Choose Your Own Analogy

"Remember BIll Cowher!" has become a popular refrain for Eagles fans who support Andy Reid and want to compare his career trajectory to that of an (eventual) Super Bowl winning Pittsburgh coach.  So I did.  Here's what I found.

First, a simple winning percentage match-up by year:

Not a bad fit.  Cowher made his first Super Bowl in year four.  Reid was in year six.  They both had other early chances.

The Steelers stuck with Cowher through his three down years (7-9, 6-10, 9-7) and he rewarded them with a five-year run in which he piled up 55 wins and one Super Bowl (the middle of that five-year stretch was a disappointing 6-10 season in 2003, but the trend was clear). 

The thing is, though, if you go back and look at the two book-end Super Bowl teams, you'll find that they had almost nothing in common, personnelwise.  Here's 1995 and here's 2005.  Cowher might as well have switched franchises for all the overhauling they did in the interim. 

This is kind of in line with my general sense about NFL coaching -- it's ridiculously overrated.  Yes, you need a guy who doesn't suck.  The league has plenty of bad coaches floating around.  But once you hit a certain level of competence at that position, it really becomes about the players.  The Steelers were 6-10 in 1999 because Kordell Stewart was their QB and their defense was good but not great.  They won 26 regular season games from 2004-2005 because they had Ben Roethlisberger and the 1st and 4th ranked defenses. 

I'm not saying coaches don't make a difference.  Clearly they do.  But the days of "he'll beat yours with his and his with yours" are long since past.  As one wise old coach recently said:

"When I first got into the league, there were a couple guys in the league I thought I could outcoach," Paterno said. "I can't outcoach anybody now in this league. The coaching is so good, you don't beat anybody coaching."

Cowher's only one coach, though, so next I expanded the analysis to look at a number of his contemporaries.  The selection was mostly just off the top of my head, but take it for illustrative purpose (click for full size):

 

There's obviously a ton of variation in this chart, but there are some general trends.  All these guys had early success, but then there's almost what you could call a "seven-year itch" in the middle there.  It doesn't hit everyone, and if I looked at every coach in history I'm sure some of this would wash away, but there's certainly a two-peak trend here.  Take a look at this chart where I averaged out those results:

Food for thought, at any rate.

The last thing I took a look at was a couple of guys who changed teams.  Tony Dungy went to Indianapolis in his seventh year, where he was supposed to turn around the defense.  Jon Gruden was traded to the Bucs in his fifth year, with a charge to fix the offense.  Both of these changes came before the 2002 season. 

Here are the relevant statistical comparisons for those two guys:

Dungy had a huge impact on Indy's defense.  Gruden had almost no impact on Tampa Bay's offense (in terms of season-long rankings).  And yet Gruden's team won the Super Bowl.  It's just interesting how things work out sometimes.