Coaching Markets

In America, a fall Saturday often means watching some college football or possibly heading off to tailgate at the alma mater. Sunday is for the NFL, which remains the top television draw, despite its problems. For much of the country, Friday night is for the local high school games. Some parts of the country play their high school games on Saturday morning, but for most it is Friday night. In Texas, high school football is a two billion dollar business. Americans love their sports, especially football.

Currently, the two best coaches in the game are Nick Saban, who coaches the Alabama Crimson Tide and Bill Belichick of the NFL’s New England Patriots. The fact that the ancestors of both men are from Illyria is an interesting fact. Not only are both the best of their era, it is possible they are the best ever. Both men have a similar style of managing their programs and both are known for being something less than charming with the media. The shadow of Diocletian is very long.

Anyway, the thing that stands out about Saban and Belichick is they are smart men, who are excellent organizers. They are gifted at working within the constraints of the game and the constraints of their situations. They are not married to a style of play, instead adapting to the talent on-hand and the state of the game. They are known for getting the most from each player, often creating a niche for the player that did not exist. They also adapt to their staffs, shuffling people in and out of their organizations.

The thing is, what makes both men remarkable is that they are exceptions. Coaching football is a very lucrative profession in current year America. Bill Belichick is thought to make close to $15 million per year. Nick Saban makes $9 million per year. Both men are probably worth over $100 million at this point. In the case of Belichick, he could be worth a quarter billion or more, as he surely has been given investment opportunities unavailable to most people. Sports teams are owned by oligarchs.

Now, for two of the greatest of all time, that is probably justifiable, but further down the talent scale, the money is still very good. All over the NFL, there are head coaches making millions per year for being very bad at their jobs. There are lots of assistants making big money for being bad at their jobs. Many assistants, are often known to lack the talent to ever be a head coach, while others are simply happy to be a mediocre NFL coach making a very good living in the game.

At the college level, the cost of mediocrity is most obvious. Many of the college head coaches are dumb people, even by the standards of sport. Will Muschamp coaches the University of South Carolina football team. He makes over $5 million per year. He is not very good at coaching football. He got fired from his last high paying gig and he will be fired from this one. He’s not alone. The game is littered with guys who are not all that bright, but somehow rise to the top of the profession.

If libertarians were right about anything, this would not be the case. There is very little government interference in the coaching business. These are contract employees, so they can be fired at will. Moreover, the colleges seem to be immune from charges of discrimination like private business. Blacks are wildly under-represented in the coaching business. There are few Jews in the management side. Women are just about non-existent in the game. Sport is free to be a free market for coaches.

In theory, the lucrative salaries and the lifestyle should be a magnet for smart young people in America. Every year, thousands of young people head to Hollywood and New York hoping to be a star. They want to be famous. You would think something similar would happen with coaching, where the money is great and you don’t have to have sex with guys like Harvey Weinstein as a condition of employment. Smart young people should be flocking to sports coaching trying to make it big.

Of course, something similar should be true of politics. Congressman and Senators are not pulling down football coach money, but they live a great lifestyle. They also get perks like the right to trade on their insider knowledge. Paul Ryan, for example, went to Washington penniless and retired with a net worth of $6 million. He landed in a seven figure job bribing his fellow colleagues. That should draw hundreds of candidates into every race, but politics is largely a closed shop, despite being democratic.

There’s not point here, other than that to point out that “natural markets” don’t exist, even in the absence of government. There’s almost no government role in the football coaching business, but it is a closed world controlled by relationships and insider information among the coaches. The same is true of politics. In theory, anyone can run for Congress. In reality, they allow in only those they want in. The Senate is the world’s most exclusive club, followed by the House and the football coaching fraternity.


For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!


111 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
CAPT S
CAPT S
5 years ago

“The game is littered with guys who are not all that bright, but somehow rise to the top of the profession.” Peter Principle, right? It’s just the way we promote people based on their mediocrity in lower positions, thinking they’ll miraculously perform in higher positions if we “just give them an opportunity.” The truly gifted leaders get too damn frustrated working for idiots and bootlickers, biding their time until it’s “their turn,” so often just take the John Galt route into anonymity. I tried to make the argument through my entire military career that leaders are BORN, not MADE. You… Read more »

CAPT S
CAPT S
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Yep. Every crisis I’ve been involved in, the leaders who came to the fore weren’t the ones the apparatchik had ordained. But heck, my experiences are dated … now a crisis erupts and you’ve got the yammering and screeching of the feminists, the cherry-on-top of the imbecilic men who got their graduation certificate from “leadership” training. No amount of training can overcome biology. The Sabans and Belichiks of the world are anomalies because they had the inordinate patience to gut-out their organization’s imbecility … that kind of patience is hard to come by. I even wonder if it’s a positive… Read more »

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Can leadership really be taught? I think you can teach natural leaders how to be better at it, but the base skill set is inherent, or at least learned at such a young age that post-K12 won’t do anything for those who haven’t already made the grade.

Vizzini
Member
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Most of my kids have been homeschooled, but the youngest really wanted to give public school a try, so we let her start 6th grade in a rural public school last year. Every day she comes home with something new to make me facepalm. At the beginning of this year they auto-enrolled her in something they were calling a leadership class. It was such a huge waste of time. Stuff like word searches for terms like “integrity,” “honesty,” and “leadership.” Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly how General Patton got his start. I opined that you don’t learn leadership from a… Read more »

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  Vizzini
5 years ago

I have a number of friends who’ve had to transition their kids to public schools – you’ll spend hours un-teaching the poz, sadly, but very necessary to keep your kids well-based

Rogeru
Rogeru
Reply to  Vizzini
5 years ago

“It was such a huge waste of time. Stuff like word searches for terms like “integrity,” “honesty,” and “leadership.” Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly how General Patton got his start.”

Public school curricula are more childish than the children. Very little is actually taught, and that’s probably a good thing.

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  Vizzini
5 years ago

Viz, Anyone of average or above intelligence was wasting their time in public school when we were kids. Imagine if we could have learned useful skills or crafts while being warehoused. (I’m still somewhat bitter about it.)

Vizzini
Member
Reply to  ReturnOfBestGuest
5 years ago

Well, I was lucky to be in a very elite public high school. Many of the kids were children of engineers at Bell Labs and many of the others were very successful suburban Jews. Ivy league schools, MIT, Juilliard and the like were expected destinations for a good percentage of the class. I “learned to code” back when it was still a ticket to success. I know my experience wasn’t typical, which makes the current experience even more frustrating.

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
Reply to  Vizzini
5 years ago

V, how did you “learn to code” back in the day?

Vizzini
Member
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

Well, there were classes for kids at Bell Labs. I never actually took them, but tagged along a couple times with a friend who did. That’s how I caught the bug. Then in high school we had a computer lab full of Apple IIe and II Pluses and a teacher who was the stereotype of the early computer nerd. He had built a Heathkit computer that you had to program in octal assembly language instructions, so my first programming experiences were on that and with BASIC in those Apples. Then I started programming games on my Radio Shack TRS-80. 🙂

Vizzini
Member
Reply to  Vizzini
5 years ago

BTW, for the kids today, “built a computer” didn’t mean buying a case, motherboard, graphics card, power supply and hard drive and slapping it all together. It meant soldering each individual chip and resistor to a circuit board. It had an octal input keypad and a one-line LED display, some other LED lights and a small speaker. Programming it consisted of finding interesting ways to manipulate the registers to cause the speaker to emit tones at different frequencies, cause different characters to display on the LED display or flash some of the LED lights. It had no persistent storage and… Read more »

Vizzini
Member
Reply to  Vizzini
5 years ago

Correction: Apple IIe’s didn’t come out until ’83, so it must have been II’s and II Pluses in the lab. I just vaguely remembered we had two types. Even the basic II only came out in ’77, so having them and II Pluses (’79) in our labs (’78-’82) meant we were pretty much on the bleeding edge of personal computers in schools.

TomA
TomA
Reply to  CAPT S
5 years ago

We live in a time of great affluence in which there is no existential penalty for bad leadership. No one dies. No battle is lost. If we lived in a world in which bad leadership got you dead in a hurry, people would become damn serious about choosing better leaders. We need to create an environment that once again demands the best of us in order to survive. Rewarding mediocracy is the road to extinction.

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
Reply to  TomA
5 years ago

“We need to create an environment that once again demands the best of us in order to survive.”

Can you expand on that? I’m curious about any specifics you care to offer.

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

I’d like to see Chinese-style white collar law enforcement and much much more capital punishment in general. We all know the only reasons why there’s no justice for guys like Madoff & Corzine. Ed Dutton’s little hemp pills would do the same thing for America that they did for England BITD. Similar population, similar pressure, similar results. If states had more stable populations over time you’d already see dramatic cross-generational differences between responsible states where execution was available like Texas and permissive states like California. OFC the downside is that given our present elites, we’d be the ones getting DOTR’d… Read more »

Javier
Javier
Reply to  Exile
5 years ago

I think it’s too late to do much for the US: just put it out of its misery.

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  Javier
5 years ago

Unless they say otherwise, it’s safe to assume anyone saying “we should…” here means in a Whiter better future time and place. We really need a phrase or acronym like NAxALT for this assumption.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

Yea, it sounds good, but total war is the only environment that forces real leaders into place. Not something we should wish for.

Badthinker
Badthinker
Reply to  Sam
5 years ago

The royal navy had it right. Every flag officer, captain and commander in the fleet, who, upon signal or order of fight, or sight of any ship or ships which it may be his duty to engage, or who, upon likelihood of engagement, shall not make the necessary preparations for fight, and shall not in his own person, and according to his place, encourage the inferior officers and men to fight courageously, shall suffer death, or such other punishment, as from the nature and degree of the offence a court martial shall deem him to deserve; and if any person… Read more »

Lineman
Lineman
Reply to  TomA
5 years ago

@TomA We need to create an environment that once again demands the best of us in order to survive. Rewarding mediocracy is the road to extinction. In order to do that you have to be around those who want that also 😉 Which brings us back around to the need to build Communities and not just keep talking it to death…I’ve had some real good conversations with solid people f2f and every time come away with the thought now if we had a hundred more we could do some great things something that would be good for us now and… Read more »

Whitney
Member
Reply to  TomA
5 years ago

We don’t need to create that world it’s going to happen all on its own but in the meantime enjoy abundance. I know I am

Outdoorspro
Outdoorspro
Reply to  CAPT S
5 years ago

To perform the inevitable swing around to politics in this discussion, Obama is the perfect example of trying to MAKE a leader out of someone who certainly isn’t one. He spent his life being groomed for political office, without having the intellectual skill set one would normally prefer in a political leader. He checked all the right diversity boxes, but sadly, lacked even the skills to be an adequate manager (never working for a living or dealing with real-life struggles will do that to you). Once in office, he did what all fakers do–surrounded himself with toadies and boot-lickers who… Read more »

Lineman
Lineman
Reply to  Outdoorspro
5 years ago

@Outdoor
I hear you on the sports thing but I could care less about watching any sport…Waste of time and rots your mind because of all the poz that comes with it…

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
Reply to  Lineman
5 years ago

Yes. Unless one of your blood relations or close family friends is playing you shouldn’t care about the damn sportsball. F@gg0ts!

Moran ya Simba
Moran ya Simba
Reply to  CAPT S
5 years ago

Gold comment!!! Agree w every word!

Primi Pilus
Primi Pilus
Reply to  CAPT S
5 years ago

A now good friend and former “mentor” (hate that word for it’s over use, but the shortcut will have to do here) once said to me: “All the good general officers get out of the Army as lieutenant colonels.” Took me years to realize exactly what he meant. I was a believer for a long time.

He is now a deeply disillusioned former idealist who his whole life has seen too clearly, of course, and who now lives tucked into a remote and forgotten corner of old America at the end of a long, gravel road.

Severian
5 years ago

This is true even in dinky little arena leagues – the same guys doing the same bad job, year after year. Hell it’s true of players – they’d rather sign a kicker who can’t hit the broad side of a barn than take a flyer on one of the hundreds of guys who graduate college each year. The strongest force in human affairs isn’t love or hate, it’s inertia.

james wilson
james wilson
Member
Reply to  Severian
5 years ago

“The strongest force in human affairs isn’t love or hate, it’s inertia.” That’s classic, S-man.

Moran ya Simba
Moran ya Simba
5 years ago

The more general ‘elite’ works the same way as football coaches and politicians; it picks new admissions. Trump is a funny proof of this. He has all the formal qualifications for membership, except one; style. Culturally, mentally, call it what you want, he is a smart blue collar guy w tons of money. His tastes, his interests, his way of talking, is how a blue collar guy who 5 billion would act. But not how the ‘elite’ acts.

Many informal cohorts are self-vetting this way I think.

De Beers Diamonds
Reply to  Moran ya Simba
5 years ago

There are some similarities between Trump and Oprah. Perhaps the Democrats will regret not finding a place for Oprah in elected office.

Exile
Exile
Member
5 years ago

One think I’ve noticed about Belichick and other succesful coaches is the cohesiveness of their teams. You rarely if ever see a Belichick team with ongoing locker room drama, despite the constant media gas-canning and envious sniping efforts by lesser teams. His teams are the best at turning this outside pressure to their advantage with an “us against the world, too bad for the world” espirit d’corps. Belichik is clearly selecting players for factors other than raw talent and metrics like 40 times and bench press, even beyond on-field performance. He’s selecting for coachability and a mindset that is ultimately… Read more »

Dutch
Dutch
Reply to  Exile
5 years ago

I would be curious to see whether employing Belichick relations would instead prove the “reversion to the mean” in talent and abilities. I sense that Trump’s family is going to demonstrate that reversion very quickly, as in one generation. My own bias believes that these special people are “one offs”, though borne from genes and cultures that are more likely to produce them.

White males seem particularly adept at organization and thoughtful motivation. Which makes white on white male violence and wars powerfully fratricidal. Scorched earth and all.

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  Dutch
5 years ago

I think we’re seeing RTM with the neopots like JPod & Kristol the Lesser as well as Buckley’s novus globohomo successors, the knuckle-dragging Bush & Cuomo kidz etc.. The ADLFBICIA is increasingly necessary to keep these poseurs propped on their thrones. Charles Kushner’s bride-harvesting of the Trump clan gained him some useful connections & clout to try and spring himself from jail & rake some shekels, and some less goblinoid grandkids, but cost them a standard deviation in post-Zoomer IQ. Bride-harvesting’s a risky strategy for the Tribe, working in Britain but sheer American beauty numbers may breed them out here… Read more »

Vegetius
Vegetius
5 years ago

Saban worked for Belichick at Cleveland. He has some interesting things to say about it.

Belichick’s men practice how to hand the ball back to the ref after a play. There is a way to hand the ball back when time is on your side and another when time is on the opponent’s side. The idea is simple situational awareness plus strategy-informed training and can actually increase or limit the number of plays in a game.

We should not let globohomo alienate us from team sports involving balls. We can learn from men like Belichick. Leadership is leadership.

SamlAdams
SamlAdams
Reply to  Vegetius
5 years ago

You win consistently by always making incremental improvements and moving the odds your way. Rowed at the elite level until I was 30. A technique change that ran the boat 2 more inches per stroke meant nearly 700 inches of improvement in a single over a 2k race. At that level of competition was often the difference between 1st and 5th.

Dutch
Dutch
Reply to  SamlAdams
5 years ago

Along Saml’s line of thinking, I have seen success in competition by learning everything the other successful guys are doing, and carefully emulating all of it. It gets you up to speed. Then start trying new things, to find something that works (that extra couple inches per yard), then look for more of them before the competition catches you by emulating your new tricks. Finally, employ every psychological trick you can to have the competition look in the wrong places for your edges, or to convince themselves, in their own heads, that you are unstoppable. Which goes to the point… Read more »

Lineman
Lineman
Reply to  Vegetius
5 years ago

@Vegetius
I would agree if we had everything else squared away which at this time we don’t because there is still a lot of work that needs to be done…

The Babe
The Babe
Member
5 years ago

I was going to say something intelligent, but when I saw the words “Paul Ryan,” I got the red mist. I’m from Wisconsin, and I hate, hate, HATE that guy. *** Well, OK, I’ll try to say something interesting, which is that Ryan exemplifies what you could call pre-whoring. To wit, one reason that, even before he left office, he always served the establishment, and never his people, was to avoid ticking off the establishment so he could collect their dough after he left office. It’s like a guy who gives it away for free even before he becomes a… Read more »

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
Reply to  The Babe
5 years ago

Words fail me when I try to express my hatred for Paul Ryan.

He probably started out as a dopey, well-meaning Objectivist but became a despicable traitor.

I’m going to stop now before I say something that gets me investigated by the FBI.

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

comment image?w=522&h=347&zoom=2

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

Objectivism and Mensaholism are strongly correlated with the Faustian/Saruman temptation (or John Galt delusion, if you prefer). They all think they can beat the Devil at his own game, withstand forces mere humans can’t, etc.. Greenspan put on the Ring and wrecked the economy b/c he thought he could do what others couldn’t or wouldn’t. I think Paul Ryan was a systemic capture. Boehner was a drunken crook with the soul of Elmer Gantry, but he was one of the best at using money & influence to break fresh-faced reformers & trick them out for the K-Street whorehouses.

Custodia Sepulchrum
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

Maybe he just thought Phaemon’s dog was right.

Carl B.
Carl B.
Reply to  The Babe
5 years ago

Agree, I positively have a white-hot hatred for Paul Ryan.

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  The Babe
5 years ago

We’ll probably have to have a duel over which one of us hates that guy more. Do you remember during the 2012 campaign when he ran on “MATH” and fiscal responsibility? On his way out the door and onto K-street he secured thousands of annual visas for Irish citizens. (As members of the EU, the Irish can already work in those 28 member states.) Of course now the Irish are forced to accept hundreds of thousands of third-world refugees annually due to a declining population. Clown world.

MemeWarVet
MemeWarVet
5 years ago

Recently, I’ve watched two Netflix series which give a lot of insight into what clueless jackasses most college football coaches are. These are “Last Chance U” and “QB1.”

Both of these series are a lot of fun for those of us who have taken the redpill; it’s both sad and amusing in to watch the “academic” staffs lie to themselves over and over about the potential to educate 70 IQ Rape Apes. And the coaches? Not exactly titans of their field.

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  MemeWarVet
5 years ago

Lines up with what I said above re: social status for coaching. It’s become ghettoized in the eyes of post-Boomer/Xer’s. The talent pool for both participants and support staff is crashing as more and more smart-fractions seek preener pastures.

Desert Rat
Desert Rat
5 years ago

Politics and sports work something like the old guilds. You find entry as an apprentice (sometimes by paying the master a nice fee and sometimes because the master is mom’s uncle and sometimes because mom’s uncle has a friend in the guild willing to take you on if uncle can’t afford a new apprentice right now). Then you work your way up. Bribery and family connections are still important and can carry one quite far (note that intelligence and competence aren’t the controlling factors here).

Mark Stoval
Mark Stoval
5 years ago

“There is very little government interference in the coaching business.” There is government involvement in sports at all levels. The colleges are government funded entities. The people who are in charge of the Universities are not the same people who would be there if there was a “free market” in education. It is like saying that “the airlines where deregulated so why is flying such a mess”? It is because the airports are government controlled in every way. The really stupid coaches, and I have worked with several, got a degree or 3 due to the mindless education system. When… Read more »

Citizen of a Silly Country
Citizen of a Silly Country
5 years ago

I think a big issue is opportunity costs for potential good coaches. To be a college or NFL coach, you likely played at least college football at reasonably-sized program. If you’re a college football player with smarts, leadership and organizational abilities, you have a number of much more secure, socially-approved avenues to success and money, think investment banking, fast-track corporate ladder, real estate development, etc. To pass on those in favor of spending several years as a low-level, low-paid assistant at a college program then on to the pros, again as a low-level assistant, moving every couple of years, working… Read more »

Andrew
Andrew
Reply to  Citizen of a Silly Country
5 years ago

You beat me to it, but here’s the flaw in Z-Man’s argument: “In theory, the lucrative salaries and the lifestyle should be a magnet for smart young people in America.” The lucrative salaries may be a draw, but the lifestyle most definitely is not, for the reasons outlined above. Commercial trucking is in the same boat, in that it’s very good money (particularly for people without college educations), but is still facing a shortage and most of the workers in the industry hate it. Salary isn’t everything. Working conditions, benefits, schedule, and lifestyle demands all matter too, perhaps more than… Read more »

dad29
5 years ago

Disclaimer: I do NOT like Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan, for example, went to Washington penniless and retired with a net worth of $6 million.

Paul Ryan is also the scion of a very well-to-do general contractor. He was never ‘penniless,.’ although I’m sure that a bunch of his net worth came from inside knowledge, as is the case with damn near everyone in The Blob we call “Government.”

Carl B.
Carl B.
5 years ago

The most over-rated, stupid, clueless coach in the NFL today is one Ron Rivera. Rivera also has the bottom-of-the-IQ-barrel Cam Newton as his watermelon chuck – er – QB. The only guy dumber than these two half-wits is the team owner who pays these guys millions and paid billions for the Carolina franchise. The owner’s name is (((Dave Tepper))), a hedge fund manager who scored when the taxpayers bailed-out the banks ushering in President Hussein.

As they say: Every. Single. Time.

Eff the Negro Felons League.

Dutch
Dutch
Reply to  Carl B.
5 years ago

I used to be a Chargers fan, the ex-hometown team, before they lifted up their skirts and left town. The most inept ownership ever. Any coach more capable than the owner was hamstrung, second guessed, and run out of town. People like Don Coryell and Bobby Ross. Good riddance to the whole thing, may they all rot in big deal taco town.

Carl B.
Carl B.
Reply to  Dutch
5 years ago

The Chargers died when Barron Hilton and Sid Gillman left.

Dutch
Dutch
Reply to  Carl B.
5 years ago

Gillman, Lance Alworth, and all that were just a couple of years before my time. Coryell, who was the San Diego State football coach when Gillman was coaching the Chargers, was his protege. Second owner from Hilton (Barron died just this week, God rest his soul), Gene Klein, hired Coryell, drafted Dan Fouts, signed Johnny Unitas at the end of his career to mentor Fouts, and put it all together. Air Coryell. No Super Bowls, but great and entertaining football. When Klein sold the team to Spanos, the first thing that absentee NorCal apartment slumlord did was dismantle Air Coryell.… Read more »

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  Dutch
5 years ago

I was in Diego for the Beathard-Ross debacle. Spanos was a NoCal carpetbagger, SD’s a better town for running those crooks, although it’s developed other probs (including a homeless problem that’s SF-worthy). Going to be there for next 2 weeks pre-Scandza, planning on being grey-pilled at seeing what they’ve done to CA’s best big city.

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  Dutch
5 years ago

At least they a catchy song! (ducks and runs away. . . )

UpYours
UpYours
Reply to  Carl B.
5 years ago

Cam won the MVP in 2015 and went to the Superbowl. Hardly the bottom of the barrel. There are other reasons to dislike the NFL, but Cam Newton is not one of them

Carl B.
Carl B.
Reply to  UpYours
5 years ago

And Newton is still a moron.

The Babe
The Babe
Member
5 years ago

Sports coaching has somewhat unique selection pressures. Namely, that most coaches are former players who reached a fairly high level (at least college)–and what makes a good player is very different from what makes a good coach.

If you take a Venn diagram of “people who make good players,” and “people who make good coaches,” the overlap is going to be very small.

An apolitical take, I suppose. It would be interesting to compare the venn overlap of “good employee” and “good management” for different industries.

MemeWarVet
MemeWarVet
Reply to  The Babe
5 years ago

>>> If you take a Venn diagram of “people who make good players,” and “people who make good coaches,” the overlap is going to be very small.<<<

Larry Bird and that’s pretty much it

Compsci
Compsci
Reply to  MemeWarVet
5 years ago

You forgot Steve Kerr.

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  MemeWarVet
5 years ago

Larry was MVP (3x), coach of the year, and executive of the year. He and Belichick probably have a lot in common.

Tars_Tarkusz
Member
5 years ago

Colleges are not exactly a free market. Given that 2 organizations completely control politics in America, it is not at all surprising that only the worst people can get anywhere in American politics. You really need the support of the party to run an effective Senate or House race. The local chapters are even worse than the national parties.

Glenfilthie
Glenfilthie
Member
5 years ago

Well, I am just spit balling here – but I think job instability has something to do with it. From my perspective, I hear of sportsball coaches getting hired and fired every week. Then there are the membership dues involved in getting into that circle – there is cack to be sucked, arses to plunge your nose into – and the same revolting human trash that you see in Hollywood. The women that become part of that circle tend to be the same syphilitic tire biters that you see in Hollywood too. I am not saying I could run a… Read more »

BTP
Member
5 years ago

I have been thinking on that lately. I follow the Falcons, who are run by a coach of mediocre talent and unremarkable intelligence. The gap in decision-making between him and The Hoodie is quite amazing. Quinn, for example, had a fellow working for him who built one of the more amazing offenses in history but who wanted a shot at the big chair and moved on. Rather than replace him with someone similar, he went out and found just some guy, with poor results. Point being: Quinn, who is a mediocre coach, has no idea what genuine football insight looks… Read more »

sirlancelot
sirlancelot
5 years ago

Think Belichick got lucky. Devised a system and had enough talent around him to implement it. Brokered his success and used it to run the team the way he saw fit. That hasn’t always been the case. Brady and Kraft have overruled him on a couple of occasions. Instead of taking his ball and going home he has weathered the storm and from the looks of it makes the majority of the teams decisions. Antonio Brown’s recent departure proves the owner and the coach are on the same page. And why wouldn’t they be ? They’re both getting filthy rich.… Read more »

UpYours
UpYours
Reply to  sirlancelot
5 years ago

Sorry, but you are wrong. Belichick is a football genius and so is Brady. This coach-QB combo has produced the greatest football dynasty. What is amazing is that players like Randy Moss who have been nothing but trouble elsewhere performed at an amazing level in NE. Heck, NE squeezed 11 wins out of Matt Cassel. Belichick knows how to squeeze the maximum performance out of the team he has. Very, very few coaches at any level in sports can say that. The other amazing thing is the level of discipline in Belichick’s team. No hold-outs and no drama. Players STFU… Read more »

UpYours
UpYours
5 years ago

OT: Virtue signaling four eyed code monkey pulls project from GitHub since it is used by the eeeeevil ICE.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/09/21/0133217/developer-takes-down-ruby-library-after-he-finds-out-ice-was-using-it

Any wonder that Trump is unwilling to stick his neck out to stop the H1-B charade? Why should he spend political capital for a bunch of arrogant leftard four-eyed dweebs? If the code monkeys love immigrants so much, they would not mind training their immigrant H1B replacements. Bring on the H1Bs, the domestic code monkeys have forgotten the lessons of 2001-2005.

Pozymandias
Member
Reply to  UpYours
5 years ago

My experience with computers was similar to Vizzini’s above. I’m a gen-x guy. I learned to code on an Apple ][+. These machines were so primitive that the “operating system” was just Apple Basic that loaded from ROM on boot. Even today I miss the almost instant boot ups. I soon realized that Basic was slower than molasses in liquid nitrogen and learned 6502 assembly language. It really saddens me to look at today’s young computer geeks. There was a natural continuum amongst traditionally masculine interests like cars and guns and electronics and computers back then. If you wanted your… Read more »

Rogeru
Rogeru
5 years ago

To do anything, you need three things: 1 the minimum ability necessary 2 the opportunity to do it 3 the desire to do it Consider women in STEM. there’s lots of women who can do math and opportunities abound. But not many women meet the number 3 requirement. I’d imagine coaching is tough because most men who study the sport and would like to coach are probably not rocket surgeons while the smart men who enjoy competition and strategy go into business or military. With politics, requirement 1 fulfills requirement 2 but requirement 1 is simply the ability to schmooze… Read more »

Felix_Krull
Member
Reply to  Rogeru
5 years ago

Consider women in STEM. there’s lots of women who can do math and opportunities abound. In pursuance of what Citizen wrote above, women who are good at math usually have better opportunities than a STEM career, because women who’re good at math usually have a high g-score, whereas a lot of boys are simply good at math but mediocre at social science-stuff. That said, I suspect a lot of the women in STEM, chose their careers to avoid working with other women. A friends’ wife took a $15,000 wage cut to get from medicine into an engineering company for that… Read more »

Range Front Fault
Range Front Fault
Reply to  Felix_Krull
5 years ago

Don’t forget women moving to technical jobs. Yes….I purposely jumped from chick jobs to technical water treatment and water distribution majority men to get away from women…particularly Vibrant women in low level secretarial jobs. No Vibrant women in treatment and distribution….1 Mexican woman in treatment who couldn’t pass her state certification who got bumped back to janitor. Best move I ever made. Paying attention to this eventually led me to this side of the divide.

Epaminondas
Member
5 years ago

Candidates for membership in congress are the most scrutinized individuals in history. The Establishment knows more about these candidates than the candidates know about themselves. And if they are flawed or poor, all the easier to blackmail them into compliance.

MikeatMikedotMike
MikeatMikedotMike
5 years ago

“The game is littered with guys who are not all that bright, but somehow rise to the top of the profession.”

They get to the top by marketing themselves as the solution. Politicians do a similar thing when they campaign to win an election.

Clearly people can be very good at making themselves seem like the right guy for the job until they have the opportunity to prove to be anything but.

bilejones
Member
5 years ago

The Z man knows damn well of course that college sports, like all things associated with what passes as higher education in America, is a carefully walled off artificial environment with no relationship to the real word.
He’s looking at a bunch of tropical fish in an aquarium and wondering why the ocean isn’t like that.
As he said, he’s having a bad week.

Teutonic
Teutonic
5 years ago

Watching sports is for faggots. No exceptions.

TomA
TomA
5 years ago

Football owners are always looking for the next Belicheck to hire and turn their team around. And failing that, they try to hire the next young offensive genius (Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan). Or bring in an old veteran with a prior history of SuperBowl success. Or gamble on a PC token hire that supposedly knows how to motivate real men (read young violent black men). And these owners are largely motivated by ego and greed, so they really, really want to find a messiah that will catapult them to SB victory. So why do they fail so often? Answer, men… Read more »

Exile
Exile
Member
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Economic incentives clearly aren’t even most of the story. Coaching does demand a lot of hours, has a steep reward curve and requires cultural “cross-training” between jock and nerd skill-sets. I think social status has a lot to do with it. Globohomo’s bugman-nerd culture values jock culture less than WASPy classics-influenced culture did, and NuMericans are mostly soccer-spergs. Shitlib parents amplify this social disapproval for what’s seen as a blue-collar career track. Unless you’re a Saban or Belichik, prospective in-laws will likely give you the “Meet the Parents” treatment.

DLS
DLS
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Belichick is not a super genius but he has one on staff. He has a film guru he has known since childhood who has a photographic memory and can tell what another team will run based on formation. Belichick is a great coach regardless, but knowing what your opponent is planning on every play is a huge advantage we never hear about. Tony Romo once commented on a play Belichick ran at the goal line in a blowout game that didn’t seem to make much sense. But Romo pointed out that he ran it so that teams would have to… Read more »

Mountaindogsix
Mountaindogsix
Reply to  DLS
5 years ago

Ernie Adams…anyway I’m a life long Pats fan. I think more so because I joined the military and moved out of Mass very early and never went back. The Pats got me through some very dark days during deployments. Football takes a beating here but these guys have lessons that can be learned. The Pats practice the easy stuff to a fault. They practice situations that may come up once every few years or once per season. They pay their middle class well and treat everybody the same. They have brough character issues in but if they don’t conform they’re… Read more »

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Belichick may not be a “genius,” but he is a savant. He grew up in football circles because of his dad and built upon it. One could have connections to the elite, learn nothing, fritter opportunities away and go sideways. Or one could take advantage of the opportunities presented and learn from the best. It’s obvious what path BB took.

james wilson
james wilson
Member
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

The fact that it’s now nerds far and away who are running successful baseball franchises tells me that football has a quality, possibly a physical quality, that either nerds themselves find unattractive or that bars them from entry. Before nerdom baseball franchises were as stupid as football clubs. But let us not forget that these sports franchises cannot quite be tests of libtardarianism because they are by law or design made immune to the consequences of complete futility. I grew up with the actual Washington Senators. When Harmon Killebrew was signing balls in 2002 for a hospital charity I told… Read more »

Chris_Lutz
Member
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Part of it is that Belichick seems to look for intelligence in his players. There are a few positions he’s okay with the dumb NFL type. However in most cases, he seems to take someone who might not be top line physical talent but is smart enough to adjust week to week. That’s why the Patriots are probably the whitest teams in the league and the black guys aren’t idiots either. So replicating Belichick’s success would require choosing players that would send the sports press into a tailspin. To show you how bad it is getting, some college teams are… Read more »

Ryan
Ryan
Reply to  Chris_Lutz
5 years ago

The other thing about having the most white players is their salary to dollar ration is probably the highest in the league. Most teams are raciss when it comes to white players, so the Pats get them at a discount.

SamlAdams
SamlAdams
Reply to  TomA
5 years ago

Just a gut feel, but it appears a guy like Belichick is good at making “lots of decisions” and just as rapidly discarding the ones that don’t work and moving on to the next. Most business disasters I’ve cleaned up have the singular characteristic of picking a single strategy, then running it without deviation until it turns into a “controlled flight into terrain”. Belichick adapts. Side note, as gruff as he is with the press, Belichick is quite humble and nice in person. One of my kids worked at his golf club a few summers ago and used to drive… Read more »

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  SamlAdams
5 years ago

If you’re not an ex-player, the worst job in media has to be covering Bill Belichick.

johnmark
johnmark
Reply to  TomA
5 years ago

Before Belichick, Bill Walsh was the genuis coach. Had an extraordinary eye for talent in players and staff, but burned out after ten years. He had the incredible idea that it was easier to gain five yards on a short pass than with a run up the middle. He called it a long hand off. Then, by using short passes, it opened the line for longer runs of 7 to 12 yards. He also could take mediocre second string quarterbacks and win with his system every time Joe Montana was out. He also chose smarter players over “athletic” ones like… Read more »

A.B Prosper
A.B Prosper
5 years ago

Human being are social animals and its almost never what you know but who you know. Communism wanted to break this cycle as did the Confusicionists but as humans ran these societies it failed. It always will and foolish White people who trust outsiders need to learn to not do this. Everyone else is out to eat your lunch. This behavior is because nepotism and social solutions are intrinsic to human nature, few people have the capacity for logic or reason and the rest of humanity whose order of operations doesn’t include much brains will do whatever they can to… Read more »

De Beers Diamonds
5 years ago

I’m not old enough to have remebered Belichick when he was coach of the old Browns. But few in Cleveland were said to be impressed with him, mainly because he benched the local favorite Bernie Kosar at quarterback. This is the same city that mythologized Kosar for losing to Elway three times, so we might not be the best judge.

Mike_C
Mike_C
5 years ago

Why aren’t bright young guys aiming to be the next superstar football coach? Because that’s a maximize your greatest possible gain strategy. The very few who make it do well, but most don’t. Becoming an MD, or a lawyer, is a minimize your greatest loss strategy. Even if you suck as a physician, you’re making six figures. Similarly, if you’re reasonably bright and motivated, you’ll make decent money as an average financial advisor or consultant, and you might hit it big. But miss grasping the golden ring in coaching and you’re in some crappy junior high school with a cramped… Read more »

Mis(ter)Anthrope
5 years ago

Popovich, the coach of the Spurs, is half Croatian and half Serbian. So the three greatest coaches of the current generation are all sons of Illyria. Popovich also has the same personality as Saban and Bilichick.

I have wondered if this just coincidence.

Matrix
5 years ago

Couple things. Sports is very nomadic in nature if you have a desire to get to the top of the coaching hierarchy. Stable people wish to stay in stable situations where they can raise their families and carve out a place in their communities. You have to bounce all of the time staying one step ahead of being exposed. Wooden would never have made it today. UCLA would have cut him loose before he hit his stride. There is also a luck level of being in the right place at the right time. Alex Cora looked like a genius with… Read more »

ReturnOfBestGuest
ReturnOfBestGuest
Reply to  Matrix
5 years ago

Repeating is hard. Especially in a league with such a long season and so much travel time. If you follow on TV it’s clear that apart from Sox v. Yankees (in NL Cubs/Cards/Reds), they’re not filling stadiums. (Although both Sox and Yankee fans travel to take advantage of otherwise impossibly cheap tickets.) That doesn’t bode well for the game.

james wilson
james wilson
Member
Reply to  Matrix
5 years ago

Calling Ferrell mediocre is heaping praise on the unworthy.

Rcocean
Rcocean
5 years ago

BTW its irrelevant whether great Football coaches are personally “Great” or just know how to hire “Great” assistants and let them do their thing. The end result is the same. Rommel And Patton didn’t personally fight every battle. But they knew how to motivate, delegate, and which subordinates to trust, and which to watch over closely. I’m not much of an NFL fan, but Pro Football would be even *more* boring then it is right now, without the NE Patriots. They’ve kept the League – almost single-handed – interesting. But the NFL suffers from the same problem as all Pro… Read more »

Rcocean
Rcocean
5 years ago

Anything that attacks Libertarians is a great post in my opinion. but you can expand this to so many areas. The Libertarians always forget that businessman don’t like to compete, they like to make money. And so the dream of every businessman is get a quasi-monopoly where he can make money without the public being able to do much about it. You’re simply too big to fail. And then there’s politics and ethnic loyalty which always take priority over just making a few extra dollars. if Hollywood was a pure libertarian meritocracy you’d think we’d have a few more Gentile… Read more »

Drake
Drake
5 years ago

My son played high school football so I saw my share of idiot coaches up close. And I see it any Saturday and Sunday I decide to tune in. I’ve often thought that I should have got in on that racket. If I was mediocre, I would still be making good money as an assistant coach somewhere. If was even a bit good, I’d be making 7 figures.

Drake
Drake
5 years ago

Belichick and Saban are the rare coaches who do not tolerate crap from talented but high-maintenance players. They avoid those kinds of players in their drafts / recruiting and quickly dump them if that kind of behavior emerges. Players on their teams are expected to do exactly as they are told. Discipline wins battles.

greyenlightenment
5 years ago

Coaching pays well for the same reason govt. work , teaching, and administrative work pays well relative to talent involved. mediocre people earning big paychecks. unlike tech jobs there is no major windfall from employee options and stuff like that. You have to put in years of work and move up the ranks.

NSROYALIST
NSROYALIST
5 years ago

What always shocked me in US sports, is this % of useless matches. The non-promotion/relegation system pollutes the beginning of the season, and rig last ante-play off games.

What’s the point ?

You still can use this excellent draft system, but goddam, relegate weak teams in a 2nd division at the end of the season. Wouldn’t it be more exciting ?

(forgive me, please, for my bad english, I’m french)

(btw, bend the knee to the french metric system ^^)

Lorenzo
Lorenzo
Reply to  NSROYALIST
5 years ago

A number of major sportsball teams are content to lazily coast along and let their billionaire owners sniff jockstraps and enjoy the perks of a team owner. Relegation would inspire them to try fielding a winning team now and then. There are too many big league franchises anyway and it wouldn’t hurt to lose some. Of course the sucker taxpaying fans who provide the billionaires with facilitiess would riot if their team got relegated. And none of the billionaires would stand for being kicked out of the big guy club, so this will never happen

JR Wirth
JR Wirth
5 years ago

Football and politics are both rackets. You don’t have to hate a racket, you can still like football and know it’s a racket. The NFL is a monopoly. The USFL failed. The NCAA is a notorious monopoly. The “natural market” is a cartel. That’s what libertarians don’t understand. Sometimes cartels can be good. They’re usually bad and rapacious in the realm of free choice and commerce.. The NFL is a harmless cartel because you can just not watch it. My local power company PG&E is a public menace that needs to be broken up. The problem with libertarians is that… Read more »

Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson
5 years ago

There are a lot of problems with this as wider analogy. First, the organizations who search out and hire coaches are deprived of the most important market signal – that failure leads to the business folding. The owners of the Jets can keep doing what they’re doing and the team will never fold. The check on the process is that if you keep making stupid decisions because you’re bad at making decisions the market eventually relieves you of the responsibility for making decisions – in football the Patriots need the Jets because you need two teams to play a game.… Read more »

JohnTyler
JohnTyler
5 years ago

There is in fact a totally free market in football coaching. Just because the results (i.e., the best and brightest do not migrate to that career path to earn a zillion $$/year ) don’t agree with ZMAN’s concept of a free market, does not make it not so. The ZMAN here is suggesting equality of outcome should be the result of a free market. This would jive just perfectly with Bernie Sanders or any other communist/fascist/progressive. Free markets do not guarantee that everybody within that market is exceptional; that it suggests that equality of outcome is the natural endpoint of… Read more »

CAPT S
CAPT S
Reply to  JohnTyler
5 years ago

I think you may be missing the larger point: this isn’t about free markets as much as organizational behavior. Why do superior leaders often get passed over in favor of non-leaders – that’s the begged question. Non-leaders as human beings are fine – they have their own gifts/talents – but when they’re thrust into leadership positions they are very simply LOSERS. And why, in organizational behavior, do losers beget more losers? And if our best leaders aren’t rising to be our CEOs, Head Coaches, and Presidents, where the hell ARE these guys. My theory is that many are out there… Read more »

Andrew
Andrew
Reply to  CAPT S
5 years ago

Um, by definition, there can only be one “best coach” in football at any given point in time, and he can only work for one team at a time. Last I checked, Bill Belichik was still the GOAT, and still employed, and I doubt Robert Kraft will fire him in order to hire Jeff Fisher. I think that Z-man’s analysis suffers from performing relativist analysis in a zero-sum system. That people other than Bill Belichik or Nick Saban have head coaching jobs in their respective fields doesn’t prove that the market is broken, it just means that there are losers… Read more »