Coaching hire best practices
Plus a short mailbag hitting on a couple good questions
Bonus post this week!
I’ve been complaining a decent amount about the state of NFL coaching, and some of the retreads that are failing in the same ways. I’ve alluded to or outright referenced Frank DuPont’s (aka fantasydouche) 2012 book “Gameplan,” which if you’ve ever watched one of my streams you might be able to pick out as one of the five or so actual books I keep on the bookshelf behind me.
A central theme of that book was the Madden generation being ready to take over coaching, and how the simulations video gamers are able to undergo give them the feedback and eventually experience to understand the sport of football in unique ways that even experienced coaches may not, in part because they have really complex jobs that include far more difficult elements than any video gamer would need to worry about, but that their busyness means not simulating real-game situations to the same degree, and only getting ~16 or whatever games each year to be put in potential different situations and get that valuable feedback that leads to a hacker’s mentality of finding potential edges, the reps — even over many more years on task — just can’t match what the video game nerd can experience in even one year.
The comparison he made at the time was to the poker world, which had just experience its “Black Friday” in 2011 but was still in its era of extreme popularity catalyzed to some degree by Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 win at the World Series of Poker. The analogy held that younger players were starting to win in poker because by playing online, they could simulate hands — sometimes “multi-tabling” dozens at a time — with way more speed than brick and mortar players, and could wind up with vastly more feedback on the decisions they were making at a much younger age, when their mental acuity was still such that they could really leverage that. DuPont made some reasonable estimates about how many hands the different types of players could play in a year and shared a graph showing estimates of total number of hands played by certain ages; he also discussed the human mind’s natural decline in the types of quick-thinking traits that are helpful to these decisions from around age 30 through the rest of our lives (which is offset by a rise in deeper thinking we might call “wisdom”).
It’s all among the most fascinating stuff I’ve ever read, not least of which because it very intelligently and correctly predicted Sean McVay and the quick rise in younger coaches — and their successes — five years before McVay’s hiring, when he himself was still a lowly Tight Ends Coach for Washington. But he was correct, and he’s since been proven correct time and again, with younger and more forward-thinking coaches showing overwhelmingly to be the right types of hires over the past decade or so.
That doesn’t mean every young coach is the right answer, obviously. Some young whiz kids like a Josh McDaniels have shown an inability to manage people, suffering from a clear lack of that “wisdom” that many older coaches do possess. Experience still matters in some capacities, and one of the things we saw from McVay early in his career was hiring older defensive coordinators — famously Wade Phillips as his first — that could provide some of that. The idea I’ve written about, though, where I’ve suggested NFL teams try to find dynamic thinkers rather than experience, would be that the experience side is more replaceable, and the kind of thing that you very much can find with the other coaching hires on the staff, for example.
I was driving home from dropping my daughter off from school this morning, and I was exploring all this in my head a little bit, and a series of thoughts sort of arose. First was this idea that during hiring cycles in the offseason, fan bases want experience — they want big names that they know, and there are many hires that can come across as uninspiring that are actually maybe the right moves. The other thing they want is speed — every year, the teams that are slowest to fill their openings get labeled as incompetent or without process. Teams rush to fill their vacancies as quickly as possible, with an explanation offered at times being that they need to give these guys time to get established before the start of the offseason.
And that stuff does make sense, but it’s also pretty clearly not the most important thing. If the general manager is in place, he’s going to be already well into his process of evaluating the free agent and rookie classes, and a lot of those early offseason decisions don’t necessarily require the coach to be in place. Obviously you’d prefer that, but you’d also prefer to make the right coaching decision so you’re not firing a guy in Year 2 of a six-year contract.
Anyway, the timeline always seems to get sped up, and because of that, I wonder how many of these teams even really know what they are getting. What is actually being considered outside an interview? Because the other big thought I had this morning is how the coach’s resume is essentially just his successes and failures, and we all know that results-based stuff, but there’s almost certainly too much weight put onto that. Urban Meyer was successful at different collegiate programs, and that was enough to make him a target, and a celebrated hire by many. But why? What process-related stuff did he offer that was going to translate?
I would suggest that the actual wins and losses more or less don’t matter to whether a team makes a good hire. What’s fascinating is there’s so much more to the resume that’s also publicly available if you just do the work in your search process of actually digging into who these candidates are. Rather than just saying, “This guy won,” you could sit down, turn on every one of his games, and watch the way he processed the sport in real time. Then you could ask him about it — Why did he make the bad game clock decisions he made in that one game? Why did his scheme seem completely lost in that other one? What has he learned?
I do realize that a lot of these teams start the search process early, so the idea of quick hires is probably not the issue. But I do think the process should take an incredible amount of time, and not just interviewing and discussing with people — yes, that, absolutely, because how else are you going to ascertain if your hire is actually a dynamic thinker and problem-solver than discussing various situational things with them — but also combing through the down-to-down outcomes and decisions that all of the candidates made.
As with a lot of my recent coaching thoughts, this works back to my Huskies. Ryan Grubb, offensive coordinator, wound up taking the Seahawks’ OC job after first accepting the Alabama job to follow head coach Kalen DeBoer there. I’ve spoken very favorably about the job DeBoer and Grubb did at UW, and I think the process that led to their hiring at UW was obviously strong (the Athletic Director who made that hire, Jen Cohen, has since moved on to USC, which I’m still bummed about). DeBoer had been an OC at various schools through 2019, before taking over at Fresno State and coaching two seasons, with 2020 shortened by the pandemic. He went 3-3 that year, then 9-3 the next year, for a 12-6 combined record, and he wasn’t super young in his mid-40s, so he doesn’t exactly fit a lot of what I’m talking about, which is part of the point of why it was a good hire.
Obviously, more forward-thinking analysis went into the hire than dwelling on his resume. Then after two years of huge success (25-3 record) but still some questions about the length of his track record, Alabama committed quickly in what I thought was another obviously sharp hire. But the part of this I think is most interesting is what I’ve referenced a few times, which is that Grubb eventually winds up as Mike Macdonald’s choice for an OC, and that hiring doesn’t come until February 13. Seattle hired the 36-year-old Macdonald on January 31, so it was only about two weeks later that the Grubb hire was made, but there were absolutely rumblings beginning that it was taking too long and sort of implications that Macdonald should have had an OC decision made when he was offered the job, given it was late in January and other head coach hirings had been made weeks prior. There’s this pressure that implies all the good candidates will be snatched up.
The way I envision it, Macdonald took the two weeks to really pour over resumes, including the actual game footage of what these coaches did, and loved what he saw from UW. That still would have led to interviews and other things, but the point is that he wasn’t looking for a quick hire to satisfy popular expectation, but was instead spending his time trying to find the right type of hire. As I’ve written, innovative coaches don’t just grow on trees, but bypassing retread offensive coordinators like the decision the Bears made on January 22 to bring in Shane Waldron and digging a little deeper for a hire with more upside and a play-by-play and game-by-game resume that didn’t scream talent mismanagement like Waldron’s was obviously a sharper process, both at the time and now in hindsight.
I just think this is a fascinating discussion, and as it’s being simplified to the McShanny coaching tree and other things, I really do think the answers lie in youth and forward-looking hires, and especially in being willing to look past specific W-L resumes at prior stops toward how the teams actually operated down to down. Why I went to the Huskies again — and always do — is because I watched every down of the DeBoer-Grubb era, and evaluated them in real time. I hated the prior coach, Jimmy Lake, and offensive coordinator John Donovan, for among the most boring and outdated offenses I can remember. There was nothing about it that even felt redeeming, and while I don’t wish ill on humans, I did strongly believe my team wasn’t going to be good until they were fired, which is just part of the industry, and it’s what I wanted pretty much from the first few games I saw of them.
The new coach, Jedd Fisch, isn’t quite that bad at all, but there have been some mismanagements there that I’m already pretty frustrated with, and I think he pretty clearly won’t be as forward-thinking as I’d like from a coach in 2024. There are just some pass rate elements, fourth-down decisions, a lack of tempo, etc., that fail to understand how to value possessions above all else and maximize win probability at the edges.
So my point is when you sit down and really watch the decisions in difficult games, you get a feel for who understands the nuance and the modern way of playing the sport, and who frankly doesn’t. I have that perception of the UW coaches because that’s the team I pay very close attention to, and what I’m arguing is not that everyone should care about the Huskies obviously but that in a hiring cycle, teams should absolutely be reviewing the down-to-down stuff to get an intimate feel for who these coaches are.
Some of you will suggest they obviously are doing that. I would suggest that if they were, hires like Waldron wouldn’t happen. As I Google the reporting around that hire to grab a date, I recognize that there were Seattle reports that were like, “Waldron won’t be back,” which is to say it seems like when he was hired with the Bears, it wasn’t even clear yet, because Pete Carroll had been fired and a new head coaching hire had not yet been made. So the Bears went and grabbed someone who was probably not really in demand, but was on some vague list of options that were probably available. They more or less landed on one of the three or four most obvious names that might have come up if someone asked, “Who can we consider here?” because the first step would be looking around the NFL and saying, “Who is available?” before probably going to the college ranks, etc. From a process standpoint, it feels lacking, like they did not overturn every stone or perform due diligence.
Obviously I’m not privy to the details of any of this. I’m just sharing some thoughts I had about how I’d approach hiring in the modern NFL, both in terms of the types of traits I’d be after and the ways I’d go about trying to identify them. And for me, regardless of results, getting intimately familiar with an offensive process would be extremely important before I even really wanted to interview someone. I’d want to go through every game and every play like I was a superfan of that team, and need to know that they showed an adaptability to the dynamic elements of the sport that I think does tend to come more regularly from the younger thinkers that probably played a lot of Madden growing up because they were obsessed with football.
Like I said, just some thoughts, because I’ve done a lot of complaining lately, and this is one thing that I’ve complained about but not offered solutions. This is the way I’d think about the solutions to this problem.
Quick hits
Trevor Lawrence’s value
The biggest, “I wish I got that into Signals” take for me on this fine Wednesday morning would have been a little more negativity around Trevor Lawrence. That was one of my final game writeups of the week and I noted that after seeing the halftime score I expected the Jaguars to look awful in the first half, and they didn’t look as bad as I had expected, but then I sort of just left it at that.
I just want to be clear that wasn’t meant to be some defense of Lawrence’s play, and I think the thesis I had about how this could feasibly be a career year for him — which made him an intriguing mid-round QB Target this year — is more or less dead. I mean, it’s plausible they are still able to get some things going this year, and I think he’ll still score alright for fantasy at times, but we have three games of evidence that they are less organized and coordinated than expected, not one of these offenses that came out humming, which was part of the point of the take. Essentially, I was arguing there was more potential for his breakout season than the market thought, and we’ve seen that it’s at best more of the same, not some breakout.
Kareem Hunt vs. Carson Steele
Got asked a bit more about my take on Carson Steele from a long-time reader and worked through some thoughts outside the newsletter, so wanted to bring them here as well. The note mentioned Kareem Hunt was awful the past two years in Cleveland, and he couldn’t wrap his head around why the consensus seemed to be he’d take work from Steele. I (very informally) wrote:
I think I just don’t think Steele has the traits Isiah Pacheco has to really benefit from what KC RBs can benefit from, which is space to just run into since defenses are just dropping so many guys. Pacheco’s so fast, Steele’s kind of just a bull.
The Hunt thing I guess is just that he’s sort of fluid on some of the short passes and stuff. Agree it’s bad for Samaje Perine, and I just think they do the “first rule do no harm” RB thing where they’ll just play legit bad players. Like Darrel Williams was never an NFL caliber RB probably. So it’s more like can Hunt do the things he needs to do in the ground game and catch and run in that fluid way out of the backfield?
I do think Steele is better than him but has this specific skill set they probably don’t really care about. They don’t need a non-explosive success rate rusher, other than maybe some specific short-yardage spots, because any back can run for a decent success rate when there are three guys in the box and eight dropping into coverage. It feels like Establishing It with Steele just doesn’t make a lot of sense unless the pass game isn’t working and they are looking for a specific pivot from what they normally want to do, so it’s a possible change of pace thing.
I don’t know, it’s hard to articulate. I guess I just think Reid and the way they do stuff has me leaning that we’re gonna see a decent amount of Hunt so long as he’s viable (which as you said he may not be).
I just want to add at the end here that I think I kind of overstated the idea they don’t need or wouldn’t care about a high success rate rusher, and if Steele can consistently be that, I do think he’ll probably play. I guess my bet would still be that Steele is the most valuable of the backs in the short term, but just that Hunt is a legitimate threat to him starting this weekend. And then Perine for me might just be dust. I don’t think you need to rush to cut him because it could shift back — this is very uncertain — but I just don’t think they’ve really been that impressed, judging by his usage. I also got asked about Perine, and whether he might still be learning the playbook, and my note there was basically “I’m not sure his role would take a ton of playbook learning necessarily,” as in I’m not sure why it would take three weeks to pick up the protections for a guy who has played in several different offenses and should have reference points.
I kind of think we’ll get less Perine this week, and more of a Steele/Hunt tandem, but that’s not based in anything other than I guess sort of a gut feel of like, “This is what I think Andy Reid will do,” based on my perception of how he’s made decisions over the years. I guess there’s probably an element of Hunt being a veteran and thinking he’s more trustworthy than a rookie, playing into my perception, along with the ways Perine seemingly hasn’t been trusted despite also being a veteran (so yeah, I’m in some ways valuing that Hunt played in Reid’s offense six years ago, because it feels like trust matters).
Lessons learned from Saquon
Question for you Ben (as a fellow Saquon fader) — is there anything in the situation/profile we should have emphasized more or is this just the cost of doing business?