NFL Coaching Changes: Chips a'Hoy

Oil Can Dan

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Unless something crazy happens I think McAdoo is the next Giants HC. No word likely to come down before Monday and things could change...
 

Omar's Wacky Neighbor

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Leaving in a bit to the studio :)
Unless something crazy happens I think McAdoo is the next Giants HC. No word likely to come down before Monday and things could change...
Pretty sure Francessa said McAdoo as well, and he has usually has decent sources inside the organization (he broke Tom leaving and meeting with the coaches a fair bit before Schefter tweeted it).
 

dynomite

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You only get a few bites at the apple, if you get one at all. McDaniels was a stupendous failure not only in Denver, but also as OC in St. Louis so he really only has his NE resume as positives. If some team wants to hire him as their Head Coach this year, I think he'd be crazy to say no.
I'm interested by what you think would change between this year and next, and why McDaniels stock will go down. You don't think the Patriots will score lots of points and be good again in 2016?

If anything, I'm always surprised by how risk-averse the NFL is, and how many chances big name assistants and Head Coaches eventually get.

Take Wade Phillips. He was the Broncos coach in 93 & 94 and got canned. Then he was the Bills coach from 98-00 and got canned. And then at age 60 he was hired by the Cowboys and given three and a half seasons as their HC.

Eric Mangini got a 2nd chance with Cleveland. Dave Wannstedt got a 2nd chance with Miami. Mike Malarkey got a 2nd chance with the Jaguars.

Whether he should be or not (personally I think he could use a little more seasoning -- dude is 39) McDaniels is one of the most attractive coaching candidates in the NFL. Whether it's next year or five years from now, he'll probably be a head coach again somewhere. I think the question for him is more about finding the right fit than jumping at his first opportunity.
 

OCST

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Carl Banks on WFAN (a few minutes ago) was pushing the idea of Josh (rhymes with SoSH) McDaniels would be a very good fit with the NYFG.
Not to derail the thread, but Banks is a radio guy for the Giants and he's great. Football on the radio is blah, but he does an excellent job with technical analysis. Wish he'd get a good TV gig.
 

crystalline

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Re: few jobs and coaches taking opportunities where they come-
Arguing for accepting any offer, I think it's a lot easier to get an HC job once you have already been a HC. Arguing for waiting for the right offer, I think the main reason to turn down an offer is a bad organization or ownership. Guys who would take a HC job can mostly adapt to a lot of situations with players and rosters and conferences but a bad owner can sink you. I'd argue that happened with Chip Kelly.

I don't think any of the BB proteges will go to a bad ownership situation, especially McDaniels (who has a HC line on his resume already), but also not Patricia or Kelly. So I'd rule them all out for the SF job.

---

Coughlin is experienced enough and close enough to retirement that he might be a good fit for Philly.

I think Marrone will turn out to be good. It's easy to think highly of a guy who trusted himself enough to walk away from a bad situation in Buffalo.
 

soxfan121

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I think Marrone will turn out to be good. It's easy to think highly of a guy who trusted himself enough to walk away from a bad situation in Buffalo.
Marrone's exit is the best thing about him. He was never impressive in Buffalo, often screwing up basic gameday management stuff (clock, timeouts, challenges, etc.). He didn't seem to be very special in the locker room, though that might just the absence of data. And he either signed off on, or recommended, EJ Manuel as his QB.

As a Pats fan, I hoped Marrone was the coach in Buffalo for a decade.
 

GeorgeCostanza

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Marrone's exit is the best thing about him. He was never impressive in Buffalo, often screwing up basic gameday management stuff (clock, timeouts, challenges, etc.). He didn't seem to be very special in the locker room, though that might just the absence of data. And he either signed off on, or recommended, EJ Manuel as his QB.

As a Pats fan, I hoped Marrone was the coach in Buffalo for a decade.
As a pats fan I couldn't be more happy they hired Rex. Unfortunately, next year will be his last.
 

Super Nomario

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Re: few jobs and coaches taking opportunities where they come-
Arguing for accepting any offer, I think it's a lot easier to get an HC job once you have already been a HC. Arguing for waiting for the right offer, I think the main reason to turn down an offer is a bad organization or ownership. Guys who would take a HC job can mostly adapt to a lot of situations with players and rosters and conferences but a bad owner can sink you. I'd argue that happened with Chip Kelly.

I don't think any of the BB proteges will go to a bad ownership situation, especially McDaniels (who has a HC line on his resume already), but also not Patricia or Kelly. So I'd rule them all out for the SF job.
RE: your first sentence, it's not necessarily easier to get a HC job once you've already been a HC. You have to have at least a modicum of success in your first stop, typically. I'm working on a piece for ITP on coaching hires so I have this data handy: 37/110 permanent hires since 2000 have had at least 1 year of head coaching experience, and 27 of those 37 had 5 years or more. So the guys who coach for two or three years and then get fired (Marty Mornhinweg, Bill Callahan, Scott Linehan, Jim Zorn, Gregg Williams), etc., don't typically get another shot. All of which points to care with the kind of job they should accept.
 

crystalline

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RE: your first sentence, it's not necessarily easier to get a HC job once you've already been a HC. You have to have at least a modicum of success in your first stop, typically. I'm working on a piece for ITP on coaching hires so I have this data handy: 37/110 permanent hires since 2000 have had at least 1 year of head coaching experience, and 27 of those 37 had 5 years or more. So the guys who coach for two or three years and then get fired (Marty Mornhinweg, Bill Callahan, Scott Linehan, Jim Zorn, Gregg Williams), etc., don't typically get another shot. All of which points to care with the kind of job they should accept.
Interesting. Spagnuolo is another in that camp.


Another factor is that any given coordinator may be very unlikely to get an offer (which would still argue against my point, to be fair). Under that assumption, mornhinweg for example would be very unlikely to get a HC offer at any point in his life. So he still should have taken the Lions job offer because he was unlikely to get another shot, and any shot is better than none.

A partial window into this could be obtained by looking at how often offers are refused. Which is usually pretty public knowledge. You'd also want to know who declined interviews though, and that's harder to obtain.
 

Super Nomario

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Interesting. Spagnuolo is another in that camp.


Another factor is that any given coordinator may be very unlikely to get an offer (which would still argue against my point, to be fair). Under that assumption, mornhinweg for example would be very unlikely to get a HC offer at any point in his life. So he still should have taken the Lions job offer because he was unlikely to get another shot, and any shot is better than none.

A partial window into this could be obtained by looking at how often offers are refused. Which is usually pretty public knowledge. You'd also want to know who declined interviews though, and that's harder to obtain.
That's a great point, and one that's difficult to study. My educated guess is that guys are better off staying a coordinator than trying and failing as head coaches, just based on how the list of hot coaching candidates doesn't seem to change much year-to-year. Gase was a hot property last year and already has a job this year. If McDaniels or Patricia don't take jobs this year, their names will still come up next year. There are probably cases where a hotshot coordinator misses his window - Rob Ryan might be an example, as he looked like a miracle worker after 2013 and now looks like a bum.

My ITP article is up for those interested: http://insidethepylon.com/nfl/front-office/2016/01/12/five-lessons-on-hiring-head-coaches/

This is the reality: most head coaching hires run up losing records and then are fired. League-wide, of the 110 non-interim hires since 2000, only 37 (34%) have winning records, with another six (5%) exactly at .500. Slightly more than half (56) never make the playoffs.
 
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Fantastic article, SN. I have long wanted the answers to some of those questions, driven by data rather than anecdote, and now I have them. There's a total gambler's-fallacy issue going on with fans and owners judging coaches by playoff success. By definition, of the 12 annual playoff teams, only 4-8 of them win any games at all, and of course 11/12 do not win the title in any given year. "but we must be luckier than the rest, if we're not it must be due to preventable error or malpractice!" Hogwash.

Regarding your Lesson #4, I have a theory, perhaps proveable by time series analysis of your data, that reaching the playoffs is a skill (despite the small sample size), whereas success within the playoffs is basically all noise. This is far more observable and generally accepted in baseball, although there you at least have a best-of-7. Yet with the NFL, there is some mystical quality attached to coaches who seem to win more often than average among playoff teams. Other than Belichick's years with Brady, I wonder if there's anything to that.

Lastly, I thought it was Brian Billick, not Bill Billick.
 

crystalline

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reaching the playoffs is a skill (despite the small sample size), whereas success within the playoffs is basically all noise.
Conditional on team quality? Or talent? Or neither?


In baseball what you say about the playoffs is almost true unconditionally, because even the best teams aren't terribly much more likely than 50/50 to win.

In football, teams are often 80:20 favorites, sometimes even in the playoffs. So I wouldn't expect it to be true unconditionally. But the small number of games makes it hard (though my guess is that it's probably not impossible) to estimate team quality or talent level (team quality conditional on coaching).
 

PedroKsBambino

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He ain't going there without full control and they just hired the GM 2 years ago.
Pretty sure every owner knows that if you approach Saban's agent you're offering everything short of a majority ownership share to even have the possibility of a meeting with him. Who is in place---at GM, team president, etc.---at the moment is irrelevant. At least, if you're serious about actually getting the meeting with Saban
 
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Conditional on team quality? Or talent? Or neither?

In baseball what you say about the playoffs is almost true unconditionally, because even the best teams aren't terribly much more likely than 50/50 to win.

In football, teams are often 80:20 favorites, sometimes even in the playoffs. So I wouldn't expect it to be true unconditionally. But the small number of games makes it hard (though my guess is that it's probably not impossible) to estimate team quality or talent level (team quality conditional on coaching).
A fair and complex question, to be sure.

When last I took a crack at it, I was estimating NFL game probabilities as follows:
  1. Start with each team's margin of victory (per game). Take the difference plus a HFA adjustment factor (historically = 2.7 pts) as your baseline estimate for the game's result.
  2. Also calculate the StDev of each team's margin of victory based on the current season's games.
  3. Calculate a joint StDev of the game between A and B as = sqrt (StDev(A)^2 + StDev(B)^2), because you can add variances linearly.
  4. Compute how many standard deviations (from that joint game's StDev) from that mean expectation of game outcome (from step 1) a tie would be, i.e. how 'far out from average' you would have to go in order to flip the result from the expected one to the other one.
  5. That "# of standard deviations" is a z-value that you can look up in a normal distribution, e.g. NORMDIST() in Excel, and convert to a % which represents % likelihood to win. For the favored team, a 0.25 StDev advantage ~= 60% probability of victory, a 0.55 advantage is about 70%, etc.
Let's suppose you used that approach to get probabilities of outcomes, or you just translated the Vegas line into the equivalent historical % likelihood and treated it as gospel. Either way, you forecast the %s for each playoff matchup.

What we'd want to know then is, do playoff teams consistently underperform or outperform the expectation levels, as set via either 16 regular season games or Vegas? i.e., if we have a collection of ~60-40 playoff games, do the experienced results reflect those probabilities? Is there a more- or less-pronounced HFA in playoffs vs regular season? Are there large-enough subsets of these games (e.g., Belichick as coach, one QB claiming favor with God, etc) where the teams consistently outperform their calculated odds? Because if outcomes pretty well cluster around expected %s, we can be pretty sure the whole "can't perform in the playoffs!" mantra we sometimes hear is bunk, or at least, not supported by the data.

The nice thing is that we can probably go all the way back to the merger to get sufficient sample sizes on this, because our assumption that outcomes and team quality are normally distributed probably hasn't changed (in other words, if that assumption is wrong now it's always been wrong, if it's correct now then it's always been the case). So there's decent data to answer that question.
 

crystalline

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translated the Vegas line into the equivalent historical % likelihood
I like this approach. There is a plot floating around using lowess-like regression to estimate win probability from Vegas line.

Because if outcomes pretty well cluster around expected %s, we can be pretty sure the whole "can't perform in the playoffs!" mantra we sometimes hear
Well, but your initial question was "Once you get to the playoffs, is the rest random?"

I am not sure the above addresses that question. Indeed I think the hardest part is framing the question precisely.
 
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Oil Can Dan

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McAdoo reportedly hired by Giants. Supposedly Philbon in as OC and Spags staying at DC.

With Reese staying the only change is Coughlin out. Ouch.
 
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Well, but your initial question was "Once you get to the playoffs, is the rest random?"

I am not sure the above addresses that question. Indeed I think the hardest part is framing the question precisely.
Yeah, I'm not sure it addresses it either. There's probably half a dozen ways you could choose to frame that question, and I'm willing to bet most of them would show something interesting. How would you suggest approaching it?
 

VBSoxFan

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Browns hire Hue Jackson as head coach.

There's speculation in the article about whether Johnny Manziel has a future with the team, given Jackson's success with other QB's in the past but the conclusion is that Manziel is done in Cleveland.
 

Remagellan

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McAdoo reportedly hired by Giants. Supposedly Philbon in as OC and Spags staying at DC.

With Reese staying the only change is Coughlin out. Ouch.
This makes perfect sense. If the Giants have another disappointing season, Reese will be out after next season. The new GM comes in in 2017 and takes a year to evaluate things and then flushes McAdoo, Spags, and company (and probably trades away Eli) in 2018 if there is no improvement by then.

The Eagles interest in McAdoo was supposedly key to the Giants deciding on McAdoo. The guy he's compared to is Andy Reid, so maybe Lurie got that same vibe and was ready to try to relief the glory days of the Reid regime, which wouldn't be a surprises since Reid was the most successful Eagles coach since Vermeil.
 

Auger34

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The Titans will hire Jon Robinson as their next GM. Early speculation is that he will hire McDaniels as his head coach. It looks like the Eagles will hire Coughlin (although Doug Pederson is still heavily linked there) and the 49ers Mike Shanahan (although Coughlin is linked there as well).
All this means that Dirk Koetter is left without a seat at the head coaches table. There are heavy rumors out there that the Bucs are waiting to interview and are highly interested in both McDaniels and Matt Patricia, although if I had to guess they would prefer Patricia and keep Koetter and his staff in place for continuity with Winston. They could also pivot and hire Sean McDermott as head coach but the idea is that their search is dragging on so long because they are interested in the Patriots staff

In 48 hours, it went from the Patriots keeping both of their coordinators to possibly losing both of them.
 

Hoodie Sleeves

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Well, but your initial question was "Once you get to the playoffs, is the rest random?"

I am not sure the above addresses that question. Indeed I think the hardest part is framing the question precisely.
I think footballoutsiders did almost exactly this a couple years back, and determined that real football game odds almost never go past about 70% in the regular season, and are lower in the playoffs because there are no genuinely bad teams.

If you've got a 70% chance to win each one of your playoffs games, and you've got a bye, you've got about a 35% chance of winning the superbowl. At 60%, it's a 20% chance.

I don't want to say its random, but the non-predictive stuff is definitely more important than being the best team in the bracket (injuries, seeding matchups, weather, and plain old lucky bounces)
 

dcmissle

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Giants/Eagles will be awesome next year if Philly hires Coughlin.
 

ShaneTrot

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McAdoo reportedly hired by Giants. Supposedly Philbon in as OC and Spags staying at DC.

With Reese staying the only change is Coughlin out. Ouch.
I guess this means Mara thought this team was good and the strategic lapses in the games against Dallas, NE, Atlanta, Jets etc... were on Coughlin. My untrained eye is besides Eli and Odell and a few slightly better than average players this roster blows. Perhaps if the OL could stay healthy they would have been better but I think Coughlin did a good job with a lousy team. Look at the defense they were horrible, last in yards allowed, third to last in points allowed. Spagnola is horrific.
 

cromulence

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I guess this means Mara thought this team was good and the strategic lapses in the games against Dallas, NE, Atlanta, Jets etc... were on Coughlin. My untrained eye is besides Eli and Odell and a few slightly better than average players this roster blows. Perhaps if the OL could stay healthy they would have been better but I think Coughlin did a good job with a lousy team. Look at the defense they were horrible, last in yards allowed, third to last in points allowed. Spagnola is horrific.
So, wait - the roster sucked and was lacking in talent, but Coughlin gets credit while Spags is horrific? I don't get it. The defense had serious talent deficiencies and injury issues, to the point where it's very difficult to fairly judge how Spags did. As a Giants fan, I'm satisfied with this. For all the talk about discipline, attention to detail, etc, Coughlin's teams seemed to make a lot of bone-headed mistakes and were maddeningly inconsistent.
 

ShaneTrot

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So, wait - the roster sucked and was lacking in talent, but Coughlin gets credit while Spags is horrific? I don't get it. The defense had serious talent deficiencies and injury issues, to the point where it's very difficult to fairly judge how Spags did. As a Giants fan, I'm satisfied with this. For all the talk about discipline, attention to detail, etc, Coughlin's teams seemed to make a lot of bone-headed mistakes and were maddeningly inconsistent.
My point is I think he is a good coach and the team was inconsistent because the talent blows and that is more on Reese.
 

Silverdude2167

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My point is I think he is a good coach and the team was inconsistent because the talent blows and that is more on Reese.

"Tom Coughlin is withdrawing his name from consideration for Eagles HC job, per sources. Not the right fit."

Also, he had 4 seasons with 10 wins or more in 12 years. Not sure he is that good of a coach. Can't pin it all on the GM.