I live in Surrey, B.C., and I'm not exactly rich enough to afford Canucks tickets, so most of the hockey I see live is at Abbotsford Heat (AHL) games. It's a good brand of hockey, and there's always potential for some entertaining moments. Unfortunately, I wasn't there in person for what's quite possibly the highlight of the Heat's tenure in Abbotsford so far, head coach Jim Playfair (the former head coach of the Calgary Flames, Abbotsford's parent team) melting down after referee Jamie Koharski (son of former NHL ref Don Koharski, who's of course famous for being involved in another legendary meltdown) tossed Heat winger J.D. Watt. Here's the video; skip ahead to 2:30 for the start of the play, or 3:20 for the start of the fireworks.
This is pretty impressive. Playfair yells at the ref, breaks a stick, takes off his jacket and then breaks another stick before leaving, probably enough to get this up into the pantheon of the top coaching rants of all time. However, hockey alone offers some stiff competition. Here's some of the other all-time greats:
Jim Schoenfeld on Don Koharski: This is the incident mentioned above, from the 1988 playoffs. "You fell, you fat pig! Have another doughnut!"
John Tortorella ejected for hitting a fan with a water bottle: Funnily enough, this one led to a one-game suspension for Tortorella and resulted in Schoenfeld taking over the team.
Don Cherry's Bruins called for too many men in Game Seven: This is one of the great coaching blunders of all time, and still came to mind 30 years after the fact when a similar error (also against Montreal) lost this year's Grey Cup for Saskatchewan. Unfortunately, his reaction is rather muted. The famous arm-waving introduction to Coach's Corner is from earlier in this game, though.
So, what say you? Where does Playfair's meltdown rank? In pure significance, it's probably below these three, as it happened in the AHL regular season instead of the NHL playoffs. We also don't have any memorable quotes from it (yet). Still, for sheer physical spectacle, this one comes out on top in my mind. Overall, I'd probably slot it behind Schoenfeld and Tortorella, but ahead of Cherry thanks to his muted reaction to the call. Leave your thoughts in the comments or get at me on Twitter!
Update: Completely forgot about Robbie Ftorek's bench-tossing, which Sean Leahy included in his Puck Daddy post along with a couple of minor-league meltdowns I hadn't seen before. This is pretty good; maybe even good enough to take top spot.
Showing posts with label coaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coaching. Show all posts
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
CIS: Walters leaves Guelph
The University of Guelph announced this morning that Kyle Walters will be stepping down as their head football coach [thanks to Jaime Stein for the tip]. The press release says Walters "will be parting ways with the Gryphons to focus on pursuing coaching ventures elsewhere at the professional level."
Mike Treadgold, the sports and health editor of The Ontarion (Guelph's student newspaper), tweeted this morning that a source informed him Walters is off to Winnipeg to become the special teams coordinator with the CFL's Blue Bombers, and also mentioned that rumour on his blog. It isn't completely confirmed yet, but that certainly sounds plausible given both the Bombers' coaching turnover and Walters' apparent desire to seek opportunities at the professional level.
Guelph may miss Walters. He was only the head coach for four years and only put up a 13-18-1 record overall, but the team certainly seemed to be on the rise recently. They've made the OUA playoffs for the last three seasons and went all the way to the final in 2007. Guelph slumped to a 3-5 record this year, but still clinched the last playoff spot and gave the Yates Cup finalist Western Mustangs a tough game in the first round. Walters might have had a difficult time replacing some of his star veterans, including the five players attending the CFL's evaluation camp and quarterback Justin Dunk. Still, at least from this perspective, Guelph seemed to be an up-and-coming program. It will be interesting to see if they can continue that momentum with a new head coach.
The larger issue here, as I covered with Paul James' departure from York and Neate discussed with Denis Piché leaving Ottawa, is if CIS programs are doing enough to retain elite coaches. There's certainly been some encouraging progress on that front recently, with more schools establishing full-time coaching positions, but many CIS coaches still have to split their coaching duties with another job (whether internal or external to their university). Even the full-time coaches generally aren't paid a lot, considering the massive amounts of work they have to do.
Football in particular is a huge challenge for coaches, given the amount of athletes involved and the massive amounts of work required. I don't know the details of Walters' contract with Guelph, but having a successful program is not just about the head coach, it's also about putting a committed group of coordinators and assistants together to support him. That takes money, but investing in the coaching positions is one of the smartest moves a university can make in my mind, as coaching continuity is key to many successful programs. It will be interesting to see who the Gryphons tab as their new coach. In any case, with both Walters and Piche gone, the OUA football landscape may be quite different next season.
[Cross-posted to The CIS Blog]
Mike Treadgold, the sports and health editor of The Ontarion (Guelph's student newspaper), tweeted this morning that a source informed him Walters is off to Winnipeg to become the special teams coordinator with the CFL's Blue Bombers, and also mentioned that rumour on his blog. It isn't completely confirmed yet, but that certainly sounds plausible given both the Bombers' coaching turnover and Walters' apparent desire to seek opportunities at the professional level.
Guelph may miss Walters. He was only the head coach for four years and only put up a 13-18-1 record overall, but the team certainly seemed to be on the rise recently. They've made the OUA playoffs for the last three seasons and went all the way to the final in 2007. Guelph slumped to a 3-5 record this year, but still clinched the last playoff spot and gave the Yates Cup finalist Western Mustangs a tough game in the first round. Walters might have had a difficult time replacing some of his star veterans, including the five players attending the CFL's evaluation camp and quarterback Justin Dunk. Still, at least from this perspective, Guelph seemed to be an up-and-coming program. It will be interesting to see if they can continue that momentum with a new head coach.
The larger issue here, as I covered with Paul James' departure from York and Neate discussed with Denis Piché leaving Ottawa, is if CIS programs are doing enough to retain elite coaches. There's certainly been some encouraging progress on that front recently, with more schools establishing full-time coaching positions, but many CIS coaches still have to split their coaching duties with another job (whether internal or external to their university). Even the full-time coaches generally aren't paid a lot, considering the massive amounts of work they have to do.
Football in particular is a huge challenge for coaches, given the amount of athletes involved and the massive amounts of work required. I don't know the details of Walters' contract with Guelph, but having a successful program is not just about the head coach, it's also about putting a committed group of coordinators and assistants together to support him. That takes money, but investing in the coaching positions is one of the smartest moves a university can make in my mind, as coaching continuity is key to many successful programs. It will be interesting to see who the Gryphons tab as their new coach. In any case, with both Walters and Piche gone, the OUA football landscape may be quite different next season.
[Cross-posted to The CIS Blog]
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Analyzing NFL coaching changes: does experience really help?
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about how Madden players might just turn out to be decent NFL coaches (and also the surprising lack of time today's coaches spend in game situations). Seeing as it's unlikely that NFL teams are going to be hiring gamers any time soon, I thought I'd take a look at how those teams make their decisions on who their head coaches should be, and how backgrounds influence NFL coaches' success. This hopefully will provide some insight into what kind of head coaching candidates teams should consider and how this year's new hires (Chan Gailey in Buffalo, Pete Carroll in Seattle and Mike Shanahan in Washington) might do.
Now, coaching success can't be considered in a vacuum; the personnel coaches inherit have a lot to do with their success. Thus, I looked at how coaches do both in immediate turnarounds (so, the next season) and over the long term (their complete records), and I also looked at their backgrounds. I selected the last five years (2005-2009) as a sample that would be reasonably large and readers would be familiar with, but this analysis could be easily done for any time period. Data is from Pro Football Reference, and is only looking at the regular season. Here's the complete spreadsheet; I'll break down the highlights of it further down.
First, let's consider the coaches with the top 10 first season turnaround percentages (calculated by taking their winning percentage from their first season in charge and subtracting the winning percentage of their predecessor in his final season). Here's that list.
One of the interesting things about that list is that only one of the new coaches (Wade Phillips) had previous head coaching experience. Three coaches had been defensive coordinators, three had been offensive coordinators and three were NFL assistants, but not coordinators. This would seem to fly in the face of the idea that it's best to hire someone who's been there and done that as an NFL head coach before. Let's see if that holds up over time by looking at the top 10 new coaches by overall winning percentage and how they compared to their predecessors.
As we can see, there are several holdovers from the previous sheet, but there are some new faces. What's more interesting to me is that the trend I discussed earlier has continued, though; only two of the new coaches have previous head coaching experience (Wade Phillips and Norv Turner), and those two are probably the most criticized members of this group for their lack of postseason success despite tremendously talented teams. Of the other eight coaches, two were NFL offensive coordinators and two were NFL defensive coordinators. The remaining four were NFL assistants. One other interesting note from this list is that Turner actually had a negative percentage change in his first season (-.188), as he took over Marty Schottenheimer's 14-2 Chargers team and led them to a measly 11-5 record. I'd suggest that Turner actually is quite a talented coach, despite public perception, but the fact remains that he had a tremendous amount of starting talent to work with.
Another element to examine is the top 10 coaches from an overall change perspective (how their overall record compared to their predecessor's overall record). Here's that list.
This list features some of the same names we've seen on the previous lists, and some new ones. One thing that interests me about it is that it includes two guys typically panned as horrible NFL coaches; Lane Kiffin and Romeo Crennel. Yes, neither was particularly good, as they had overall winning percentages of .250 and .375 respectively, but they were significant improvements over their predecessors (Art Shell and Terry Robiskie). However, depending on how you consider coaches, Crennel could be omitted; Robiskie was only an interim coach who guided the 2004 Browns for the five games of the season, so you can argue that Crennel's real predecessor is Butch Davis, who actually had a superior career winning percentage in Cleveland to Crennel (he was 24-34 with the Browns from 2001 to 2004 for a .414 percentage). Davis went 5-11 and 3-7 (.313 and .300) in his last two seasons, though, so it's clear that whatever you think of Crennel as an overall coach, he didn't have a lot of talent to work with at the start.
More interesting still, though, is that the trend noted above is most pronounced here. Only one of these coaches, Phillips, has previous head coaching experience at the NFL level. Four were NFL defensive coordinators, two were NFL offensive coordinators, Kiffin was an offensive coordinator in college (with previous experience as an NFL assistant), and the other three were NFL assistants. Thus, it looks like hiring guys who have previously been head coaches might not be the best move. Let's investigate this further by looking at the worst coaches in my spreadsheet, initially by first season change.
The reverse trend appears to be taking place here. Four of these new coaches were previous NFL head coaches, and another one (Bobby Petrino) was previously a head coach in college. Of the remaining coaches, two were NFL assistants, one was a defensive coordinator and two were offensive coordinators. Thus, hiring up-and-coming guys isn't a sure guarantee of success either, but hiring former head coaches doesn't seem to work too well. It's also interesting that Raheem Morris comes in at the top of the list; he took over Jon Gruden's Tampa Bay team that went 9-7 in 2008 and led it to a 3-13 record this year. Despite that, he seems to have received much less criticism than many other coaches this year, including Tom Cable, Jim Zorn, Dick Jauron and Eric Mangini, all of whom were more successful in their first season than Morris. That doesn't mean Morris is necessarily a worse coach then those candidates, but it is curious that he hasn't received a lot of criticism for taking a team that almost made the playoffs and turning them into one of the NFL's worst franchises.
Now, let's look at the worst coaches by overall change. Here's the top 10:
Here we see many of the same offenders from the last list and many of those traditionally considered some of the worst NFL coaches, including Cam Cameron, Art Shell and Dick Jauron. The head coaching trend also continues here, as five of these coaches were previously NFL head coaches and one (Petrino) was previously a college head coach. Two of the others were NFL offensive coordinators and two were NFL assistants.
What's also interesting is that five of these hires were internal. Most of the NFL's hires have been external (from other franchises); only nine of the 38 coaches hired over that period were internal, so it's quite significant that five of those nine showed up on this list of the worst coaches out there. Here's a look at all nine coaches hired internally, sorted by winning percentage:
As you can see from that list, only two of the internal hires had an overall record over .500 with their team. Those hires are Jim Caldwell and Mike Singletary. Of course, Caldwell took over from the retiring Tony Dungy, who had a career winning percentage of .777 with the Colts and was 12-4 in his final season; not exactly the toughest situation to be thrust into. He did find a lot of success this year, taking the Colts all the way to the Super Bowl, but he had a terrific staff already in place and a quarterback who's perhaps more involved in offensive playcalls than any other player in the league. He also managed to find a way to give history the finger, angering fans and members of his team in the process, and there's a good argument to be made that Caldwell was outcoached in the Super Bowl and may have cost his team the game. Thus, Singletary's really the only impressive internal hire, as he took over a horrible team and made them into a potential playoff contender.
So, what overall lessons can we take from this study? First off, it looks like teams are generally better off going with external hires. Secondly, it looks like those candidates who haven't previously been head coaches are more likely to be successful. The first point bodes well for Shanahan, Carroll and Gailey, as none of them came from the organization they're now coaching. The second doesn't, though, as all three were previously head coaches. Shanahan was quite successful as an NFL head coach, though, while Gailey was only 18-14 and Carroll was 33-31 (but successful as a college head coach at USC). We'll see how they do, but history isn't in their favour.
Comments? Questions? Other trends you've noticed from my data? Let me know in the comments, or by e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.
Now, coaching success can't be considered in a vacuum; the personnel coaches inherit have a lot to do with their success. Thus, I looked at how coaches do both in immediate turnarounds (so, the next season) and over the long term (their complete records), and I also looked at their backgrounds. I selected the last five years (2005-2009) as a sample that would be reasonably large and readers would be familiar with, but this analysis could be easily done for any time period. Data is from Pro Football Reference, and is only looking at the regular season. Here's the complete spreadsheet; I'll break down the highlights of it further down.
First, let's consider the coaches with the top 10 first season turnaround percentages (calculated by taking their winning percentage from their first season in charge and subtracting the winning percentage of their predecessor in his final season). Here's that list.
One of the interesting things about that list is that only one of the new coaches (Wade Phillips) had previous head coaching experience. Three coaches had been defensive coordinators, three had been offensive coordinators and three were NFL assistants, but not coordinators. This would seem to fly in the face of the idea that it's best to hire someone who's been there and done that as an NFL head coach before. Let's see if that holds up over time by looking at the top 10 new coaches by overall winning percentage and how they compared to their predecessors.
As we can see, there are several holdovers from the previous sheet, but there are some new faces. What's more interesting to me is that the trend I discussed earlier has continued, though; only two of the new coaches have previous head coaching experience (Wade Phillips and Norv Turner), and those two are probably the most criticized members of this group for their lack of postseason success despite tremendously talented teams. Of the other eight coaches, two were NFL offensive coordinators and two were NFL defensive coordinators. The remaining four were NFL assistants. One other interesting note from this list is that Turner actually had a negative percentage change in his first season (-.188), as he took over Marty Schottenheimer's 14-2 Chargers team and led them to a measly 11-5 record. I'd suggest that Turner actually is quite a talented coach, despite public perception, but the fact remains that he had a tremendous amount of starting talent to work with.
Another element to examine is the top 10 coaches from an overall change perspective (how their overall record compared to their predecessor's overall record). Here's that list.
This list features some of the same names we've seen on the previous lists, and some new ones. One thing that interests me about it is that it includes two guys typically panned as horrible NFL coaches; Lane Kiffin and Romeo Crennel. Yes, neither was particularly good, as they had overall winning percentages of .250 and .375 respectively, but they were significant improvements over their predecessors (Art Shell and Terry Robiskie). However, depending on how you consider coaches, Crennel could be omitted; Robiskie was only an interim coach who guided the 2004 Browns for the five games of the season, so you can argue that Crennel's real predecessor is Butch Davis, who actually had a superior career winning percentage in Cleveland to Crennel (he was 24-34 with the Browns from 2001 to 2004 for a .414 percentage). Davis went 5-11 and 3-7 (.313 and .300) in his last two seasons, though, so it's clear that whatever you think of Crennel as an overall coach, he didn't have a lot of talent to work with at the start.
More interesting still, though, is that the trend noted above is most pronounced here. Only one of these coaches, Phillips, has previous head coaching experience at the NFL level. Four were NFL defensive coordinators, two were NFL offensive coordinators, Kiffin was an offensive coordinator in college (with previous experience as an NFL assistant), and the other three were NFL assistants. Thus, it looks like hiring guys who have previously been head coaches might not be the best move. Let's investigate this further by looking at the worst coaches in my spreadsheet, initially by first season change.
The reverse trend appears to be taking place here. Four of these new coaches were previous NFL head coaches, and another one (Bobby Petrino) was previously a head coach in college. Of the remaining coaches, two were NFL assistants, one was a defensive coordinator and two were offensive coordinators. Thus, hiring up-and-coming guys isn't a sure guarantee of success either, but hiring former head coaches doesn't seem to work too well. It's also interesting that Raheem Morris comes in at the top of the list; he took over Jon Gruden's Tampa Bay team that went 9-7 in 2008 and led it to a 3-13 record this year. Despite that, he seems to have received much less criticism than many other coaches this year, including Tom Cable, Jim Zorn, Dick Jauron and Eric Mangini, all of whom were more successful in their first season than Morris. That doesn't mean Morris is necessarily a worse coach then those candidates, but it is curious that he hasn't received a lot of criticism for taking a team that almost made the playoffs and turning them into one of the NFL's worst franchises.
Now, let's look at the worst coaches by overall change. Here's the top 10:
Here we see many of the same offenders from the last list and many of those traditionally considered some of the worst NFL coaches, including Cam Cameron, Art Shell and Dick Jauron. The head coaching trend also continues here, as five of these coaches were previously NFL head coaches and one (Petrino) was previously a college head coach. Two of the others were NFL offensive coordinators and two were NFL assistants.
What's also interesting is that five of these hires were internal. Most of the NFL's hires have been external (from other franchises); only nine of the 38 coaches hired over that period were internal, so it's quite significant that five of those nine showed up on this list of the worst coaches out there. Here's a look at all nine coaches hired internally, sorted by winning percentage:
As you can see from that list, only two of the internal hires had an overall record over .500 with their team. Those hires are Jim Caldwell and Mike Singletary. Of course, Caldwell took over from the retiring Tony Dungy, who had a career winning percentage of .777 with the Colts and was 12-4 in his final season; not exactly the toughest situation to be thrust into. He did find a lot of success this year, taking the Colts all the way to the Super Bowl, but he had a terrific staff already in place and a quarterback who's perhaps more involved in offensive playcalls than any other player in the league. He also managed to find a way to give history the finger, angering fans and members of his team in the process, and there's a good argument to be made that Caldwell was outcoached in the Super Bowl and may have cost his team the game. Thus, Singletary's really the only impressive internal hire, as he took over a horrible team and made them into a potential playoff contender.
So, what overall lessons can we take from this study? First off, it looks like teams are generally better off going with external hires. Secondly, it looks like those candidates who haven't previously been head coaches are more likely to be successful. The first point bodes well for Shanahan, Carroll and Gailey, as none of them came from the organization they're now coaching. The second doesn't, though, as all three were previously head coaches. Shanahan was quite successful as an NFL head coach, though, while Gailey was only 18-14 and Carroll was 33-31 (but successful as a college head coach at USC). We'll see how they do, but history isn't in their favour.
Comments? Questions? Other trends you've noticed from my data? Let me know in the comments, or by e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Experiment: Rethinking NFL Coaching
Consider a thought experiment for a moment. Say we've walked into the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and are watching the android Data. As part of his studies of the human psyche, he's examining the world of sports and has taken a particular interest in American football. Specifically, in an attempt to improve his leadership abilities, he's trying to figure out what makes a successful coach. To this end, he's constructed a holodeck program to simulate a NFL game. In order to isolate the variable of coaching, he's programmed both teams with identical players.
The difference between the teams? Team A is run by a typical NFL coaching staff, with a head coach (Coach A), position coaches and offensive, defensive and special-teams coordinators. Team B is run by a 30-year old who doesn't have any actual football experience, but has spent hours on end playing every installment of the Madden franchise since its inception and watching every possible NFL game for decades. To make it possible for him to control the entire team, it's programmed in that he sends in his instructions through Madden's "Coach" mode (playcalls, substitutions and timeouts, but no actual control of players on the field), while Team A handles their gameplan in the traditional model. Now, when these two teams face each other in Data's simulation, which would you bet on?
Every bit of common sense would say to go with Team A. They're run by guys who have been there and done that for years. In fact, because they're involved with an NFL team, these guys have been selected as some of the best coaching talent out there. They work crazy hours and develop elaborate game plans. In short, they're the professionals. Of course most people would take this highly skilled team over a single rank amateur. In fact, most people wouldn't bother running the experiment at all; they'd tell Data it's a foregone conclusion.
One nice thing about computers (and androids), though, is that they evaluate situations based on information and programming instructions, not simple a priori assumptions about common sense. Data would run his program, and I'd bet it would come to a surprising conclusion; namely, Team B winning.
Why would I bet on Team B? I'm not discounting the value of experience; in fact, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers (which I've written about before), and I largely buy his argument that much of the success we typically credit to indviduals' innate qualities is, in fact, largely due to their experience and circumstances. That's actually what I'm building on here. The 30-year-old running Team B has his own experience, and it happens to be in a very different arena than that of the traditional coaches running Team A. My guess is that it would prove superior.
Perhaps the easiest area to explore this idea in depth is the area of clock management. Joe Posnanski wrote a very interesting piece on the subject today, concluding that "Coaches in the NFL have no idea how to use the clock." He makes a compelling argument that fans understand clock management better than coaches, and I think he comes up with part of the reason why; fans spend more time thinking about the clock than coaches. However, that's only part of the explanation, I think. The key factor is experience.
No one coached more NFL games than George Halas, the legendary coach of the Chicago Bears. He finished with 318 wins, 148 losses and 31 ties in 497 regular-season games. Second all-time in games coached is Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins; he finished with 328 wins, 156 losses and six ties in 490 regular-season games. Using Pro Football Reference to rank coaches by NFL games, no active coach comes even close; the highest-ranked is Tennessee's Jeff Fisher, who's 17th with 136 wins and 110 losses in 246 regular-season games.
Now, think about that for a moment. The only area where you really get to work on clock management is in games. Sure, pre-season games help, and you can do a bit during practices, but there are always so many more pressing things teams are doing in practice, and it's never quite the same environment. Moreover, it's only a fraction of those games (the close ones) where you really have to worry about clock management; it's probably the last thing on a coach's mind when he's either winning or losing by a lot. Even in those games where clock management becomes an issue, an NFL coach is worried about lots of other things as well; keeping his players happy, working with his coordinators, thinking about playcalling and motivating his team. Considering all that, I'd guess that NFL head coaches really haven't had that much experience managing the clock.
What about the coach of Team B, though? It actually wouldn't be that hard for him to surpass Team A in clock management experience. For one thing, Madden offers the option to play shorter quarters, which allows you to get many more games in. The shorter quarters don't affect clock management much, because you still go through the same situations at the end of games. Even if you play with full-length quarters, though, Madden is much shorter than a regular NFL game thanks to a lack of commercial breaks and an ability to call plays quickly. Moreover, in Madden, you can play any number of games in a row in a sitting; in real life, you only get 16 per season (plus any playoff games), and you have to wait a week between each game. Thus, serious Madden gamers like our Team B coach spend much more time actually managing their teams in game situations than real NFL coaches.
Don't quite buy it? Well, consider this. If a Madden gamer played 16 full seasons, he'd have coached 256 regular-season games, ten more games than Fisher. In 31 seasons, he'd pass Shula with 496 games. In 32 seasons, he'd pass Halas with 512 games. 32 seasons is hardly an unreasonable figure; I've played through around 10 in the last six months, and I'm anything but a hardcore Madden user (which our Coach B would be). A casual Madden gamer like myself could hit 32 seasons in three to four years of gaming; a hardcore one could do it much faster. Moreover, Madden has far less distractions than an actual game (no motivational speeches required, no assistants to keep happy, no fans going nuts, no way to argue with refs), so Madden coaches probably spend much more time thinking about clock management than real coaches. Thus, Coach B would have far more experience actually managing the clock than Coach A.
Of course, there's much more to successfully coaching a game than clock management. However, many of the other components are similar. Consider the issue of when to use challenges, another area fans and writers often take NFL coaches to task for. Using the same argument seen above, most Madden users probably have more experience with challenges than head coaches. The same applies for offensive and defensive play selection and audibles. These can be worked on more in practice, so NFL coaches have more experience with them than they with challenges, but they're still very different in a game than they are in practice. Even if we counted all the hours Coach A spent running plays on the practice field (not as many as you might think, as practices also involve a lot of individual drills and small-group situations), though, our hardcore Madden user Coach B would likely still have more experience with playcalling than Coach A. He would have spent more time in game situations, and that gives him a better chance for success.
Now, you can make a case for Coach A if you insist that clock management, challenge management and playcalling in Madden can't be applied to actual football. If they're completely separate things, then Coach A has a distinct experiential advantage. I don't think they are, though. Again, the strongest case can be made in the area of clock management; the clock operates under the same rules in Madden and "real" football, and you can take the same measures to either stop it or keep it running. Challenges and playcalling are a little tougher, but keep in mind that Madden is programmed to operate under the same rules as "real" football, bases its plays on real plays and bases its players on real players. The quality of the simulation has improved over the years, and you could argue that the latest versions give reasonably realistic results in terms of playcalling; frequently, the same offensive plays work against certain defensive sets in both reality and the game.
There's something else that would help Coach B: innovation. As I wrote in my piece on the subject at The Good Point, innovation has always faced an uphill battle in the NFL. Few coaches are willing to really innovate for fear of looking silly; however, once an innovation is discovered, it quickly goes from laughingstock to widely-used strategy (see the Wildcat offence). Those innovations generally aren't that far out there, though; for example, the Wildcat was largely based off the old single-wing offence and was run successfully in college before it was brought to the pros.
The reason we never see anything really bizarre in the NFL is thanks to the backgrounds of the people involved. Most coaches in the NFL have gone through a very similar career arc, starting off as players, then becoming low-level assistants, then coordinators and then head coaches. They may have slightly different schools of thought based on their personalities and the coaches they've worked with (hence the concept of coaching trees), but all those ideas are really just branches of the same tree. You see this in many businesses; people from the same backgrounds tend to approach problems the same way. If you come up with a multi-dimensional business problem involving manufacturing a new device and present it to different groups, accountants will tend to look at it in terms of the costs involved, while research scientists will look at it from the perspective of what can be created and engineers will look at it from a perspective of what's feasible to create. None of these approaches is necessarily right or wrong, and you have to incorporate elements of all of them to find success.
The problem is that the NFL's small group of coaches from similar backgrounds means everyone approaches certain issues in similar ways. (Chris Brown had a good piece on this at Smart Football). There's also the risk of looking silly if you try something radical, which motivates many to stick to the tried-and-tested paths even if they do have other ideas. For example, consider the case of fourth downs. Bill Belichick got plenty of criticism for daring to go for it on fourth-and-two in his own territory this year, even though many of the numbers we have on fourth-down conversion percentages support him. That was a highly unconventional call by NFL standards, but it's still well within the bounds of what is sometimes done; that was late in the game with a short distance to go. What you would never see in today's NFL is a coach who consistently goes for it when faced with fourth down and five yards or less, regardless of field position and time left; that's far enough outside the box that no one would dare to try it for fear of looking silly.
The nice thing about Madden, though, is its judgement is based on results, not aesthetics. I've consistently gone for it on fourth and five or less and found lots of success doing so. You can do plenty of other things that you wouldn't likely see in the NFL too, such as running five-receiver sets on every play or prominently featuring flea-flickers and end-arounds. Madden users have a variety of different backgrounds, and ones very different from the typical NFL coach, plus the game design encourages experimentation and innovation. It also leads to a more statistically-based school of thought; if certain ideas work more often than not, a player will keep using them. Naysayers would argue that these ideas wouldn't work in the NFL, but it's impossible to know because no one has tried. The nature of Madden promotes innovative thinking, though, and that would be yet another advantage for Coach B.
I'm sure this idea still seems reasonably silly to many of you. After all, Madden's just a game, and games by nature are designed for entertainment. However, the increasing realism of the game in recent years has brought it closer to the level of a simulator. There are plenty of other fields where simulators are considered to provide valuable training experience, particularly for pilots and astronauts. Do you think it's really tougher to deliver a useful simulation of football than a simulation of landing an F-14 on a carrier?
Now, I'm not saying we could replace NFL head coaches with Madden gamers and instantly see improvements across the board. There are many areas of football where a current NFL coaching staff like Team A's would have an advantage, particularly in developing players from raw draft picks to seasoned veterans, motivating their players to give it all they have and juggling their players' egos. Over a long period of time, such as a complete season, I think those advantages could nullify Team B's greater expertise in playcalling and clock management. However, for the one game considered in Data's experiment, I'm taking Team B.
The broader question, though, is why can't we have the best of both worlds? What if we kept the current backgrounds of our NFL head coaches, but got them to frequently play Madden and encouraged them to try new strategies? I'm quite sure we'd see them get better at clock management, and I think they would improve as playcallers and innovators as well. At the end of the day, this will probably just remain a hypothetical, but it's an interesting one to consider. Is the way we currently develop coaches the best way to do things, or should we encourage them to take a look at the virtual world? After all, football is just a game.
The difference between the teams? Team A is run by a typical NFL coaching staff, with a head coach (Coach A), position coaches and offensive, defensive and special-teams coordinators. Team B is run by a 30-year old who doesn't have any actual football experience, but has spent hours on end playing every installment of the Madden franchise since its inception and watching every possible NFL game for decades. To make it possible for him to control the entire team, it's programmed in that he sends in his instructions through Madden's "Coach" mode (playcalls, substitutions and timeouts, but no actual control of players on the field), while Team A handles their gameplan in the traditional model. Now, when these two teams face each other in Data's simulation, which would you bet on?
Every bit of common sense would say to go with Team A. They're run by guys who have been there and done that for years. In fact, because they're involved with an NFL team, these guys have been selected as some of the best coaching talent out there. They work crazy hours and develop elaborate game plans. In short, they're the professionals. Of course most people would take this highly skilled team over a single rank amateur. In fact, most people wouldn't bother running the experiment at all; they'd tell Data it's a foregone conclusion.
One nice thing about computers (and androids), though, is that they evaluate situations based on information and programming instructions, not simple a priori assumptions about common sense. Data would run his program, and I'd bet it would come to a surprising conclusion; namely, Team B winning.
Why would I bet on Team B? I'm not discounting the value of experience; in fact, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers (which I've written about before), and I largely buy his argument that much of the success we typically credit to indviduals' innate qualities is, in fact, largely due to their experience and circumstances. That's actually what I'm building on here. The 30-year-old running Team B has his own experience, and it happens to be in a very different arena than that of the traditional coaches running Team A. My guess is that it would prove superior.
Perhaps the easiest area to explore this idea in depth is the area of clock management. Joe Posnanski wrote a very interesting piece on the subject today, concluding that "Coaches in the NFL have no idea how to use the clock." He makes a compelling argument that fans understand clock management better than coaches, and I think he comes up with part of the reason why; fans spend more time thinking about the clock than coaches. However, that's only part of the explanation, I think. The key factor is experience.
No one coached more NFL games than George Halas, the legendary coach of the Chicago Bears. He finished with 318 wins, 148 losses and 31 ties in 497 regular-season games. Second all-time in games coached is Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins; he finished with 328 wins, 156 losses and six ties in 490 regular-season games. Using Pro Football Reference to rank coaches by NFL games, no active coach comes even close; the highest-ranked is Tennessee's Jeff Fisher, who's 17th with 136 wins and 110 losses in 246 regular-season games.
Now, think about that for a moment. The only area where you really get to work on clock management is in games. Sure, pre-season games help, and you can do a bit during practices, but there are always so many more pressing things teams are doing in practice, and it's never quite the same environment. Moreover, it's only a fraction of those games (the close ones) where you really have to worry about clock management; it's probably the last thing on a coach's mind when he's either winning or losing by a lot. Even in those games where clock management becomes an issue, an NFL coach is worried about lots of other things as well; keeping his players happy, working with his coordinators, thinking about playcalling and motivating his team. Considering all that, I'd guess that NFL head coaches really haven't had that much experience managing the clock.
What about the coach of Team B, though? It actually wouldn't be that hard for him to surpass Team A in clock management experience. For one thing, Madden offers the option to play shorter quarters, which allows you to get many more games in. The shorter quarters don't affect clock management much, because you still go through the same situations at the end of games. Even if you play with full-length quarters, though, Madden is much shorter than a regular NFL game thanks to a lack of commercial breaks and an ability to call plays quickly. Moreover, in Madden, you can play any number of games in a row in a sitting; in real life, you only get 16 per season (plus any playoff games), and you have to wait a week between each game. Thus, serious Madden gamers like our Team B coach spend much more time actually managing their teams in game situations than real NFL coaches.
Don't quite buy it? Well, consider this. If a Madden gamer played 16 full seasons, he'd have coached 256 regular-season games, ten more games than Fisher. In 31 seasons, he'd pass Shula with 496 games. In 32 seasons, he'd pass Halas with 512 games. 32 seasons is hardly an unreasonable figure; I've played through around 10 in the last six months, and I'm anything but a hardcore Madden user (which our Coach B would be). A casual Madden gamer like myself could hit 32 seasons in three to four years of gaming; a hardcore one could do it much faster. Moreover, Madden has far less distractions than an actual game (no motivational speeches required, no assistants to keep happy, no fans going nuts, no way to argue with refs), so Madden coaches probably spend much more time thinking about clock management than real coaches. Thus, Coach B would have far more experience actually managing the clock than Coach A.
Of course, there's much more to successfully coaching a game than clock management. However, many of the other components are similar. Consider the issue of when to use challenges, another area fans and writers often take NFL coaches to task for. Using the same argument seen above, most Madden users probably have more experience with challenges than head coaches. The same applies for offensive and defensive play selection and audibles. These can be worked on more in practice, so NFL coaches have more experience with them than they with challenges, but they're still very different in a game than they are in practice. Even if we counted all the hours Coach A spent running plays on the practice field (not as many as you might think, as practices also involve a lot of individual drills and small-group situations), though, our hardcore Madden user Coach B would likely still have more experience with playcalling than Coach A. He would have spent more time in game situations, and that gives him a better chance for success.
Now, you can make a case for Coach A if you insist that clock management, challenge management and playcalling in Madden can't be applied to actual football. If they're completely separate things, then Coach A has a distinct experiential advantage. I don't think they are, though. Again, the strongest case can be made in the area of clock management; the clock operates under the same rules in Madden and "real" football, and you can take the same measures to either stop it or keep it running. Challenges and playcalling are a little tougher, but keep in mind that Madden is programmed to operate under the same rules as "real" football, bases its plays on real plays and bases its players on real players. The quality of the simulation has improved over the years, and you could argue that the latest versions give reasonably realistic results in terms of playcalling; frequently, the same offensive plays work against certain defensive sets in both reality and the game.
There's something else that would help Coach B: innovation. As I wrote in my piece on the subject at The Good Point, innovation has always faced an uphill battle in the NFL. Few coaches are willing to really innovate for fear of looking silly; however, once an innovation is discovered, it quickly goes from laughingstock to widely-used strategy (see the Wildcat offence). Those innovations generally aren't that far out there, though; for example, the Wildcat was largely based off the old single-wing offence and was run successfully in college before it was brought to the pros.
The reason we never see anything really bizarre in the NFL is thanks to the backgrounds of the people involved. Most coaches in the NFL have gone through a very similar career arc, starting off as players, then becoming low-level assistants, then coordinators and then head coaches. They may have slightly different schools of thought based on their personalities and the coaches they've worked with (hence the concept of coaching trees), but all those ideas are really just branches of the same tree. You see this in many businesses; people from the same backgrounds tend to approach problems the same way. If you come up with a multi-dimensional business problem involving manufacturing a new device and present it to different groups, accountants will tend to look at it in terms of the costs involved, while research scientists will look at it from the perspective of what can be created and engineers will look at it from a perspective of what's feasible to create. None of these approaches is necessarily right or wrong, and you have to incorporate elements of all of them to find success.
The problem is that the NFL's small group of coaches from similar backgrounds means everyone approaches certain issues in similar ways. (Chris Brown had a good piece on this at Smart Football). There's also the risk of looking silly if you try something radical, which motivates many to stick to the tried-and-tested paths even if they do have other ideas. For example, consider the case of fourth downs. Bill Belichick got plenty of criticism for daring to go for it on fourth-and-two in his own territory this year, even though many of the numbers we have on fourth-down conversion percentages support him. That was a highly unconventional call by NFL standards, but it's still well within the bounds of what is sometimes done; that was late in the game with a short distance to go. What you would never see in today's NFL is a coach who consistently goes for it when faced with fourth down and five yards or less, regardless of field position and time left; that's far enough outside the box that no one would dare to try it for fear of looking silly.
The nice thing about Madden, though, is its judgement is based on results, not aesthetics. I've consistently gone for it on fourth and five or less and found lots of success doing so. You can do plenty of other things that you wouldn't likely see in the NFL too, such as running five-receiver sets on every play or prominently featuring flea-flickers and end-arounds. Madden users have a variety of different backgrounds, and ones very different from the typical NFL coach, plus the game design encourages experimentation and innovation. It also leads to a more statistically-based school of thought; if certain ideas work more often than not, a player will keep using them. Naysayers would argue that these ideas wouldn't work in the NFL, but it's impossible to know because no one has tried. The nature of Madden promotes innovative thinking, though, and that would be yet another advantage for Coach B.
I'm sure this idea still seems reasonably silly to many of you. After all, Madden's just a game, and games by nature are designed for entertainment. However, the increasing realism of the game in recent years has brought it closer to the level of a simulator. There are plenty of other fields where simulators are considered to provide valuable training experience, particularly for pilots and astronauts. Do you think it's really tougher to deliver a useful simulation of football than a simulation of landing an F-14 on a carrier?
Now, I'm not saying we could replace NFL head coaches with Madden gamers and instantly see improvements across the board. There are many areas of football where a current NFL coaching staff like Team A's would have an advantage, particularly in developing players from raw draft picks to seasoned veterans, motivating their players to give it all they have and juggling their players' egos. Over a long period of time, such as a complete season, I think those advantages could nullify Team B's greater expertise in playcalling and clock management. However, for the one game considered in Data's experiment, I'm taking Team B.
The broader question, though, is why can't we have the best of both worlds? What if we kept the current backgrounds of our NFL head coaches, but got them to frequently play Madden and encouraged them to try new strategies? I'm quite sure we'd see them get better at clock management, and I think they would improve as playcallers and innovators as well. At the end of the day, this will probably just remain a hypothetical, but it's an interesting one to consider. Is the way we currently develop coaches the best way to do things, or should we encourage them to take a look at the virtual world? After all, football is just a game.
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