Yeah, I think it largely depends on how you interpret “would do the best jobs”?
Would, if they had years of prep?
Would, if you just inserted them immediately in a HC slot tomorrow?
The first one is zero for sure. The second might be zero, but I don’t think it’s a lock.
I’m going by this one, so they have to have a strong understanding of the game of football.
Do you even Ted Lasso?
Some of the coaching things are just dumb. Dallas being the latest in a long line. My generic favorite is down 9-10-11 and run a short pass from the 20 instead of only taking end zone shots or just kicking the FG to preserve time.
I’m skeptical a bit with the go for it success analytics because the simple way it’s presented is as some perfect knowledge EV calc when it’s both uncertain (lots of imperfect assumptions) and ignores any kind of frequency analysis. The Chargers going for it on their on 20 I thought was a bridge to far. The analysis had to be within certainty (less than 2%) and the downside polar option was very negative while the upside was not. (Oak was going to score if the conversion failed, but if the conversion succeeded, the Chargers could easily have to punt or go for it on another dicey 4th Down).
Yes traditional coaching is way too tight, but going all in blind is an over correction).
https://twitter.com/PFF/status/1483869387329257484/photo/1
they went 3-13 that year
Not stanning for dumb coaches doing dumb things, but pundits do go a little overboard saying stuff like “calling a short pass on 3rd and 10 is a fireable offense”.
When in reality, the play that was run probably has 5 eligible receivers in the pattern, and the one that got targeted happens to be one running a short route while the other 4 we running routes at a variety of depths, and perhaps an interior lineman lost a 1v1 or perhaps the other receivers didn’t win their release battle and the qb bailed out to a check-down. Or maybe the qb failed to pull the trigger on a better target.
But ldo coach dumb for calling a short pass.
Again coaches do dumb micro stuff, but lots of “play calling” criticism is a bit overblown and could be restated as “players were overmatched and failed”. This obviously doesn’t apply to stuff like punt/go decisions or when to go for 2.
Also ignores game theory. Like you should probably run a draw on 3rd and 6th some fraction of the time. Like 5-10%, I don’t know. Keeps the defense on their toes and increases the chances of a pass past the marker working. Just like you should do a play action pass sometimes on 4th and 1.
Yah general bad punditry (not from our esteemed members here obv) is always results oriented, and assumes that in any situation there is definitely The One True Play that would work 100% of the time, ignoring the fact that the defense is full of bad hombres that get paid to wreck stuff, and sometimes they win.
I was talking more end game scenarios where the clock is the enemy vs a random 3rd and 10, but that said their are certain teams that seem to always pass beyond the sticks and those that don’t. I don’t know if scheme or the talent but as someone that’s watched a lot of Lions football, it’s damn frustrating for sure.
Yeah I was going to edit to add that Mike McCarthy is still a moron and Dak Prescott exhibited below-average awareness in failing at the end of their Wild Card game, and some teams/coaches definitely revel in putting their players in bad situations that doom them to fail, so bring on Coach Cuse.
I would love to be assistant coach of “don’t do dumb shit”.
I’m head coach of that in my household.
It’s definitely an interesting thing, and as commonWealth mentioned, I think the league is ripe for disruption in terms of analytics/game theory/whatever you want to call it.
The bottom line is that nerds like us simply aren’t welcome to show up in the NFL and tell people how to (correctly) do things from a GTO perspective.
If you want to be an NFL coach, you typically need to start coaching youth football in your neighborhood and work your way through highschool, convince 15 year old kids to lift a ton of weights, recruit people on your team, deal with annoying parents. Then maybe you can get some volunteer quality control assistant gig for some D3 school, keep kids lifting weights, yada yada yada until you’re so entrenched in the existing culture of kids and teams and THE GRID IRON.
To get through that pipeline to where you’d be a legitimate NFL coaching candidate makes it very hard for people with different approaches to show up.
So, you end up with guys like Brandon Staley that seem like wild young GTO guys, but they’re still mostly the same as every other coach.
Played highschool/college football, grad assistant at Northern Illinois > job with D3 St. Thomas working with defensive linemen and special teams > assistant at Hutchinson Community College > defensive coordinator at Hutchinson CC > grad assistant at Tennessee > defensive coordinatator/secondary coach at John Carroll > defensive coordinator/linebackers coach at James Madison University > outside linebackers coach for the Bears > outside linebackers coach for the Broncos > defensive coordinator for the Rams > Coach of the Chargers
Ripe for disruption, but really not super able to be disrupted.
Hot (or maybe not all that hot) take on coaching. Even for a game as complex as football, it’s still a players league. Playbooks and schemes are like 95% common across the league. The teams with the best players have a significant edge regardless of any dumb shit done by coaches. The best coaches will push players to go beyond what they thought they were capable of, while also building the best possible game plans to take advantage of the strengths of their team. I think some nerds overstate the importance of analytics. Sure those things are important for things like 4th down and 2 point decisions, and I do think analytics should weigh heavily there. But at the end of the day 95% of who will win or lose is about who are the biggest, fastest, strongest, most skilled mfs on the field.
Scouting and position coaching also are ways teams can differentiate from one and other. Malcom Butler’s miracle interception was the result of very good scouting, and then drilling it into the player, that a lot of teams probably don’t do.
In the 4th down go for it vs kick discussion, I’ve yet to see variance used as an argument. I think variance should often be a critical deciding factor. Better teams want to reduce variance. Teams with a lead, the same.
eh I think most of them do, it’s just they had two weeks so they could run every play seattle ever ran
cant quite do that with one
Win probability addresses those concerns for being ahead/behind. If you factor in the strength of the team in the WP calculation better teams wanting to reduce variance is addressed as well.
I still don’t believe that most teams hit that level of coaching. That stuff really does matter imo. It’s just that we can’t see it, so we tend to discount it.
sure but everyone gets tendency sheets and analytics and all that but the best coaches can filter out some of the noise with the scouting or analytic reports, the worst ones cannot.