard we can get half-a-yard. They didn’t blitz. It wasn’t like there was an all-out coming at us. We need to come off the ball and get some movement at the point of attack and dig ourselves out of that hole right there. We hadn’t gotten anything going at that point in time so hoping we could jump-start something there.”

The bold decision did not pay off when LeSean McCoy was stopped on 4th-and-inches, and that failure enabled the leaders of the conservative moment to begin crowing. Going for it on 4th down is no guarantee, but from 2010 to 2013, runs on 4th-and-1 have converted 68.6% of the time (excluding runs in the red zone). And one would think a dominant rushing team like Philadelphia would be in much better shape. Philadelphia leads the league in both rushing yards and yards per carry, while the Vikings have a below-average run defense. According to Advanced NFL Stats, Philadelphia should have gone for it if the team had a 50% chance of conversion, and the Eagles probably had a 75% chance of converting here.

But the frustrating part of the analysis is that the anti-stats movement claimed that it was “too early” for Philadelphia to go for it. As a general rule, it is never too early to go for it on 4th-and-inches, and that applies even more strongly when talking about the Eagles offense.
[continue reading…]

Tomorrow night on NFL Network, the fantastic series A Football Life will look at the career of Marty Schottenheimer.

Despite his many accolades, like Dan Marino, Schottenheimer is as often defined by his major shortcoming: never winning a Super Bowl. Did you know that Schottenheimer ranks 6th with 200 career wins? That places him behind only Don Shula, George Halas, Tom Landry, Curly Lambeau, and Paul Brown. Schottenheimer finished his career 74 games above .500, ranking seventh behind those five coaches and Bill Belichick. But the 5-13 record in the playoffs has become party of his core, and has unfortunately swallowed the rest of his career.

Schottenheimer won fewer games than Shula, but he didn’t have Johnny Unitas, Bob Griese, or Marino.  He wasn’t as successful as Landry or Brown or Belichick, but he didn’t have Roger Staubach or Otto Graham or Tom Brady, either.

Schottenheimer and Shula are the only coaches to win 14 games with six different quarterbacks.  Marty is the only one to win 13 games with seven different quarterbacks, the only to win 11 games with eight different ones, and the only to win 10 with nine different quarterbacks. He won eight games with ten different quarterbacks and five games with eleven different quarterbacks. In fact, Schottenheimer won games with 18 different starter quarterbacks, easily a record. [continue reading…]

At the end of Sunday’s game against the 49ers, the Seahawks had an opportunity to (attempt to) allow the 49ers to score. Following a  Colin Kaepernick gainof 8 yards on 3rd-and-7, the 49ers had the ball, down by 1, at the Seahawks 7-yard line with 2:39 remaining.  The Seahawks were out of timeouts, which meant if San Francisco wanted to, it could drain the clock to under 30 seconds. Keith Goldner at Advanced NFL Stats already covered this issue well: “Once the 49ers had the 1st-and-Goal, with the impending snap coming under the 2:40 mark, the Seahawks should have immediately attempted to allow the 49ers to score.”

I agree with Keith’s analysis: the Seahawks would have been in a better situation having the ball following a kickoff with 2:30 left in the game, trailing by 5-7 points, than to have been in the desperate situation they were in. But what does coach Pete Carroll have to say about whether it would have been wise to allow the 49ers to score a touchdown?

“There’s a lot of gut in that decision…We had the talk, and it’s just not in our mentality to let anybody have anything….I’m going to do a little research this week and see if anyone has ever done that and won,” Carroll said.

I don’t think we need to go beyond Keith’s analysis, which correctly frames the issue. We don’t need to look at historical numbers to know that trailing by 5-7 with the ball on your own 22 with 2:30 left is better than trailing by 2 with the ball on your own 22 with 26 seconds remaining. But since coach Carroll used to coach the Jets, I figured I would do him a solid and provide him with a history lesson. [continue reading…]

In week 11, the Bears led the Ravens by three with two minutes remaining. After the two-minute warning, Joe Flacco completed an 11-yard pass that brought Baltimore to the Bears’ 16-yard line. The Ravens next snap took place with 1:21 remaining, and Ray Rice picked up 11 yards to put the Ravens at the Chicago 5-yard line with 75 seconds left.

Baltimore then let the clock run, snapping the 1st-and-goal play with 36 seconds left (Ray Rice ran for three yards). After waiting a few seconds, the Ravens called timeout with 23 seconds remaining. On second down, the Ravens ran Rice again, but he lost a yard, and Baltimore used its final timeout with 11 seconds left. Flacco’s third down pass went incomplete, and Baltimore kicked a field goal to force overtime, giving Chicago the ball back with just three seconds.

This was the rare case where both teams managed to lower their odds of winning with poor clock management. Baltimore had two timeouts and 36 seconds to run three plays. The worst option would be to call timeout after the 1st down and 2nd down plays: the goal should be to keep a timeout for after the third down play. By saving that timeout, the team retains the option of running on 3rd down, and also has a safety net in the event of a sack. There’s no reason why a team needs to call one timeout after 1st-and-goal and another after 2nd-and-goal. For a man who sleeps at the office to get every edge he can, John Harbaugh lowered his team’s odds of winning by not knowing when to use his timeouts. This is not just an academic point, either: Flacco nearly lost the third down snap, which could have ended in an embarrassing loss for the Ravens. ^[1]Also, the predictable run-run-pass playcalling won’t win Harbaugh any awards, either. A second down pass to the end zone solves all of these problems, too.

But Harbaugh’s poor use of timeouts — while inexcusable — didn’t lower his team’s odds of winning significantly. That task was handled by Marc Trestman. After Rice ran down to the 5-yard line, Trestman should have called timeout with 75 seconds remaining — instead, he allowed Baltimore to run the clock all way to 36 seconds left (Baltimore snapped it with 3 seconds left on the play clock). On that play, Rice nearly ran for a touchdown, which shows how foolish this decision was by Trestman. The mere fact that Baltimore bled the clock for 39 seconds is prima facie evidence that the Bears erred by not calling timeout. Football is a zero-sum game, so if it was good for Baltimore to let the clock run down, it must have been bad for Chicago to allow the Ravens to do that. Think of it this way: would Ravens fans have been happy or sad to see Trestman call timeout in that situation?

The interesting part of this situation is we actually got to find out what Trestman was thinking. Adam Hoge transcribed the head coach’s Monday press conference, where he said:
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Eight teams fired their head coaches last year. How are those eight coaches doing in 2013? And will there be more firings next year because of the Reid effect? That’s what I’m writing about this week at the New York Times.

Andy Reid may be the worst thing to happen to struggling coaches. In 2012 under Romeo Crennel, the Chiefs appeared to be a talented team but finished 2-14. Even the biggest Kansas City optimists could not have expected the addition of Reid and quarterback Alex Smith to turn the Chiefs into a Super Bowl contender overnight. But Reid has all but locked up the coach of the year award and engineered one of the great turnarounds in league history. If general managers break close calls in favor of replacing their coaches in the off-season, call it the Reid effect.

Chip Kelly, who replaced Reid in Philadelphia, has done a superb job, too. The 2012 Eagles were a 4-12 team that relied on fourth-quarter comebacks to win each of those games. Philadelphia had an inconsistent offense and a terrible defense, which caused ownership to make the splashy hiring of the off-season by bringing in Kelly from Oregon.

The Eagles’ offense has come close to matching the hype that surrounded Kelly’s arrival. Philadelphia is in the top 10 in yards and points per game, and the Eagles are the only team to rank in the top three in both yards per pass attempt and yards per carry. Quarterback Nick Foles has 16 touchdown passes and no interceptions and leads the league in yards per pass attempt, and LeSean McCoy leads the N.F.L. in yards from scrimmage.

You can read the full article here.

I’ve been posting the Game Scripts numbers each week this season, and now have a full page dedicated to the results from every game at the top right of your screen. But the best use of Game Scripts is to adjust Pass ratios for teams to understand their true Passing Identity. Here’s how you do it.

1) Calculate how many standard deviations above/below average each team is in Game Scripts. The average Game Script, of course, is zero. The standard deviation through five weeks is 4.69, so the Broncos (8.43 Game Script) are 1.80 standard deviations above average in Game Script.

2) Calculate how many standard deviations from average each team is in Pass Ratio, defined as pass attempts (including sacks) divided by total plays. The average Pass Ratio through five weeks is 59.8%, while the standard deviation among the thirty-two teams is 6.7%. The Giants (excluding last night’s game) lead the league in Pass Ratio at 71.8%, which is 1.79 standard deviations above the league-average Pass Ratio.

3) Add how many standard deviations above/below average each team is in both Game Scripts and Pass Ratio. To convert these into an Index (and a more intuitive number for folks), multiply that result by 15 and add it to 100. So a team that has a Pass Identity that is 1 standard deviation above average will be at 115, while a team that is 1.6 standard deviations below average will be at 76.

Here are the results:
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Through four weeks, there have been 28 cases where a team, trailing in the 4th quarter, sent in the kicker or the punter. In general, that’s a pretty low rate — it’s just under once every two games. But while going for it on 4th down isn’t always the right decision when trailing in the 4th quarter, even 28 kicks/punts is too many.

Twelve of those 28 plays were field goal attempts, and all were successful.  Four kicks were to tie or take the lead, but only one of them — Rian Lindell’s 37-yarder, trailing by one point with 38 seconds remaining in week one against the Jets was an obviously correct decision (not that Greg Schiano’s conservative play-calling on the prior three plays deserves the same treatment). Two other kicks were noncontroversial: Facing 4th-and-9 from the Vikings 11, trailing by 10 with 3:40 remaining, I don’t blame Mike Tomlin for sending in the kicker. Even more obvious: Jeff Fisher having Greg Zuerlein kick a 38-yard field goal on 4th and 8 from the Arizona 20, trailing by 3, with 9 minutes left in the game. What about the other 9 field goal decisions? Let’s start first with four end-game strategic blunders:

1) John Harbaugh sent out Justin Tucker to kick a 30-yard field goal on 4th and 4 trailing by 18 with 5:33 remaining at the Broncos 12-yard line. Yes, Harbaugh thought Baltimore’s best chance of winning was to kick a field goal, stop Denver, score a touchdown, stop Denver, score another touchdown, convert the two-point attempt, and then win in overtime. Even though a 30-yard field goal is close to automatic, this one is pretty easy to analyze.  In both situations, you need to stop Denver twice and score two more touchdowns. So the question becomes, it is easier to:

(a) kick a 30-yard field goal and (assuming the other events all unfold in your favor) then have only a 1-in-4 chance of winning (i.e., convert on the 2-pointer and win in overtime); or

(b) score a touchdown on a drive at the Denver 12, facing 4th and 4?

2) Mike Smith had Matt Bryant kick a 25-yard field goal with 3 minutes to go, trailing by 10 against New England, facing 4th and 1 at the Patriots 7-yard line.

This one is not terrible, but I agree with Bill Barnwell’s analysis that going for it would have been the preferred move. Note that you don’t need the benefit of hindsight: Jason Lisk correctly predicted in real time that by going conservative on 4th-and-1, Atlanta would have to go for it (and fail) in a more challenging 4th down play later in the game.
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I can’t believe I’m writing this article. Everyone loves Chuck Pagano, but he made a pretty embarrassing blunder at the end of the Colts upset win in San Francisco on Sunday. The Colts led 13-7 when Andrew Luck scrambled for a six yard touchdown on 3rd-and-3 with just over four minutes left in the fourth quarter. Incredibly, Pagano then chose to kick the extra point, which my buddy and Colts fan Nate Dunlevy identified immediately as a terrible decision.

I wasn’t going to write a post about that decision, because, ya know, what could be more obvious than going for two when up by 12 points with just over four minutes left in the game? I mean, Jason Garrett got this right in the season opener. Being up by 14 points means two touchdowns doesn’t beat you, while there is almost no difference between being up 12 or being up 13 points. That doesn’t make for a very interesting post, though.

From 1999 to 2012, 36 teams scored a touchdown when leading by 6 points in the final eight minutes of the fourth quarter. Only 22 times did the team then follow that score by going for two, converting half of the time. Take a look:
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John Harbaugh is a Super Bowl-winning head coach. He might represent the new archetype for owners when it comes to hiring a head coach. He outcoached his brother in Super Bowl XLVII. But that doesn’t mean his fourth down decisions on Thursday Night were above criticism.

1) Punting is not the way to beat Manning

Facing 4th and 5 from the Broncos 40-yard line, Harbaugh elected to punt up 14-7 with 8 minutes left in the second quarter. Last year, I highlighted one of the most difficult fourth down decisions coaches have to make: 4th-and-7 from between the 34- and 38-yard lines. In the thin air of Denver and with strong-legged Justin Tucker, we can safely include this scenario in that definition of No Man’s Land. Facing 4th-and-5 is a lot easier than 4th-and-7, so going for it would have been my preferred choice. The Ravens elected to punt, but let’s consider the other two options.
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The number one storyline in the NFL in week one isn’t the health of Robert Griffin III, but the presence of two other men occupying FedEx Field that night. The football world is anxiously awaiting to see how Chip Kelly’s offense, piloted by Michael Vick, will work in the NFL. We don’t know much, but we do know that the coach plans to incorporate the fast-paced, up-tempo style that his teams used at Oregon to obliterate opponents.

In May, I took a stab at discussing tempo in the NFL, and I presented a couple of lists that measured the number of plays run per second of possession in the NFL. Today, I want to revisit the questions of tempo and pace using more precise measurements.  Let’s start with some league-wide data. The table below shows the average number of seconds between snaps for NFL teams last season. I’ve excluded a number of plays from this sample, including all plays at the start of a quarter, all overtime plays, plays after a changes of possession, and plays in the final three minutes of the first half or five minutes of the second half (where teams are less likely to operate at their normal pace).

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Randy Moss and Cris Carter. Torry Holt and Isaac Bruce. Reggie Wayne and Marvin Harrison. From time to time, a franchise with a star wide receiver manages to draft another one. At that point, we just wait and see how long it takes the young pup to steal the spotlight. Everyone succumbs to age, and eventually, the torch will be passed to the younger receiver. Even the GOAT wasn’t immune to Father Time (well, at least while he was in SF), as Terrell Owens eventually surpassed Jerry Rice as the 49ers top wideout.

Last year, Julio Jones and Roddy White both finished in the top 12 in fantasy points scored by wide receivers (using the formula 0.5 point per reception, 0.1 points per yard, and 6 points per touchdown). Since 1970, there have been 20 different pairs of wide receivers who met the following criteria:

• Each wide receiver finished in the top 12 in fantasy points (using a 0.5 PPR scoring system)
• The receivers were at least four years apart in age; and
• The younger receiver was 26 year old or younger.

2012 Falcons – Julio Jones (23) and Roddy White (31) (Matt Ryan)

Let’s start with the most recent entry.  At just 23 years old, Jones has established himself as one of the game’s best wide receivers.  White is presumably on the downside of his career, but he’s had a remarkable run.  Wide receiver numbers must be adjusted for era, but here’s a fun stat: White has topped 80 catches, 1100 yards, and 6 touchdowns in six straight seasons (2007-2012), a feat previously accomplished by only Marvin Harrison and Jerry Rice.
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Is there a harder award to predict in football? It would have been impossible to predict who would win the award this time last year, as eventual winner Bruce Arians wasn’t even a head coach until October. Of course, that doesn’t excuse my terrible selection. As I said last year, predicting in the pre-season which coach will ultimately win the award is so difficult that Vegas doesn’t even offer odds on the event. For reference, below is a look at every coach to ever be selected by the Associated Press as NFL Head Coach of the Year: for what it’s worth, Arians saw the biggest increase in winning percentage of any COTY winner. Arians also broke a tenure deadlock: until last season, both 1st and 2nd-year coaches had won the award 15 times, but now first-year head coaches are in the lead having won the award 16 out of 57 times (28%).

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(I originally posted this at the S-R Blog, but I thought it would be very appropriate here as well.)

Here is a google doc containing every team-season in our database since 1957, including the Head Coach and offensive & defensive coordinators. It also specifies those coaches’ preferred offensive or defensive schemes (depending on which side of the ball they specialize in), and attempts to figure out the general offensive family (i.e. Air Coryell, Erhardt-Perkins, etc) each team-season fell into.

THIS IS BY NO MEANS COMPLETE. In fact, it’s very much incomplete at this stage — and that’s where you come in. In the comments of this post, or in an email, we’d love to hear corrections and/or additions to the data, if you see an entry about which you know more than we do (and it’s a good bet you do). Thanks in advance for your help, and hopefully we can assemble a more complete listing of teams’ systems/schemes, which will let us do things like compute splits vs. a certain type of offense or defense, analyze whether 4-3 or 3-4 defenses were better in a given season, etc.

So let those corrections/additions pour in!

Last week, I examined the Chargers hiring of former Broncos offensive coordinator Mike McCoy. What I found was that, on average, teams that go outside the organization to hire offensive coordinators saw no uptick in offensive production in the new coach’s first season. And in general, the list consisted of a lot of uninspiring names.  The history of hiring defensive coordinators is a little more successful, at least according to the eyeball test. Chuck Pagano, Rex Ryan, Mike Smith, and Mike Tomlin are some of the more recent hires, and of course Bill Belichick’s work as defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells was the launch pad for two head coaching jobs.

This year, the only team that hired a defensive coordinator was Jacksonville, who tapped Gus Bradley as the Jaguars newest head coach. There’s an entirely new regime in Jacksonville (led by owner Shad Khan and general manager David Caldwell), but it’s hard not to view the Bradley selection in light of the team’s previous hire. In 2012, the Jaguars chose “hotshot” offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey, who was coming off a successful season as the coordinator of the great Falcons offense. A year later, the Jags are picking the defensive coordinator for the league’s top defense in 2012, at least as measured by points allowed.

The table below shows all of the instances I’ve identified since 1990 where a team hired a new head coach who had been a defensive coordinator for a different team in the prior year. Here is how the Bradley line reads. In 2012, Bradley was the Defensive Coordinator for Seattle; after the season, he was hired to become the head coach of the Jaguars. With the Seahawks, Bradley’s defense ranked 1st in points allowed, 4th in yards allowed, and 7th in PFR’s EPA allowed.
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In 2011, Mike Mularkey and Joe Philbin were offensive coordinators for high-powered offenses. Those success seasons — on the backs of elite quarterbacks and wide receivers — were springboards for head coaching jobs in 2012. Mularkey’s work with Matt Ryan, Roddy White, Julio Jones, and Tony Gonzalez got him the top spot in Jacksonville, while Philbin (with an assist from head coach and play caller Mike McCarthy) parlayed big numbers from Aaron Rodgers, Jordy Nelson, Greg Jennings, Jermichael Finley, James Jones, and Randall Cobb into the Dolphins head coaching job. Mularkey, of course, was one-and-done with the Jaguars, while Philbin had an uneven first year in Miami.

Mike McCoy’s work with Peyton Manning, Demaryius Thomas, and Eric Decker in 2012 (and Tim Tebow in 2011) helped him become the Chargers head coach in 2013. McCoy is one of three 2012 offensive coordinators who will be head coaches this season. ^[1]As for the other six head coaching changes? Doug Marrone (Syracuse) and Chip Kelly (Oregon) jump from college to Buffalo and Philadelphia, while Marc Trestman goes from Canada to Chicago. Gus Bradley … Continue reading The other two are are Bruce Arians (who goes from OC/interim HC/COTY in Indianapolis to Head Coach in Arizona) and Rob Chudzinkski (OC in Carolina, HC in Cleveland). I’m not sure if Arians really qualifies, but in any event, it’s McCoy who truly represents the “hot shot offensive coordinator –> head coaching job” rungs on the coaching ladder. His 2012 Broncos finished 2nd in points scored, 4th in yards, and 1st in both Net Yards per pass Attempt and Adjusted Net Yards per pass Attempt.

We’re working on our database of offensive coordinators, but it’s not 100% complete just yet. Let me know if I’ve missed any, but the table below represents all of the instances I’ve identified since 1990 where a team hired a new head coach who had been an offensive coordinator for a different team in the prior year. Here is how the McCoy line reads. In 2012, McCoy was the Offensive Coordinator for the Denver Broncos; after the season, he was hired to become the head coach of the Chargers. With the Broncos, his offense ranked 2nd in points, 4th in yards, and 1st in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt.
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In light of Shattenjager’s great post yesterday about Marion Campbell, I thought we should do some NFL head coach trivia today centered around losing.

Let’s start with a tough one. With 165 losses, which coach has lost the most games in NFL history?

Obviously, there’s something to be said for losing a lot of games. That’s kind of like throwing the most interceptions in NFL history, a mark that Brett Favre holds. Let’s move on to a rate-based trivia question.

Which coach has the worst winning percentage in NFL history, minimum 50 games coached? It’s not Campbell or Joe Bugel, who at 30% are tied for the fourth worst record.

What if we move to current coaches? Which of the 32 active head coaches has the most losses? No hints here:
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Today you’re in for a treat, as frequent commenter Shattenjager has contributed an absolutely outstanding guest post.

Introduction: Question

Every time I have looked at Marion Campbell’s coaching career, a question has leapt to mind: How on earth did he keep getting jobs?

When Chase Stuart recently revisited Doug Drinen’s Dungy Index to measure coaches’ performances in the regular season compared to expectation, the man who appeared dead last in Wins over Expectation was former Falcons and Eagles head coach Marion Campbell, at a rather staggering -14.9. His teams essentially lost 15 more games than a linear regression based on Pythagorean winning percentage expected.

“So what?” you might think, “He was just a terrible coach.” I wouldn’t blame you for having that reaction. However, here’s what’s really fascinating about Marion Campbell: he had three separate head coaching stints.

Strictly looking at win-loss records is a poor measure of a coach, but it works well enough as a shorthand overview of Campbell’s career. He went 6-19 as the Atlanta Falcons head coach 1974-1976 after Norm Van Brocklin was fired during the 1974 season. Then, several years later, he took the head coaching job of the Philadelphia Eagles after Dick Vermeil famously stepped down due to burnout and promptly went 17-29-1 over the next three seasons before being fired again with one game remaining in the season. Just a year later, the Falcons—yes, the same Falcons who had already hired and fired Campbell as their head coach—decided that Campbell was the man to replace newly-fired Dan Henning. He rewarded them with an 11-32 run that ended with his retirement late in the 1989 season.

Again, how did he keep getting jobs? Well, it’s complicated, but I think an in-depth look at his career can explain it. [continue reading…]

Back in 2006, Doug Drinen came up with the Dungy Index, a way to measure a coach’s performance in the regular season relative to expectations. Because Doug understands regression to the mean, he was impressed by Tony Dungy’s ability to continue to string together 12-win seasons year after year. ^[1]Admittedly, this looks less impressive when you consider that Jim Mora, Jim Caldwell, and John Fox have won 13+ games with Peyton Manning, too. But Doug didn’t want to just use winning percentage to rate coaches: expectations are lower when a coach inherits a bad team, and that needs to be taken into account.

Defining “expectations” is challenging. I don’t have a perfect way, but I do have a simple one: use a linear regression based off of last year’s Pythagorean winning percentage to predict the number of games a team should be expected to win this year. ^[2]All ties are counted as half-wins. I did just that, and the best-fit formula was:

Year N+1 Wins = 4.23 + 0.472 * Year N Wins

So a 3-win team should be expected to win 5.6 games in Year N+1, a 10-win team is projected at 9.0 wins, and a 13-win team drops down to 10.4 expected wins. If you subtract the number of expected wins from the number of actual wins by the coach in a season, you are left with his number of wins over expectation. You’ll see pretty quickly why this is called the Dungy Index: he fares very, very well in it.
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Entire books have been written about the West Coast Offense. Friend of the program Chris Brown has an excellent primer on some of the principles of the system. Due to time constraints, this post is not going to dissect a voluminous playbook, translate Spider 3 Y Banana into English, or discuss the role of motions or shifts in the offense. This post will not help you find the winning edge.

I thought it would be interesting to see if certain statistics could help identify teams that ran a West Coast Offense. My initial thought was that an effective West Coast Offense would manifest itself in three key statistics:

• Completion percentage. The WCO is built around short passes that work as a substitute for running plays. These long handoffs lead to high completion percentages for the quarterback.
• Yards per completion. Short passes imply lower yards per completion. Ideally, we’d analyze yards per completion after removing yards after the catch, but that’s not something the NFL kept records of historically. Still, I think a low yards per completion average can be a good indicator that a team ran a West Coast Offense.
• Passing first downs. In a West Coast Offense, teams are moving the chains through the air. With fewer long gains and a pass-first mentality, one would expect a lot of passing first downs.

Background

If you’re a historian, you can skip this section. The classic story told about the birth of the West Coast Offense takes us back to before the AFL-NFL merger. In 1969, the Bengals had Paul Brown as head coach and Bill Walsh as the assistant coach/offensive coordinator. That year, quarterback Greg Cook had one of the great rookie seasons in history, but injuries to his rotator cuff and biceps ruined his career. The team turned to backup Virgil Carter, a very smart and accurate passer but who was destined to be a backup because of his size and weak arm. Those factors led Walsh and Brown to implement an offense that catered to Carter’s strengths and hid his weaknesses.

Carter wasn’t just smart for football. In 1970, he published a seminal paper that was the precursor to the Expected Points models we see today; in ’71, Carter led the NFL in completion percentage, but ranked third to last among the 21 qualifying quarterbacks in yards per completion. The Bengals ranked 9th in passing first downs, and those statistics seem to jive with the picture we all have in our heads of a West Coast Offense.
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ESPN is counting down its top 20 coaches in NFL history. So far, we have:

No. 20: Tony Dungy
No. 19: Mike Shanahan
No. 18: Sid Gillman
No. 17: Marv Levy
No. 16: Hank Stram
No. 15: Bud Grant
No. 14: Tom Coughlin
No. 13: Jimmy Johnson
No. 12: John Madden
No. 11: Bill Parcells
No. 10: Curly Lambeau
No. 9: Joe Gibbs
No. 8: Tom Landry
No. 7: Bill Belichick
No. 6: Paul Brown

No doubt, the final five coaches are Don Shula, Chuck Noll, George Halas, Vince Lombardi; and Bill Walsh. But this post isn’t me complaining about those rankings or coming up with my own system.

Grading coaches across eras is even more difficult than it is with players. How do you compare Lambeau, who coached for 33 years and won 6 NFL championships, to Belichick? Lombardi became a head coach in ’59, Shula in ’63. But how do you vault when over the other when Lombardi died in 1970 while Shula was still coaching in 1995? John Madden has the best winning percentage among coaches with at least 100 games, but he took over a team that went 25-3 in the two years before he arrived. What’s the appropriate way to compare him to Walsh or Johnson?

Instead of trying to answer the difficult questions, I’ll answer something I’m very well-equipped to handle. I’ve seen people cite the records of certain coaches against each other as evidence for or against a particular coach. That’s an obviously flawed way to break a divide, but hey, it’s Friday in the offseason, so let’s look at head-to-head coaching records.
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With Norv Turner, you know what you’re going to get. Turner was fired in San Diego after the Chargers failed to make the playoffs in each of the last three years, but as usual, Turner was able to find a nice landing spot. He’ll be the Browns offensive coordinator in 2013, which will mark his 29th straight year in the NFL. Turner started as a receivers coach with the Rams in 1985 and hasn’t been out of work for very long ever since.

And while he has a reputation for having great running games, he also has habit of sending his receivers down the field. That’s no accident. Ernie Zampese, a longtime assistant under Don Coryell, became the Rams offensive coordinator in 1987, and Turner’s teams have been running a variation of the vertical Coryell/Zampese system ever since.

I ranked all players (minimum 500 receiving yards) in yards per reception in each year since Turner was united with Zampese in ’87. In six of those seasons, one of five different Turner receivers led the NFL in yards per reception. In addition, Turner’s top receiver (in terms of YPR) finished in the top five in that metric thirteen more times. The table below shows the rank of the highest-ranked receiver (in terms of YPR) in Turner’s offense in each of the last 26 years.
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Marvin Lewis has coached the Bengals for ten seasons. To his credit, Lewis has helped resurrect the worst franchise of the 1990s; on the other hand, Lewis has not won a playoff game in ten years with the Bengals. That’s unheard of in this era where coaches are expected to win and win big right away. No other active coach has gone even five straight seasons with his current franchise without a playoff victory. At the end of the 2012 year, four coaches — Andy Reid in Philadelphia, Jim Schwartz in Detroit, and Norv Turner in San Diego — had gone four straight years, and Reid and Turner were both fired after the season. Schwartz was given a longer leash after he inherited an 0-16 team, but he is now on the hot seat. Only three others coaching at the end of 2012 had gone even three straight years for the same team without a playoff win — Buffalo’s Chan Gailey, Mike Shanahan in Washington, and Ken Whisenhunt in Arizona. Shanahan made the playoffs last year but lost, while Gailey and Whisenhunt were both replaced. ^[1]Jason Garrett and Leslie Frazier technically meet the requirement, too, but they only coached for the second half of the season in 2010.

Prior to the Super Bowl era, there was only one playoff game a year (other than playoff games to break ties). Since 1966, Lewis is one of just two coaches to coach one team for a decade and fail to win a playoff game. ^[2]If you want to look before the Super Bowl era, there were two longer streaks. Steve Owen was the Giants head coach from 1931 to 1953. He compiled a 151-100-17 record and won two championships with … Continue reading The 11th, the elder Jim Mora, was fired by the New Orleans Saints in his 11th year after a 2-6 start. The table below shows each coach since 1966 who was the head coach for the same team for five straight years and failed to win a playoff game during that stretch. The “First Yr” and “Last Yr” columns show the first and last years of the streaks, not of the coach’s tenure. Coaches who were fired in the middle of their last season are marked by an asterisk, while coaches whose reign started in mid-season (but who are treated as if they coached the entire season) are marked with a “+” sign.
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Yesterday, I looked at the most pass-happy active head coaches and offensive coordinators in the NFL. If you’ve been a loyal reader of my previous posts on Game Scripts, you understand the methodology I’ve used today to grade each coaches. The quick summary is I’ve come up with the term “Game Scripts” to determine the average points margin over each of the 3600 seconds in each game; from there, I also came up with Game Scripts scores for each season.  If you then take each coach’s pass/run ratio, adjust for the league average pass/run ratio, and then adjust for Game Scripts, then you can determine each coach’s passing identity.  I’ve done this for every season since 1940.

The table below lists the 252 coaches I have in my database who have been either a head coach or an offensive coordinator for at least four seasons. I suggest using the search box to find your favorite coaches, but as always, all columns are sortable, too. In the table below, the number of HC/OC seasons includes all seasons, but the games, wins, losses, ties, winning percentage, and wins over .500 columns all include only the coach’s records as a head coach. The Game Script column shows each coach’s average Game Scripts average over each season, while the “P/R” column does the same for pass/run ratio.  The next three columns are all indexes centered around 100. The “SCRIPT” column is the Game Scripts rating, the “PASS” column is the Pass/Run Ratio rating, and the Pass Identity column is a combination of the two columns. (You can read some of the other Game Scripts articles for more explanation).  Based on his time in Green Bay with Aaron Rodgers, Joe Philbin comes in as the most pass-happy coach, but that number seems likely to decline the longer he coaches. George Seifert built his reputation as the defensive coordinator for the 49ers, but having Joe Montana, Steve Young, and Jerry Rice turned him into a pass-friendly coach. As for the next two men on the list, modern NFL fans need no further explanation.
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One reason I came up with the concept of Game Scripts was to identify the most pass-happy coaches. Remember, a team’s Game Script score is simply their average scoring differential over each second of every game. Last year, the Falcons were the most pass-happy team in the NFL after adjusting for Game Scripts; Atlanta had the 5th highest Game Script (average lead of 3.6 points) and the 7th highest Pass/Run Ratio (63.0%). To put that in perspective, none of the other top 16 teams in Game Scripts had a Pass/Run Ratio of even sixty percent. The Falcons used to be run-heavy, of course, but as Michael Turner aged while Matt Ryan, Julio Jones, and Roddy White matured, they’ve become a passing team.

There will be 64 head coaches and offensive coordinators in 2013; I went back and looked at every season those coaches were either head coaches or offensive coordinators in the NFL. ^[1]At least, according to my database. I won’t have missed any head coaching years, but it’s possible I’ve missed some seasons where a coach was also an offensive coordinator. Two head coaches — Gus Bradley in Jacksonville and Chip Kelly in Philadelphia — have never been a head coach or offensive coordinator at the NFL level. In addition, the following seven offensive coordinators will be entering those roles for the first time, too: Harold Goodwin (Arizona), Nathaniel Hackett (Buffalo), Adam Gase (Denver), Pep Hamilton (Indianapolis), Jedd Fisch (Jacksonville), Doug Pederson (Kansas City), and Dowell Loggains (Tennessee). The table below shows the career Game Scripts averages, Pass/Run Ratios, and Pass Identities for the other 55 head coaches/offensive coordinators entering 2013.

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