60% of HC Hires Fail

Steelers have two HCs since 2000 that are best in the league. This also tells us that it's very easy to get a HC hire wrong.

How often do NFL teams get coaching hires right? What 23 years of data tells us - The Athletic

This is the average output per coach among the 160 hires from 2000-22.

• Seasons on job: 4.4
• Regular-season record: 34.4 wins, 34.5 losses, 0.2 ties
• Playoff appearances: 1.7
• Playoff wins: 1.6
• Super Bowl appearances: 0.3 (45 total)
• Super Bowl wins: 0.1 (23 total)

Tomlin and McCarthy both top rated. [article defines 'success', i.e. the more they exceed the average the more points they are awarded]

 

Brother, you are bringing it with the information and the analytics you have been posting. Thank you for taking the time to do it.

I'm a little more old school and don't strictly follow analytics. I don't always agree with what the analytics are saying and I still believe what my eyes are telling me and sometimes my gut, but lots of information is always a good thing and adds to the conversation.

Great job. Keep it up.

 

This tells me that on average the average coach is about average

 

Somewhat of a hobby to keep the brain cells from rotting

 

Averages can be deceiving. The average HC has at least 1 playoff win in 4.5 seasons?!... Let the Tomlin missiles fire.

 

has to be higher than 60

 

This is the reason I was generally in favor of holding on to Tomlin for as long as we did. And I wouldn't have been opposed to bringing him back this year either.

I think that good HCs rarely "make" teams win, but I do think that bad HCs frequently "make" teams lose.

I think Tomlin was "good enough" as a coach that he wasn't making the team lose.

All that being said, I'm coming around to the MM hire even though I was against it initially. I think the fact that the young coaches that were being talked about ended up without jobs. Suggesting they weren't ready.

Ultimately, I'm excited to see what happens when we have an offensive minded coach in the Burgh.

 

Tomlin should have been fired 10 years ago.

 

wrong
should have been fired 2011
Knew after the super bowl and his EZ going unaccountable way the team was doomed
I can't believe it took so many others years and years l to realise it

 

Tomlin played a role in the Killer B's offense and Super Bowl window of 2014-18. Tomlin's specialty... defense, let the team down.

 

Every industry has relatively the same hiring success. Typically, 1 in 3 new hires will develop into long term employees. Whether that's actual production based or the employer simply leaves on their own. It's generally a 1 in 3 ratio.

 

How can so many coaches fail when the “best candidates” are always hired?

yes.. this is sarcasm.

 

I'm not sure I can agree with this. IMO, "the Tomlin way", was leading us to wild card round humiliations. We weren't sharpening the knife enough in the regular season to actually compete in the post season. I would have preferred a few losing seasons if it eventually lead to some more recent playoff successes.

The one stat that has stuck with me, that makes me say Tomlin wasn't "good enough" is this: 4 seasons out of 19 that resulted in a playoff win. That's just not "good enough" IMO. Happy to give him credit for his early career success with Ben. Also giving him credit for the 15 out of 19 seasons that didn't result in a playoff win and the past 6 appearances that resulted in embarrassment.

 

This is the coaching equivalent of Bill Parcell's quote: "You can lose with good players, but you cannot win without them".

 

Im trying really hard with my new persona to not bad mouth MT……. So hard

 

Who knows?

Without the counterfactual, we can't really say.

In that 10 years, I think we had more regular season success than we "deserved". But less playoff success than we'd all have liked (1x division round exits...2x if we go back 11 years, 1 AFCC loss, 5 x WC losses).

So it's good that we made the playoffs in 7/10 of those years. But we certainly would have liked to have had more playoff success. A SB appearance (or even a win). More WC victories. Etc.

I think it's worth remembering that 7/10 of these years happened after Ben's injury (very early in the 2019 season). I think the results we got were equal to or higher than reasonable expectations. And I don't think that we'd have done better under a different coach. Because Tomlin is a high floor guy.

But I know that Steelers fans have issues with reasonable expectations because of the

To me, the better argument against Tomlin is more about 2011 to about 2015 when we were in the prime portion of our window of competitiveness. But I think his biggest issue was not getting the Blount situation correct. Especially since relationship management is probably the thing that he's best at.

But ultimately, I think the successes and failures of the team while Ben was here (under both Cowher and Tomlin) are mostly about Ben. He was a very high variance player. When he was on, he was one of the best players I'd ever seen. But he also had some brutal games (or at least halves) in the playoffs. And even though he played well in the back half of games against Jax and CLE in the playoffs, it wasn't enough to dig our way out of the holes we dug with terrible first halves.

Ultimately, I'm guessing that neither one of us will be convinced by the other here. As all of these arguments have been made 1,000,000 times on the internet.

 

I think the question about the end of Tomlin's tenure will be something like "was it better to get humilated in those WC rounds, or miss the playoffs".

I think since Ben's injury, we got to the playoffs with teams that didn't really deserve to be there. And we proved that in the playoffs.

Does that mean that the coach was good or bad? I don't exactly know. But I think the playoff appearance post-Ben were about (1) good coaching and (2) a team mission statement that was 100% about winning in the present even if it meant sacrificing medium term development. I don't really like (2), but I think that's a thing that comes from Rooney, not Tomlin. I think the MM hire is more of this too.

 

I can see that perspective. At the same time, we should have gotten more out of Ben's prime too. And the head coach has to take a good part of the blame for how it dealt with a retiring hall of fame QB. We tried out Duck, Rudolph, Pickett, Trubisky, Fields, Wilson, AR and overpaid a defense that didn't live up to it's pay scale.

No matter how we slice and dice it, 15 of 19 seasons without a playoff win just isn't getting it done for me.

 

You and others often say that, and then I ask give me an example of a HC that has been to 2 SBs, won 1, has never had a losing season, and has a winning average of 10.5 games a year , and has been fired in the history of the NFL, and nobody can give me one. Not one. Think about that a minute.
I don't think our Owner want to be the 1st to do it.
I usually get back something that doesn't resemble anything of what I asked. Why, because they can't.
Hell take out the SBs even. I can't think of one HC that's been fired that never had a losing season.

 

But he accomplished all of that with Cowher's players.

I would have been impressed with Tomlin, had he gotten to... or won a Super Bowl from 2014-18, our last Super Bowl window. It didn't happen.

 

Hmm , and yet even the greatest HCs in the History of the NFL without great Qbs had losing seasons

 

Why do you keep saying that.
Tell me how a team changes 1/3 of their team a year, and a team two year later, and then 4 years later is with the same players??
You do know that 10 players doesn't even make one side of the ball, let alone 3 sides.

 

Because it's true.

 

But it's not true. 10 is not 53.
Do You know that Cowher had more of Nolls players on his 1st SB that he lost than Tomlin had of Cowher on his 2nd SB.
It's not true