The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hiring an NFL Head Coach

NFL owners should look to existing research on what makes a good coach, and copy how the most successful organizations lower bias in the hiring process

I’m not saying that the billionaires running NFL franchises are idiots. They have their core competencies: running massive business enterprises, extracting the benefits of monopoly status from the public coffers, and knowing how to be born into the right family.

In all seriousness, NFL teams might be billion-dollar businesses, but they’re run more like personal fiefdoms. There’s certainly a structure and a number of participants in the hiring process for most franchises, but the ultimate authority rests with one, or at most a few individuals.

Developing a better process for hiring a head coach would mimic how you develop a better process for all decisions: study the available data (or create new data to study) on coaching success, and unabashedly steal what the most successful organizations have learned through the years.

Here, I’m going to lay out a number of insights I’ve found from those who have studied what makes a successful head coaching candidate, plus what Google, one of the most successful and data-driven companies in the world, has implemented to improve its hiring, after testing different techniques across thousands of candidates.

EXISTING COACHING RESEARCH

There isn’t a lot of coaching research out on what makes a head coach successful, but a found a few sources, plus some academic research on the clear racial biases in the process.

There have been a number of studies illustrates the biases against black head coaching candidates, whether it’s a reluctance to hire a black coach after the previously failure of another, or how at every rung of the coaching hierarchy, black coaches face higher standards for hiring and lower thresholds for firing than their white counterparts.

I’ll discuss later techniques for minimizing a lot of the emotional, and potentially racially biased, aspects of the interview process, moving closer to something like the blind audition process that has improved the representation of women in orchestras. This doesn’t mean you only hire black head coaches, but certainly you should be aware of this bias and think about how to minimize it in your process.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL MORE IMPORTANT THAN FOOTBALL PHILOSOPHY

Joe Banner, former NFL executive with the Eagles and Browns, talked about how he and Eagles owner Jeff Lurie found Andy Reid, a somewhat obscure - at the time -quarterback coach in Green Bay. Banner and Lurie studied what made head coaches successful, and they couldn’t find anything consistent from the perspective of football philosophy or the side of the ball they coached.

Our study, which focused on coaches who had been to multiple Super Bowls, showed that from a football perspective there were few common threads. Some coaches came up on defense, others on offense. Some believed in throwing the ball all over the yard, others were resolute in running it. Some had extensive play-calling experience on one side of the ball or the other. Others didn’t. There was nothing there.

You often hear that an offensive play-caller is the ideal coaching target, but there isn’t much evidence for that. Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh came from the defensive side and special teams, while Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll, two seniors with the outstanding records of success, were both defensive coordinators in the NFL.

What Banner and Eagles did find is that there are certain personality traits that correlate with NFL success, primarily a pain-staking attention to detail and planning.

When we moved from there to character and personality, suddenly everything crystalized. All of these coaches were very detail-oriented, to the point where it drove those around them crazy.

We’ve seen “rah-rah” players’ coaches find success like Carroll, and also curmudgeons like Belichick. We’ve seen charismatic leaders win Super Bowls, and also the strong, silent types. It’s impossible to say any personality style, at least a style we can identify publicly, is better than others.

What Banner found, and what makes a ton of sense, is that those who are the most meticulous, thoughtful and intentional in their processes have success, which makes them more likely to study every potential edge, and question existing “truths” based on tradition, not evidence.

Identifying traits like being detail-oriented as important, and discounting coordinator success, led Lurie and Banner to Packers quarterbacks coach Andy Reid.

The interview with Andy only confirmed what we’d heard. He brought a big book in with him, like most coaches do, and after we asked him about philosophy and his beliefs, he opened the book for us. Inside were detailed reports and grades on assistant coaches, and rankings for each position. He had potential coordinators ranked 1-10, just as he had prospective quality control coaches ranked 1-10.

Today lots of coaches have these rankings, because they’ve heard the story of Andy interviewing in Philly, but I can’t remember seeing anything like it before then. When Andy left the room, Jeffrey and I said to one another, “Either our process is wrong, or this guy is going to be a really big success.”

PREVIOUSLY SUCCESSFUL HEAD COACHES ARE GREAT HIRES

I found another fantastic piece of research on coaching hires from Andrew Healy, former economics professor and contributor to Football Perspective and Football Outsiders, who’s now the Vice President of Research & Strategy for the Browns.

Healy studied the success of new head coaches based on their previous success in coaching, and saw that there was some relationship. Healy measured success by looking at the DVOA over expected for coaches based on how teams had performed versus the what you would expect based on how the team performed the previous three years.

Across all head coaches, previous performance does seem to project future success, at least a little bit. An additional one point of previous success predicts that a head coach does about 0.2 points better. In other words, head coaches on average carry about 20% of their previous success into their current jobs.

But after he dug deeper, Healy found the entire correlation was based only on those who had previously been head coaches. There was nothing in the success of a coordinator that translated to his success as a head coach.

But I noticed something interesting when I delved a little deeper into the data. It turns out that all of this is driven by the people in the sample who were previously head coaches.

…. success as a coordinator does not seem to tell us very much about success for first-time head coaches. On the other hand, the relationship between previous performance and future success is strong for previous head coaches. For second (or third or fourth) acts, head coaches carry over about 70% of their value from their previous jobs.

Successful head coaches like Sean Payton, Jim Harbaugh and Dan Quinn are in the mix for jobs this cycle, and history tells us they’re more likely to find success again than an offensive coordinator who has worked with a top quarterback talent, or a defensive coordinator who’s players happened to get more turnovers than expected.

THE BEST HIRING PROCESS

Laszlo Bock is the former Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, and back in 2015 he wrote a New York Times best-selling book on hiring and people management called Work Rules! There were a number of lessons from the book that would apply to nearly every business, including some I think would be particularly useful for teams looking to hire their next head coach.

Don't let hiring managers make the hiring decisions; let an impartial committee review each candidate to enforce a high bar and have a meaningful discussion about the pros and cons of each candidate

I think this is the most important and also toughest to implement. I can’t imagine many NFL owners will be open to turning over the ultimate hiring power to a group they won’t have veto authority over, but there are many compelling reasons to do so.

First, interviews don’t really work, and least not those that aren’t highly structured. Too often hiring managers (in this case owners), acquire a strong and nearly impenetrable impression of a candidate early in the interview, with studies showing it happening as quickly as 15 minutes.

One of the worst hires in recent memory was Matt Rhule, who Panthers owner David Tepper likened to himself, which he must have felt as part of the interview process. In fact, Tepper was so rushed and hellbent on making his dream hire come true that he threw unprecedented money at the first-time head coach and rushed the process.

Interviews are a terrible leading indicator of performance. Studies show that interviews explain little of future performance vs work experience, a work sample test, and general cognitive ability.

Knowing that interviews aren’t that useful should be a key component of how the independent hiring committee makes its selection. You’re going to get vastly more predictive information on how a candidate will act, or react, in different situations by interviewing former co-workers and subordinates than direct asking them.

What we looking for: Do you have intellectual humility? i.e the ability to recognize that you’re wrong and have new facts change your outlook and opinion.

Even I have been fooled often looking at the words new coaches give in interviews like Dan Campbell talking about going for 2 in certain situations, or Mike McDaniel praising the value of running the ball, and assuming their words were predictive of how they’ll act as a head coach.

Instead, both Campbell and McDaniel have been excellent in their decisions, likely because they were willing to change their opinions after meeting with analytics staffs and getting new, better facts on which to base their decisions.

But again, you can’t ask candidates if they have this humility in an interview and trust them. You have to interview people who have worked with them in the past and saw (or didn’t see) them adapt their ideas to new information.

THIS HIRING CYCLE IS UNDERWAY

I’ll have more next week on specifically who teams should be targeting at head coach, but these lessons are probably more important than any outside analysis we can do with the limited information publicly available.

What we do know is that the hot coordinator candidate isn’t likely to be better than a previous successful head coach, that personality traits that don’t show up in the interview setting are most important, and that real evidence of how a candidate has acted and changed his opinions in the past are more important than how they tell you they’ll act while positioning themselves to get the job offer.