NFL Owners are More Patient With Coaches Than They Were Forty Years Ago

Last week, I saw this tweet about the modern “win now or you’re fired” era of coaching and immediately thought, “well, that doesn’t seem right.” I’ve probably spent far more time that is rational or reasonable looking at old archives of team records. I hadn’t, however, systematically looked at it.

It seems reasonable, and it’s far from a minority position to think that the “win now” mentality is escalating in these modern times. One could find any number of examples of coaches from the old days where patience was a virtue, or those fired quickly today. Don Shula might not be the best example–he was 39-16-1 after four seasons in Baltimore. It would be similar to thinking John Harbaugh would be fired after his first four seasons in Baltimore now. But you could point to Tom Landry or Chuck Noll as examples of coaches who excelled after early rough patches.

Of course, you could also point to Marvin Lewis about to coach his 13th season in the NFL, without a playoff win. Or that Jeff Fisher has now been a head coach in 14 different non-playoff seasons, matching Don Shula–in 13 fewer seasons as a NFL head coach. The two guys that just survived a fourth season, Ron Riveraand Jason Garrett, have a far less noteworthy track record that Don Shula.

But let’s get past specific hand-picked examples. I went through every coaching move since 1960 and the below chart lists the length of tenure (rounded up, so a coach fired halfway through year 3 would be a 3-year coach). Here it is sorted by decade:

There are very few coaches who have made it to the 4+ year mark for evaluation this decade so it is a small sample, but the early numbers show it to be pretty much in line with the last two decades before that. And if you want to talk about the era when owners had a quicker trigger, look at the 70’s.

Yes, 20.3% of all coaches in that decade didn’t even make it to a second season. We think of the Shulas and Landrys and Nolls, but they were very much the exceptions of their era. And the patience of other owners to overtake them, combined with the dominance of a few teams, led to plenty of turnover. In fact, only three coaches hired between 1970 and 1974 made it to a sixth season. Shula moving from Baltimore to Miami is one of them. (Trivia: see if you can get the other two, one of whom was involved in litigation with his team by the end of year six).

As with many things in the social media age, we become aware of information so much faster and seem far more connected. That can lead to, in my opinion, a belief that somehow human nature is changing. Owners have always wanted to win, and “win now” isn’t something that has arisen since the advent of Facebook and Twitter.