The Honest and True NFL Power Rankings, Week 9

Happy almost-Halloween! We have reached the halfway point in the NFL season. It has been said that the first 8 weeks are the preseason and the second half is where things really happen. Just survive, hang around, and then play well when it really counts. With that said, here are the week 9 power rankings:

My methodology is simple: as things currently stand, according to the infallible “eye test,” what team would win a seven game series (ridiculous proposition in the NFL) against the next team. Who is actually the best?

Also, when is the last time anybody has seen a movie in theaters? For me, it’s been since the summer. I blame grad school. At the rate I am going, the next movie I will see will be Anchorman 2, which hits theaters December 20. In honor of that, the power rankings are tiered based on the top 3 Will Ferrell movies.

The Frank the Tank Division (12 most playoff-worthy teams): 

1.    Denver (7-1) – (LW: 1) This team embodies the house party in Old School with Snoop Dogg. Great but flawed.

2.    New Orleans (6-1) – (LW: 4) Comfortable win over a solid Buffalo team, with Sproles contributing as much to the victory as I did.

3.    Indianapolis (5-2) – (LW: 2) On bye this week.

4.    San Francisco (6-2) – (LW: 6) Playing old school football, with the best rushing attack in the league and dominating defense.

5.    Cincinnati (6-2) – (LW: 8) Okay I’m a believer. Blowout wins go a long ways on the Honest and True NFL Power Rankings. Is Marvin Jones a one hit wonder?

6.    Kansas City (8-0) – (LW: 5) Just not buying into the close wins over bad teams.

7.    Green Bay (5-2) – (LW: 7) No healthy receivers, no problem. Good to see Jermichael Finley on the mend from ICU. Also, good first-hand account by Finley on SI, which reminds us that these guys aren’t merely expendable gladiators.

8.    Seattle (7-1) – (LW: 3) Gotta think a few losses are coming their way with how clueless the offense looked on Monday night when it amassed a grand total of 135 yards.

9.    Detroit (5-3) –(LW: 11) Can't say enough about this team/game. Megatron had a nice receiving month in three hours last Sunday. Is there something in the water in Detroit? What was so cool is that nobody in the stadium knew that Matthew “the doughy bro” Stafford was sneaking instead of spiking except him.

10. Carolina (4-3) – (LW: 12) The new trendy darkhorse in the NFL. Everyone is saying what Panthers fans have been prematurely saying for two seasons. I vow to drop out of school and travel with the team if they win their next 3 games in a row.

11. New England (6-2) – (LW: 11) Tom Brady looks like a much more attractive Jimmy Clausen. I have him in my money league and he is almost single-handedly destroying my chances of winning.

12. Dallas (4-4) – (LW: 9) As Bald Don't Lie went to press, Dez was still running his mouth on the sideline. This team is like being the tallest midget, and they will win the NFC East.

Ron Burgundy Division:

13. San Diego (4-3) – (LW: 13) How fitting that San Diego is the first team in the Ron Burgundy division. This team will get to 5-3 before hitting the meat of the schedule. Also had a bye this week.
14. Arizona (4-4) –  (LW: 16) My brother and I argued for a solid 20 minutes about this team. Sneaky good team.

15. Miami (3-4) – (LW: 23) I mistakenly underrated this team badly last week. For some reason I thought Tannehill was hurt. We bloggers are human.

16. NY Jets (4-4) – (LW: 14) Oh lawd. Here is the Geno most thought that we would see in the NFL. 

17. Buffalo (3-5) – (LW: 17) No shame in getting whipped in the Superdome.

18. Houston (2-5) – (LW: 28) Bye week to clear their heads.

19. Chicago (4-3) – (LW: 19) Good to have one of their bye weeks while Cutler is recovering. Again, this ranking reflects the Bears with McCown as the starter.

20. Baltimore (3-4) – (LW: 21) Bye.

21. Washington (2-5) – (LW: 24) “Well that escalated quickly.” – Redskins after surrendering 31 points in the 4^th quarter to Denver. Good toughness through most of the game though.
22. Oakland (3-4) – (LW: 27) Somehow Terrelle Pryor has become a competent NFL quarterback, which is more than the Raiders have been able to say for a long time. That 93 yard run was huge. Also, their D coordinator apparently forgot that he wasn’t sitting in traffic but was at a televised NFL football game.

Ricky Bobby Division:

23. Atlanta (2-5) – (LW: 15) Shake and BREAK. As in Roddy and Julio’s appendages. Gotta wonder if the injuries overshadow bigger problems on the team like their defense.

24. Pittsburgh (2-5) – (LW: 20) How slow did Polamalu look trying to run down Terrelle Pryor on the long TD run? He looked so old.

25. Cleveland (3-5) – (LW: 25) Nobody cares about this boring team, so I’m not going to write anything on them.

26. Tennessee (3-4) – (LW: 22) Bye. [See Cleveland]

27. NY Giants (2-6) – (LW: 31) 2 games out of the NFC East? LOLZ… Can they pull the most Giants thing ever and win the division? Can’t see it happening with already having 6 losses.

28. St. Louis (3-4) –(LW: 30) Tough sledding without Bradford. I like the toughness against the Seahawks, but despite the emergence of Zac Stacy, I have as many rushing touchdowns this season as the Rams do.

29. Philadelphia (3-5) – (LW: 18) Badly overrated on BDL last week, and things have really slowed down for this team in Philly. In other news, Mike Vick is hurt again.

30. Minnesota (1-6) – (LW: 26) Josh Freeman’s Monday night game last week was egregious. Here’s my theory that has little factual basis:

a)   Management in Minnesota feels the need to make a move and picks up Freeman and then tells Leslie Frazier that he must play.

b)   He lays the egg of all eggs on Monday night, looks confused, doesn’t know the playbook or audibles, and is on the whole exasperated. This is the NFL: you don’t just learn the playbook in a few days.

c)    Management has an “oh $#!@” moment and doesn’t want to appear wishy-washy when they bench Freeman for Ponder (who two weeks ago was in the doghouse), so they say that Freeman has a concussion and cannot play.

d)   They lose the following week under Ponder, and the Vikes are still a terrible team.

31. Tampa Bay (0-7) – (LW: 29) I'm sure the Tampa Bay locker room would take MRSA over Schiano at this point. The (pirate) ship is sinking. The Bucs appear close to a mutiny. Time to make Schiano walk the plank.

32. Jacksonville (0-8) – (LW: 32) I refuse to watch them. I'm assuming they're as bad as they have been all year. Sure, put this crappy team out in London.

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!