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Originally Posted by Sheriff Gonna Getcha
How can you say that? How can you say what "overall performance" would be without coaching, when every team is led by a coach? The league is full of examples is which coach A leads a team to a horrible record and is fired and coach B comes in and takes basically the same team and produces a winning team.
And I still have no clue how Andy Reid (as good as he is) is put ahead of coaches like Bill Parcells and Joe Gibbs.
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An educated guess based on years and years of data.
If coaching was all there is to winning, the leagues's best coach would go 16-0 every season. So we can establish through common sense that coaching accounts for significantly less than the entire outcome of any given game.
SGG, try looking at it this way: How often does a coach lose a game for his team? I mean, how often does a team come back to the locker room and say "we would have won that game (with 100% certainty) with 31 other coaches, but somehow we lost", and be accurate. I doubt this can be said in the last ten years. I reasonably estimate that 98% or more of a coaches in-game decisions would be ones that are complete no brainers, that is to say that every coach in the NFL would make the same call, the right call.
The remaining 2% or the "questionable decisions" are what defines a coach's in game ability. However, if we theoretically assume that coach A will always make the correct questionable decision, and coach B will always make the worst questionable decision, how many wins will coach B cost his team over coach A? Put it this way: if you guessed one per season, I'd argue you are overestimating this effect.
This is why I feel its somewhat pointless to second guess coaching decisions. While his in game performance suggests that he should be fired, coach B would still have won 60 games over the last 5 years if he coached the Colts.
In the current game, Andy Reid and Bill Belichick would be my Coach A prototypes, and I'd say either Herman Edwards or John Fox might have been my type Bs. That part is just my opinion, but Edwards and Fox have both won in this league, no thanks to their in game coaching decisions.
A coaches' offensive/defensive system is another slight variable, but the system is only going to be as good as the men who make it work. Every coach in the league has a system. Having a good system gives a slight advantage, but if you are facing Peyton Manning, you wont remember that advantage at the end of the 60 minutes.