The Peter Pan Principle: Coaching Erosion in the NFL

The NFL is an attritional league where a team's performance can drop regardless of coach's skill and leadership. When a drop-off occurs, NFL front offices overreact, fire solid incumbents, and promote young coaches far too soon

Imagine a hotel that has a great year. Revenues are up, and customer service commendations are at a high. If you owned another hotel and saw this, would you hire the Front Desk clerks to become the General Manager of your hotel? How about if your GM had a down year following two out three years of growth and success? Probably not. NFL teams wouldn't, either.

They'd hire the Housekeeping Supervisor.

No league advances number 3s to number 1s like the NFL, and no league fires successful coaches like the NFL. Lane Kiffin represents the former, Mike Shanahan, John Gruden and Brian Billick, the latter. Eric Mangini, who went 10-6, 4-12, and 9-7 in three years with the New York Jets, could be both.

Josh McDaniels, and Rahiem Moore are yet two more examples of how NFL brass operates nowadays. Two fallacies underlie this behavior

1. Technical skill equals organizational leadership ability
2. Short term drop off becomes long term failure

Mc Daniels comes to Denver with no prior head coaching experience at any level. Although he has been and Offensive Coordinator and quarterbacks coach, he coached an already established QB who had won two Super Bowls, been to two Pro Bowls, and was about the same age as him. He is credited by some with preparing Matt Cassel, who famously started no college games at USC. That may be overstated, because Cassel was coached at USC by Steve Sarkisian, arguably the best QB coach at any level. Moore is the classic case of being in the right place at the right time. He had never been a head coach at any level, and he was named as defensive coordinator, his first coordinator position at any level, about a month prior to replacing the guy who hired him.

Both made the kind of mistakes that basic institutional knowledge would anodize against. McDaniels had arguably the most talented quarterback under 30 in the league, Jay Cutler, yet soured that relationship by looking backward to bring in his safety blanket, Matt Cassel. He ended up with Kyle Orton. Morris hired Jeff Jagodzinski as offensive coordinator, and fired him 10 days before the season, in favor of a guy with a different philosophy, who will yet still run the same offense. During the press conference, he looked as terrified as Gizmo the Mogwai as the Gremlins hatched, muttering a flurry of contradictions. Thanking Jagodzinski for "starting us on the right track," he went on to say that the "coaching staff is in a constant state of evaluation," but that "things take time." The move was unprecedented. Well, except for Todd Haley, another rookie coach who fired his offensive coordinator 14 days before the season.

Coaches with more demonstrated experience would not have made such gaffes.

McDaniels' predecessors

At the time of his appointment to an NFL head-coaching job, to the Los Angeles Raiders in 1989, Mike Shanahan was considered green at 36. However, he had spent 9 years as a college assistant, and 3 as an NFL assistant. After 2 years the experiment was over, and Shanahan went on to get 6 more years of seasoning, before taking Denver's head job at 43. He had remarkable success, coaching five 1,000-yard running backs and two Super Bowl Champs.

Dan Reeves tolled nine years as a Dallas assistant under Hall of Famer Tom Landry before taking the helm in Denver at 37.

Red Miller was Denver's coach from 1977-80. Miller's career consisted of 3 high school head jobs, followed by a stint at Carthage College. He went on to be an assistant for 16 years with 7 teams, before being named head man in Denver.

Miller's predecessor was John Ralston. Before being named Broncos head coach in1972, he had 15 years as a college coach, including a superb rebuilding job with Stanford, whom he led to two Rose Bowl victories.

Compared to his predecessors, McDaniel's resume looks glaringly anemic.

Moore's predecessors

John Gruden was fired after seven seasons as head coach. From 2002 through 2008, his teams won three division titles, and a Super Bowl in 2003. Although his rise seems meteoric, he had 12 years of assistant experience in both the NFL and college, prior to taking the helm of the Oakland Raiders in 1998.

His predecessor, Tony Dungy, was just as seasoned. He played three years in the NFL, winning a Super Bowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1979. He coached 16 seasons as an assistant prior to being named Buccaneers Head Coach in 1996.

The Hedge Fund vs. The Patient Manager: NBA vs. NFL

Warren Buffet became our country's richest investor by thinking long term. If the trend was upward, he continued on it, knowing that there would be the occasional down year. The NFL is the day trader, the league with rabbit ears. A stock starts to tick down a bit, even after some success, and it's "SOS!" They confuse a raindrop on the hull with a hole in it, and start deploying the life rafts. The problem is the ship is intact; it just went through a short storm, a torrent the life raft is not meant to withstand. It is thus doomed to sink much sooner. It's why, in the NBA, Phil Jackson wasn't fired after consecutive first round series losses, and Jerry Sloan of the Utah Jazz remains at the helm in spite of never having won a championship.

McDaniels and Moore are examples of a modified version of The Peter Principle. It says that in any organization, people rise to their level of incompetence. I call the NFL's mutation the Peter Pan Principle, as young coaches are thrust into big boy roles they aren't ready for, and thus may be ruined, so that we may never know if they could have done the job with more seasoning. Moore and McDaniels may be brilliant minds, but technical acumen cannot be conflated with the leadership ability needed to direct large and disparate groups of large men on a day-to-day basis, nor can it substitute for the foresight it takes to set up an organizational structure.

Even a Housekeeping Supervisor knows that.

Source
www.wikipedia.org