Reviewing head coach hirings over the past 5 years for success trends

Across the NFL, over the past five years, an astonishing 35 head coaches have been hired (and 16 of those fired), at a pace of seven vacancies filled per year. Several of those hirings (and firings) have happened with the same team – the Jets, Texans, and Broncos all lead the pack with three head coach hirings over that period.

In total, 23 of 32 teams in the league have turned over their head coaching job in that timeframe, including all of the teams in the NFC East, NFC South, and NFC North. The NFC West is the only division with fewer than two head coaching turnovers during the past five years (and with Pete Carroll’s transition this year, they will lose that distinction).

Below is a table of the full suite of NFL head coaching changes over the past five years.

Examining Trends

This isn’t an enormous data set, so drawing sweeping conclusions from it can be a bit of a risk, but it can still be useful to try to identify trends or patterns that might be interesting to explore more fully at some point in the future.

In compiling the data, one thing jumped out to me immediately: The track record of coaches jumping from college to the NFL in recent years is wretched. Urban Meyer, Matt Rhule, and Kliff Kingsbury all failed miserably, with a combined record of 41-75-1 in their short stints in the NFL. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s very little discussion of college coaches filling any of the NFL head coaching vacancies this year. Collective NFL winning percentage: .353.

That said, even prior NFL head coaching success is no guarantee of future success. In total, seven of the coaches here were coming from previous NFL head coaching jobs. All of them – except Adam Gase – had winning records in their prior positions. Even so, Reich and Rivera bombed out. Gase, predictably, fell on his face as well. It’s really too early to say how Sean Payton’s tenure in Denver will play out. Collective NFL winning percentage: .489

But what about the question many Washington fans are asking themselves now: Do we want a former high end offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator as our next head coach? The results were actually quite a bit more stark than I had expected.

Among the former NFL offensive coordinators, their collective head coaching record is currently .542, the best – by a wide margin – of any group broken out for this exercise. Six of eleven of the former OCs had a winning record in their promotional role, and seven are still employed.

The former NFL defensive coordinators performed even more poorly than the NFL head coach “re-treads” did, with a collective winning percentage of .415. Only one (DeMeco Ryans) of ten of the former DCs had a winning record in their promotional role. Even so, six are still employed, despite a relative lack of success on the field.

I’ll be curious to hear from others if this information shapes their perspective on Washington’s next head coaching candidate at all. Please discuss in the comments below.