by Chase Stuart
on February 9, 2016
In the Hall of Very Good Mustaches
Tony Dungy was selected for enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. Dungy is the 23rd head coach selected to the Hall of Fame: among that group, he ranks 12th in wins with 139, 9th in winning percentage at .668, and 7th in wins over .500. Those are all impressive numbers, given the sample; the “worst” mark on his resume would be the lone championship, which places him in the bottom six among Hall of Fame coaches (John Madden and Sid Gillman each won one; George Allen, Marv Levy, and Bud Grant won zero titles).
Dungy entered the league in 1996. Excluding Bill Belichick, who is clearly the best coach of this era, where does Dungy rank among the other Super Bowl-winning head coaches? Is he the best choice for the Hall of Fame among this group?
Statistically speaking…. yes. Dungy ranks 5th in wins among this group, but first in winning percentage (in fact, his winning percentage is even higher than Belichick’s!). Perhaps most importantly, he ranks first in wins over .500, which blends raw wins and winning percentage. Coughlin and Shanahan have two rings, but both have combined to win just 52 games more than they have lost; Dungy himself is at +70. [continue reading…]
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Tony Dungy
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by Chase Stuart
on February 1, 2014
Tonight, the newest members of the Class of 2014 will be announced. Here are the 15 finalists:
[continue reading…]
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Aeneas Williams,
Andre Reed,
Charles Haley,
Claude Humphrey,
Derrick Brooks,
Eddie DeBartolo,
Jerome Bettis,
John Lynch,
Kevin Greene,
Marvin Harrison,
Michael Strahan,
Morten Andersen,
Ray Guy,
Tim Brown,
Tony Dungy,
Walter Jones,
Will Shields
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by Chase Stuart
on June 12, 2013
Each coach is given bonus points for mustaches.
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. 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. 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.
[continue reading…]
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Tony Dungy
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