Will Anyone Ever Get Cut?

Former GE CEO Jack Welch may not have invented the "up or out" approach to managing employees, but he certainly deserves most of the credit for popularizing it.  This article describes how it works, but in a nutshell, what companies do is rank all their employees on their job performance, then promote the top 20 percent, keep the middle 70 percent, and fire the bottom 10 percent.

Now there's some question as to how well this works as an ongoing management philosophy.  Certainly, it has some applicability in turnaround situations, but in most companies, after the first couple years of ditching the deadwood, it's not going to be easy to find truly incompetent people to fire (your personal experience notwithstanding).

I've wondered for awhile how that approach would translate to professional sports teams.  At the top two levels, that's sort of the way it already works.  If you play well, you keep your starting job.  If you play really well, then you blow up on the free agent market and make a ton of money.  So that's not the interesting part of the equation.

It's at the bottom of the curve where things could be a little different.  Consider this, right now the Eagles have 13 wide receivers on the roster.  With the possible exception of DeSean Jackson (practice?  we talkin' about practice?) is there a reasonable chance that any of the nine guys behind Hank Baskett and Jason Avant on the depth chart is suddenly going to leap ahead of them and take over the #3 wide receiver role?   I don't think so.

Which is probably fine, because I happen to think those guys are pretty good players.  I'm not sure Avant has the speed to be more than a great possession receiver, but those guys can make 10-year careers out of just that.  And my new theory on Hank Baskett is that he's just the right situation away from being a starting-caliber player in this league (barring injury, this is not the right situation).

But the thing is, neither one has ever really proved much on the field.  I'm not saying they couldn't, just that they haven't.  Which makes me wonder if there should really be a presumption that the guys who have been here have to be noticeably worse than the guys who just got here in order to lose their roster spots.

In short, would a team be better if it told players, "We don't care how long you've been here, how well you know the offense, or what you do in practice.  Even if you do everything else right, if you don't make plays in games when you get your opportunities, we're going to go in a different direction."

Consider another example:  Scott Young.  By all accounts, Young is a solid backup who can get on the field without immediately getting killed.  But if that's all he'll ever be (which is my guess, but I could be wrong), is that a good enough reason to keep him around instead of a young guy who might potentially have a higher ceiling?  Especially because the last time Young got on the field in a high-profile situation, things didn't work out that great?

Now most of you are probably nodding your heads right now, because we all love "ceiling" and "potential."  It's why we get so excited about the draft every year. 

But consider this, what makes this approach hard is that you would have to cut players who are currently better than the players you're keeping.  So if you're having a preseason punt returner competition, and Reno Mahe clearly does the best job, maybe instead you go with BIll Sampy, since he wasn't quite as good, but he can actually outrun the guys whose numbers start with sixes and sevens. 

Would it work?  Heck, I don't know.  Maybe you'd kill your depth by always chasing potential rather than focusing on execution.  On the other hand, competition always brings out the best in people.  And maybe you could get another 10 percent out of someone just by changing the way he personally defines success.

Could be an interesting experiment.  Which means it won't happen any time soon, since NFL coaches are notoriously risk-averse individuals who love to do things the way they always have.

Maybe once the business guys don't just become scouts, but actually move into coaching, we'll finally see someone running the Six Sigma Offense.