The Grass is Rarely Truly Greener
Changes don't have to be improvements.
The Oklahoma Sooners football team is spiraling into what seems a hopeless, losing season.1 The offense consistently looks as bad as the defense looks good. As a result, a storm is well underway. The fanbase wants change—coaching changes. Some are demanding it in quite specific terms; others are just generally frustrated expecting there must be change of some changes at some level.
I am among this group and somewhere in the middle. I think it is very likely in the OU program’s best interest to change the offensive coordinator, parting ways with Seth Littrell, and allow a new person in that position to fill out his assistants as he sees fit. I could be persuaded differently in either direction.
How this is best executed is hard to say. Perhaps it should be immediate with someone else being promoted as an interim. I think it would be better to actually wait until the end of the season while clearly communicating now that this will happen allowing Seth to complete the remainder of the year.
Obviously, this is not the only option on the table. Position coaches could be let go. Head coach Brent Venables himself could be dismissed.
Regardless, there is no guarantee any of this is the best move. Here is why: It is hard to replace a coach, especially a head coach, and actually get an improvement.2
We all have a desire for confident, certain solutions to problems—especially problems that are emotionally salient to us. Our favorite football team falling drastically short of our goals for it fits this perfectly. It is then fueled further with resentment that the coaches making the big bucks are so ineptly failing at the task. We all are experts in doing other people’s jobs, after all. Seeing other, competing programs find success with different leadership completes the circle. “Fire ‘em all! Start over!”
Pushing back on the practicality of this instinct is the sports economics literature, which shows very consistently that it is not desirable either to pay excessively to retain a (supposedly good) coach or to fire and replace a (supposedly bad) coach.3 If anything, the studies point in the opposite direction—replacement tends to be a negative factor in the long run. The reason is two-fold:
It is tough to identify signal from noise, separate luck from skill.
Regression to the mean is a strong force.
Generally coaches are fired for bad coaching performance. Successful coaches are rarely fired with those instances being for some off-the-field type of trouble.
Lincoln Riley seems to be a reverse version of this. He voluntarily left Oklahoma, and Oklahoma was worse after his departure. USC’s experience with Riley has been a lower level of success than what he had experienced at Oklahoma. The truth is at USC he probably experienced something similar to what he would've had at Oklahoma, including a reckoning with how bad his defenses had been. If he sees renew success at USC, it will be because he changed his ways.
As another anomalous example from Oklahoma, 35 years ago Barry Switzer was highly successful and yet was fired in his prime for off-the-field problems. Gary Gibbs took over the Oklahoma program facing stark headwinds in the form of crippling NCAA sanctions. The fan base was very intolerant of his inability to match Switzer’s success. Would Switzer have fared better? It is hard to say other than he was an all-time top-ten coach probably not by luck. While he almost certainly was better overall as a head coach than Gary Gibbs, he would have faced additional headwinds Gibbs did not given the baggage attached to Switzer at that time.
Gibbs was fired after five years. The next four with two different coaches were much worse than the Gibbs experience. The second of these, John Blake, was Switzer’s essentially hand-picked choice. His tenure was an unmitigated disaster on the field.
Pointing to the success of Bob Stoops, who of course followed John Blake at Oklahoma and similarly Nick Saban at Alabama and perhaps eventually Matt Ruhle at Nebraska, et al. as reasons why you should be intolerant of bad performance is only true with the benefit of hindsight. All three programs hired and then fired several highly talented, highly qualified head coaches who didn't work out including not being as successful as the first coach in the chain to be let go.
Looking at Nebraska’s experience with Frank Solich replacing a retiring Tom Osborne, we see a very similar one to Gibbs at Oklahoma. Both were replacing coaching legends. More successful than Gibbs and without the hinderance of NCAA sanctions, Solich was a Big 12 champion and took his team to the national title game. He was fired after six seasons. This was the first step in the now five-head-coach sequence that today has Matt Ruhle as the hopeful man to right the ship.
There are other examples: Texas (Mack Brown), Miami (Larry Coker), USC (Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian)...
The correct answer is neither a rule of never fire the coach nor a rule of if at first you don't succeed try, try again. Both are overly-simplistic notions. The former might work on average, but it will sink a program who dogmatically followed it. The latter might work at blue blood programs, but it comes at a very high expense. And for others it simply isn't a viable strategy.
The most egregious example of this expensive arms race based on the idea that paying enough upfront can buy success is Texas A&M. Jimbo Fisher was paid millions to be head coach at A&M and then was paid about $76 million to stop being A&M’s coach. Ironically the enormous buyout cost prevented A&M from terminating Fisher earlier than they did—another area the A&M economics department could have offered helpful advice by avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.
A program's success is dependent on a lot more than just who the head coach is. If it were that simple, Michigan State (Nick Saban),4 Arkansas (Lou Holtz), South Carolina (Steve Spurrier and Lou Holtz), Baylor (Matt Ruhle), Oklahoma State (Jimmy Johnson) and many others would be enjoying blue blood status today from years if not decades of dominance. If you object that retention is a key issue and some programs can’t afford to keep the great ones, we’ll yes, that is all part of it. And we don’t exactly know the names of the would-be legendary coaches who were trapped at lesser programs.5
Regression to the mean works in both directions. And it takes a long time to truly identify wheat from the chaff.6
The lesson to take from all of this is a two-pronged cautionary tale:
Don't assume that the grass is greener and that the next head coach (or the next head coaching job for coaches jumping ship like Lincoln Riley and so many coordinators who leave for head coaching jobs) is all that is standing between you and glory.
Don't pay for success that has not yet been delivered.
Tread lightly in making a hiring decision and making a dismissal. It could just be a more costly way to get to where you’re already headed.
This was cross posted at www.MagnitudeMatters.ai.
Notably, they are as of this writing a positive 4-3. But the sentiment is they are headed for much worse.
The lower down the assistant is, the more likely a change will result in an improvement since the coach being fired is being fired because it is perceived that he is detrimental to the program and because the program’s success is much more determined by the program itself than any single coach. By analogy: An individual franchise of McDonald’s will see its success governed by much bigger forces (the global brand, the neighborhood it is in, the ownership and management, etc.) than any single fry cook. If that guy is burning the fries, firing him is helpful, but it will only get the franchise back to its normal state of profitability. You cannot hire a new fry cook who can get you above the baseline—no single employee at that level is capable of that. At the same time the guy burning the fries can sink your business slowly (or quickly if he is also a violent, unstable person).
Also in the NFL at the Miami Dolphins.
But we can speculate: Bill Snyder, Mike Gundy, Hayden Fry, …
It is true that coaches can improve over their careers; although that is probably over stated.