Move Aside Geeks--The Wimps Shall Inherit The W's (*If They Can Lead)

As a numbers guy who loves his standard deviations, high variance “David Strategies”, and “4^th-down calculators,” I have a painful admission to make. Football teams are ultimately organizations and we should be judging coaches first and foremost as organizational leaders as opposed to always-rational economic models.

Don’t get me wrong. NFL coaches are a bunch of terrible decision-makers. Your average trash-talking, pizza-snarfing Madden playing hobo can make better in-game decisions than your average NFL coach. The lack of aggressiveness amongst NFL coaches is well documented by brilliant writers like Bill Barnwell and Gregg Easterbrook .  But I would hire some of these wimps to lead my organization any time.

There’s a lot more to coaching than in-game decision-making. Two easy ones: 1) NFL coaches know more about football than most of know about anything. 2) Head coaches are CEO’s who create a climate for team success and should be judged that way. I’m going to focus on number 2, although 1 could be a key omitted variable in my analysis.

Let’s look at the numbers. If aggressiveness is a proxy for good decision-making, let’s look at Football Outsider’s aggressiveness index.  The higher the number, the more aggressive a coach is, with the average being centered at 1. The statistic also excludes for catch-up situations where the decisions are more obvious. It’s hard to believe a stat that says Marty Schottenheimer is one of the most aggressive coaches in history has a perfect methodology, but I sure can’t come up with anything better. 

This list is from 1991-2012 with a minimum of 3 seasons.  I included the top and bottom quartiles of NFL coaches by aggressiveness, highlighted those whose winning percentage is greater than one standard deviation from the mean in green, less than one standard deviation in red, and Super Bowl winners who did not make the top tier in orange. 

The Bold and Sometimes Beautiful

Coach	AI	Win %
Kotite	1.66	0.417
Ditka	1.64	0.56
Haslett	1.64	0.435
Mularkey	1.63	0.333
Belichick	1.59	0.651
Coslet	1.58	0.379
Parcells	1.58	0.57
Seifert	1.51	0.648
Payton	1.51	0.657
Johnson	1.43	0.556
Schottenheimer	1.36	0.613
Williams	1.34	0.354
Carroll	1.33	0.538
Jauron	1.33	0.423
M.Smith	1.31	0.674
Dungy	1.28	0.668
Campo	1.26	0.313
David Shula	1.25	0.268
Tobin	1.22	0.394
Mangini	1.22	0.413
Wannstedt	1.22	0.485

The Wimps

Coach	AI	Winning%
Knox	0.67	0.559
Pardee	0.68	0.53
Billick	0.72	0.556
Gruden	0.72	0.54
Infante	0.72	0.375
Reid	0.73	0.596
Fox	0.73	0.546
Jones	0.73	0.379
Glanville	0.76	0.465
Holmgren	0.77	0.592
Morris	0.77	0.354
Switzer	0.79	0.625
Edwards	0.79	0.422
Reeves	0.8	0.535
Crennel	0.83	0.337
Ross	0.84	0.54
Gibbs	0.85	0.621
Levy	0.85	0.565
Green	0.85	0.546
Schwartz	0.85	0.366
McGinnis	0.85	0.298

For further context, Ray Rhodes, Jeff Fisher, and Wade Phillips are numbers 22-24 in aggressiveness while multiple Super Bowl participant Mike Tomlin, lucky multiple Super Bowl winner Mike Shanahan, and terrible coach Chan Gailey are the missing coaches on the least aggressive scale.

What you observe is that there are more successful aggressive coaches than successful wimps. This is good because it shows, at least on an observational basis, the good decision-making matters. However, there are some really successful wimps, and having balls of steel is no guarantee of success (see Kotite, Rich and Coslett, Bruce). Three-time Super Bowl winner Joe Gibbs and 4-time NFC championship Andy Reid are near the bottom.

So why do we have this wide variance? In other words, why are some coaches like Andy Reid, Joe Gibbs, Marv Levy, and Mike Tomlin extremely successful despite being wimps? Three main possibilities 1) They are extremely lucky 2) They had superior talent 3) They have some qualities that dramatically overcomes their shoddy decision-making. 

Folks like those at coachblewit.com might go with reason 1 or 2, and rank Reid the #9 coach in the NFL and Tomlin as #14, actually behind haven’t done anything yet #6 Chip Kelly and can’t pick a QB # 13 Leslie Frazier.  These folks are woefully misguided. Instead, the leadership of these individuals overshadow their decision-making short comings.

So what is the special sauce that Reid, Tomlin, and Gibbs might have if they have the football decision-making courage of the cowardly lion? Identifying special sauce is hard, so when in doubt, I ask smart people, like those at the Harvard Business Review who have published 6 signs of great corporate culture. They say that culture can lead to 20%-30% advantage in performance over culturally unremarkable organizations. For those of you doing math at home, that's an infinity percent advantage over Greg Schiano.

 Here is their list, and brief anecdotes about how these terrible decision-makers lead great organizations. I'm going to focus on the coaches I know the best, Gibbs and Tomlin, who led/lead my favorite teams, and Reid, who dominated the Skins for years.

    Vision: Does your organization have a purpose and a plan?

Examples:

ESPN.com on Andy Reid’s Chiefs Season: “The players have seen unrest and now they have seen the stability, the calm and the plan.”

Joe Gibbs actually authored a book Racing to Win: Establish Your Gameplan for Success

Values: A set of guidelines and mindsets needed to achieve the vision.

Example: All three of these coaches have a football identity that they follow to a tee. So do Parcells and Schottenheimer towards the top of the list. Reid’s teams will always run the West Coast offense and pass way too often. Gibbs’ teams always run the ball and play a physical brand of football. Tomlin, with the help of Dick LeBeau, always play an extremely aggressive and physical defense. Some years their teams execute better than others, but they always follow their identity.

Practices: Does the team’s actions align with their values?

It appears that all three of these great coaches follow through on their values in their actions. A few snippets:

No-nonsense Tomlin just banned video games and somersaults. He ran a brutal training camp his first year with the team.

How about this quote by Alex Smith on Andy Reid, “He eliminates distractions, he allows guys just to focus on football and exactly that, just be themselves,” Smith said. “I even think he encourages it, encourages to play with personality and have personality. He does that through his actions by letting his own personality shine and come through. I think it really starts with him.”

"Joe Gibbs was just very thorough in every facet of the game. He had a great mannerism with his players, assistant coaches. Just a wonderful human being, very bright, a good person, very ethical. Everything you'd want in a coach, Gibbs had," said coach Don Shula.

     People: Does your organization have people who embrace your core values?

All three of these coaches are inextricably linked with assistants and players who were extensions of themselves. Tomlin has Dick LeBeau and had fearsome defensive players such as James Harrison who reflect Tomlin’s intensity. Andy Reid had Jim Johnson and McNabb, and Joe Gibbs had Richie Pettibone, Joe Bugel, and The Hogs. All performed worse without these key people.

      Narrative and Place: Does your organization have a great story? Is the work place conducive to a positive culture?

No great insights on these two. However, I can tell you for certain that having a MRSA epidemic in your locker room is correlated with losing

In short—despite the fact that it appears Reid, Tomlin, and Gibbs constantly make the wrong in-game decisions, they are likely great culture coaches and as a result, great coaches and winners overall.

So Where Does This Leave Us: While we should definitely still obsess over coaches' terrible in-game decision-making, I hope we develop a strong culture in the sporting media around analyzing leadership and the organizations those leaders create. That 20-30% of performance associated with culture is the difference between playoffs and mediocrity. Until then, Hail to The Wimps!