10-17-2021, 02:19 PM
CEOs of large companies and head coaches of college football teams are worlds apart. Totally different skill sets required. In most large companies, a CEO can do basically nothing for years and get away with it. The top management layers are irrelevant in day to day operations. Their responsibilities are mostly to keep stockholders convinced the company is doing great and to hopefully keep any bad publicity from popping up. CEOs who make big strategic moves are pretty rare, and from what I have seen wrong at least as often as they are correct. Once you have made an obscene pile of money, who cares if the board finally fires you? You are set for life. Why take a risk?
Football coaches OTOH are at most two direct reports from the lowest level, the players. Every year, you have 25% turnover (about), like it or not. You can't fire any of your lowest level "employees". You can't cut their pay. There is no such thing as long term planning. You can't put aside wins from one year to use next year if things don't go well. Every week you win or lose based on how a bunch of kids respond to some instructions that may or may not be correct in the first place. Probably that is why coaches have such erratic records. Jack Elway for instance was great at SJSU and not so great at Stanford. Did he suddenly become an idiot? Willingham was good enough at Stanford to get the Domer job and then the UW job, but was horrible at both. The list goes on. Was Harbaugh a genius at Stanford or was he lucky? I think probably both. As we have seen, he can't replicate that success on demand.
People want to believe there is a Santa Claus and that the results of a "good" coach always differ from the results of a "bad" coach. Unfortunately the standard deviation is so large that the results often don't mirror what may be true. In this case, good and bad are definitely vector quantities that work differently in different times and different places.
Football coaches OTOH are at most two direct reports from the lowest level, the players. Every year, you have 25% turnover (about), like it or not. You can't fire any of your lowest level "employees". You can't cut their pay. There is no such thing as long term planning. You can't put aside wins from one year to use next year if things don't go well. Every week you win or lose based on how a bunch of kids respond to some instructions that may or may not be correct in the first place. Probably that is why coaches have such erratic records. Jack Elway for instance was great at SJSU and not so great at Stanford. Did he suddenly become an idiot? Willingham was good enough at Stanford to get the Domer job and then the UW job, but was horrible at both. The list goes on. Was Harbaugh a genius at Stanford or was he lucky? I think probably both. As we have seen, he can't replicate that success on demand.
People want to believe there is a Santa Claus and that the results of a "good" coach always differ from the results of a "bad" coach. Unfortunately the standard deviation is so large that the results often don't mirror what may be true. In this case, good and bad are definitely vector quantities that work differently in different times and different places.