Coaching Carousel

[the juiceman cometh]

Dude, this whole thread started with your response to someone saying great players fail miserably at coaching.

It really kicked off when you took issue with a small piece of a larger post I made. Particularly the examples of former players I chose.

My main point throughout this conversation hasn't been that there are tons of "great" players who turned out to be good coaches. It's that there's no evidence to back it up the notion that "great" players fail as coaches at a disproportionate rate, and no reason to think it's true, or will hold true in the future. See post #39. Very few aspiring coaches even get a chance to be a P5 or pro head coach, much less a successful one. I've seen no evidence the success rate for "great" players is meaningfully worse than for coaches who come from other backgrounds, especially when you consider the vast majority of those without successful pro careers get aggressively weeded out at the lower rungs of the coaching ladder.

I'm sure you could just as easily make the blanket statement that failed NFL head coaches don't make good college coaches. I'm sure a lot on here would agree with you. I'm sure Alabama fans wouldn't. The point here, so there's no confusion, is that the NFL piece is pretty irrelevant when it comes to Saban because he had a ton of success in college football prior to his NFL failure. Deion has had coaching success, besides his NFL "greatness." If you go back to my post you originally responded to, this was a much bigger part of the point I was making before you chopped it up into just an argument about whether certain coaches were great or just merely good players.

 

[altgeld88]

Probably TL/DR but here goes, as this topic interests me:

Regarding great players becoming coaches, the less relatively talented an athlete is to his peers at a certain level the harder he has to work at the game in order to maintain his position on a team. That work often involves greater thought about the mechanics of the game in order for a player to overcome his relative disadvantages. It also involves long stretches sitting on the bench as a reserve and observing the game rather than playing it. That years-long process tends to stimulate a skill in analyzing the game from certain angles that, in certain people predisposed toward it, facilitates teaching it to others.

If you're Larry Bird, Kareem, Magic, or Wilt, the game comes so naturally and fluidly that you tend to think much less about what you're doing because you're so naturally dominant of your peers. (And those peers are only the most elite of elite college basketball players.) If you have to be creative and opportunistic (Pat Riley and Phil Jackson come to mind), and if you're a player who practices diligently with the team but spends long stretches watching from the bench, you're likelier (if you have a disposition toward analyzing the game) to develop a coaching mentality. And you're likelier to be a more effective coach than a natural superstar because you've had to understand the game in a deeper and broader sense than those more talented do.

(As an aside, Pat Riley was a starter at Kentucky, a third-team All-American, and yet was merely a reserve for the Lakers. Phil Jackson was similarly a reserve for the Knicks. These guys were truly elite talent in an absolute sense but pedestrian compared with, say, Jerry West and Earl Monroe.)

Coaching is problem-solving. You have to enjoy that in order to coach well. And to enjoy it you likely have to have spent a lot of time solving problems as a player trying to keep up with better talent. And also spending lots of time in that rare position in which you might be called in to play at any moment (and so have to remain vigilant and engaged) but spend long stretches observing from the bench.

There's also an analogy here to a brilliant professor to whom (for example) understanding particle physics is effortless and he's annoyed to have to try to explain it to a relative idiot like me. That's not to say there aren't brilliant professors who are excellent teachers. There are and I've had them. But there are also many who can't be bothered (and are analogous to the star player who'd rather have the cushy studio talking head pregame/halftime gig after he retires. Or just bed 20,000 women, if you're Wilt.)

 

[ChiefGritty]

Being a head coach is actually a profoundly different job in different sports, making it hard to analogize.

That's particularly true in football, maybe college football most of all where there's just no avoiding the job being first and foremost acting as the CEO of a large organization with a ton of people who you aren't directly supervising all the time. That's not really like being an NBA coach at all.

 

[EyeoftheIllini]

Being a head coach is actually a profoundly different job in different sports, making it hard to analogize.

That's particularly true in football, maybe college football most of all where there's just no avoiding the job being first and foremost acting as the CEO of a large organization with a ton of people who you aren't directly supervising all the time. That's not really like being an NBA coach at all.

Agreed, which is why I posted earlier that you see great players get into coaching bball and baseball much much more than in football. In those other sports stars will be named HC with little or no coaching experience. Don’t see that much in football. I’m sure there are cases in college football, but I can’t really think of any that didn’t put in the time as an assistant.

 

[ChiefGritty]

Agreed, which is why I posted earlier that you see great players get into coaching bball and baseball much much more than in football. In those other sports stars will be named HC with little or no coaching experience. Don’t see that much in football. I’m sure there are cases in college football, but I can’t really think of any that didn’t put in the time as an assistant.

I am pretty sure what Deion is doing is essentially unprecedented. Someone for whom coaching was not ever their profession taking over as a Division 1 head coach. Another modern example doesn't spring to mind.

He had coached the football-based prep academy he created and was the OC for his kids' high school, but Jackson State is a world away from that stuff.

I was sure he'd fall on his face, and I will be sure the next comparable guy to try this will fall on his face. It's an unbelievable story.

(I guess that Wall Street guy who was at Coastal Carolina kinda compares, but he spent a couple years "interning" at Nebraska as I recall and was also a head coach in one of those startup spring leagues. He also did well of course, maybe this is more possible than it looks.)

 

[EyeoftheIllini]

I am pretty sure what Deion is doing is essentially unprecedented. Someone for whom coaching was not ever their profession taking over as a Division 1 head coach. Another modern example doesn't spring to mind.

He had coached the football-based prep academy he created and was the OC for his kids' high school, but Jackson State is a world away from that stuff.

I was sure he'd fall on his face, and I will be sure the next comparable guy to try this will fall on his face. It's an unbelievable story.

(I guess that Wall Street guy who was at Coastal Carolina kinda compares, but he spent a couple years "interning" at Nebraska as I recall and was also a head coach in one of those startup spring leagues. He also did well of course, maybe this is more possible than it looks.)

The only guy I can think of that is even somewhat comparable is Doug Williams at Grambling. I seem to remember he had some success there early on and didn’t have a ton of experience — though I think he had some. But nothing like Sanders.

 

[SuperintendentChalmers]

Joe Torre once explained his ability to relate to a wide group of players by noting that he hit .360 one season and .240 one season.

 

[One Man Fast Break]

The pool of "great players" is considerably smaller than the pool of players that we all just kind of forget about if they don't go into coaching.

If coaching is a perfectly efficient meritocracy and we can accept that there is a very weak correlation between how good you can play and how well you can coach (once you hit a certain base level, often just being a college athlete to begin with, and sometimes not even in that... which as more to do exposure to various coaches and involvement in learning various schemes)... we would expect the vast vast majority of "good coaches" (say the top 100 coaches in the world) to come from the much more vast pool of forgettable players than the very small sliver of former great players.

It doesn't mean that being a better player somehow makes you worse at coaching overall... and if you are looking at the high-profiled formerly great players that failed as coaches, you are likely just paying more attention there and ignoring the vast wasteland of failed coaches that you didn't know existed when they were players.

 

[champaignchris]

Georgia Tech is an interesting job that screams opportunity. They haven’t been a consistent national power since the 50s, but will pop off a Top 10 team once a decade.

They had a long run of 20 bowl games in 22 years under a succession of 3 very good coaches in O’Leary, Gailey and Johnson before pretty clearly whiffing on Collins.

It’s a great school in a great city in some of the best recruiting territory in the country and a conference where all the traditional powers besides Clemson are in a down cycle. Given its location in a Atlanta, it’s a pretty sure bet that it won’t be left behind when/if the ACC eventually falls apart.

Someone should be able to hop in there and clean up.

 

[Ander1345]

Georgia Tech is an interesting job that screams opportunity. They haven’t been a consistent national power since the 50s, but will pop off a Top 10 team once a decade.

They had a long run of 20 bowl games in 22 years under a succession of 3 very good coaches in O’Leary, Gailey and Johnson before pretty clearly whiffing on Collins.

It’s a great school in a great city in some of the best recruiting territory in the country and a conference where all the traditional powers besides Clemson are in a down cycle. Given its location in a Atlanta, it’s a pretty sure bet that it won’t be left behind when/if the ACC eventually falls apart.

Someone should be able to hop in there and clean up.

Jeff Monken come on down.

 

[Mr. Tibbs]

Jeff Monken come on down.

interestingly , Todd Monken is the current OC at UGa and his name has also made the internet lists.

would be funny if both bros were in contention

 

[RabidDawgClassic]

It really kicked off when you took issue with a small piece of a larger post I made. Particularly the examples of former players I chose.

My main point throughout this conversation hasn't been that there are tons of "great" players who turned out to be good coaches. It's that there's no evidence to back it up the notion that "great" players fail as coaches at a disproportionate rate, and no reason to think it's true, or will hold true in the future. See post #39. Very few aspiring coaches even get a chance to be a P5 or pro head coach, much less a successful one. I've seen no evidence the success rate for "great" players is meaningfully worse than for coaches who come from other backgrounds, especially when you consider the vast majority of those without successful pro careers get aggressively weeded out at the lower rungs of the coaching ladder.

I'm sure you could just as easily make the blanket statement that failed NFL head coaches don't make good college coaches. I'm sure a lot on here would agree with you. I'm sure Alabama fans wouldn't. The point here, so there's no confusion, is that the NFL piece is pretty irrelevant when it comes to Saban because he had a ton of success in college football prior to his NFL failure. Deion has had coaching success, besides his NFL "greatness." If you go back to my post you originally responded to, this was a much bigger part of the point I was making before you chopped it up into just an argument about whether certain coaches were great or just merely good players.

That “small piece of a larger post” was the one gigantic flaw that rendered the remainder of the larger post moot.

 

[GILL-INOIS]

If Deion Sanders leaves JSU....does his son QB Shedeur Sanders come with him?


Shedeur Sanders was offered by a ton of schools. Including 2 of those positions currently open.....Georgia Tech and Arizona St. Throw in Daddy Sanders was in Auburn territory in the last week. If Mizzou (should have)would have beat Auburn in the last week I think the trigger would have been pulled on Harsin.

 

[ChiefGritty]

Georgia Tech is an interesting job that screams opportunity. They haven’t been a consistent national power since the 50s, but will pop off a Top 10 team once a decade.

They had a long run of 20 bowl games in 22 years under a succession of 3 very good coaches in O’Leary, Gailey and Johnson before pretty clearly whiffing on Collins.

It’s a great school in a great city in some of the best recruiting territory in the country and a conference where all the traditional powers besides Clemson are in a down cycle. Given its location in a Atlanta, it’s a pretty sure bet that it won’t be left behind when/if the ACC eventually falls apart.

Someone should be able to hop in there and clean up.

So, to play devil's advocate

- I believe GT has some of the most cramped, behind-the-times facilities in major college football and their dense urban campus doesn't really give them the square footage to change that.

- My understanding is that they've had trouble from an academic perspective historically, both getting players in school and keeping them there. GT isn't Stanford or Duke, but it's not far from it and is more technically focused than those kinds of places are, like even their liberal arts stuff is sort of engineering-inflected (I have no idea what that means tbh but I've heard that).

- And in a way it's very easy to see them being left behind when the ACC falls apart because the SEC already owns Atlanta without them and the Big Ten would be irrelevant in Atlanta even with them. They're behind several of their conference foes on the Golden Ticket list.

Make no mistake, the Paul Johnson era was a (wildly successful!) attempt to accept their limitations in the modern era of college football and do more with less, the same theory as applied at the service academies. For that to be the way they're looking at the problem kinda tells you everything you need to know.

All of that said, the new NIL world seems to point toward a bright future for schools physically located in major media markets with rich alumni bases who care about football. USC and Miami spring immediately to mind, but why not GT? Fundamentally for decades the money generated by college football has been laundered through various kinds of institutional support, with facilities being the most obvious and prominent, in order to attract players. NIL cuts out the middle man, and I guess in theory GT is one of the most middle man-limited programs in the country.

Because you're right, they are absolutely at ground zero talent-wise. Georgia is basically co-equal with the Florida/Texas/California elite tier of recruiting states, and it's heavily concentrated in the Atlanta metro area.

 

[the juiceman cometh]

That “small piece of a larger post” was the one gigantic flaw that rendered the remainder of the larger post moot.

 

[InDaAZ]

Probably TL/DR but here goes, as this topic interests me:

Regarding great players becoming coaches, the less relatively talented an athlete is to his peers at a certain level the harder he has to work at the game in order to maintain his position on a team. That work often involves greater thought about the mechanics of the game in order for a player to overcome his relative disadvantages. It also involves long stretches sitting on the bench as a reserve and observing the game rather than playing it. That years-long process tends to stimulate a skill in analyzing the game from certain angles that, in certain people predisposed toward it, facilitates teaching it to others.

If you're Larry Bird, Kareem, Magic, or Wilt, the game comes so naturally and fluidly that you tend to think much less about what you're doing because you're so naturally dominant of your peers. (And those peers are only the most elite of elite college basketball players.) If you have to be creative and opportunistic (Pat Riley and Phil Jackson come to mind), and if you're a player who practices diligently with the team but spends long stretches watching from the bench, you're likelier (if you have a disposition toward analyzing the game) to develop a coaching mentality. And you're likelier to be a more effective coach than a natural superstar because you've had to understand the game in a deeper and broader sense than those more talented do.

(As an aside, Pat Riley was a starter at Kentucky, a third-team All-American, and yet was merely a reserve for the Lakers. Phil Jackson was similarly a reserve for the Knicks. These guys were truly elite talent in an absolute sense but pedestrian compared with, say, Jerry West and Earl Monroe.)

Coaching is problem-solving. You have to enjoy that in order to coach well. And to enjoy it you likely have to have spent a lot of time solving problems as a player trying to keep up with better talent. And also spending lots of time in that rare position in which you might be called in to play at any moment (and so have to remain vigilant and engaged) but spend long stretches observing from the bench.

There's also an analogy here to a brilliant professor to whom (for example) understanding particle physics is effortless and he's annoyed to have to try to explain it to a relative idiot like me. That's not to say there aren't brilliant professors who are excellent teachers. There are and I've had them. But there are also many who can't be bothered (and are analogous to the star player who'd rather have the cushy studio talking head pregame/halftime gig after he retires. Or just bed 20,000 women, if you're Wilt.)

Excellent thesis
Now, explain why Juwan Howard is such a twit…

 

[Mr. Tibbs]

I have no doubts that Deon Sanders will get his bite at the apple with an SEC or ACC team this December or 15 months from now.
I have no ill feelings nor animosity towards him - I just dont think he will succeed at the P5 level.
I wish him well.
But the road to football coaching nirvana, at the college and NFL level, is littered with corpses of guys with way better football coaching chops than him

 

[IlliniShelt]

I have no doubts that Deon Sanders will get his bite at the apple with an SEC or ACC team this December or 15 months from now.
I have no ill feelings nor animosity towards him - I just dont think he will succeed at the P5 level.
I wish him well.
But the road to football coaching nirvana, at the college and NFL level, is littered with corpses of guys with way better football coaching chops than him

I'll take his coaching chops. His record should speak for itself.

 

[altgeld88]

Excellent thesis
Now, explain why Juwan Howard is such a twit…

And you thought my initial post was long... ??!!

 

[the juiceman cometh]

I'll take his coaching chops. His record should speak for itself.

Yeah but he was too good at football, and at the end of the day that'll be his downfall

 

[220Illini]

I have no doubts that Deon Sanders will get his bite at the apple with an SEC or ACC team this December or 15 months from now.
I have no ill feelings nor animosity towards him - I just dont think he will succeed at the P5 level.
I wish him well.
But the road to football coaching nirvana, at the college and NFL level, is littered with corpses of guys with way better football coaching chops than him

He’s a great recruiter, motivator, and kids seem to love him. If he surrounds himself with knowledgeable, experienced coordinators especially offensively he will have success anywhere.

 

[Boomauer]

Ummm don’t all head coaches have staffs? It’s weird, whenever I hear people talking about the Illini’s great D so far I hear Walters name not BB’s.

All have staffs....not all are created equal. We as Illinois fans should know that.

 

[BretMyBeachHouse]

Yeah but he was too good at football, and at the end of the day that'll be his downfall

said no one.

 

[Ryllini]

Ummm don’t all head coaches have staffs? It’s weird, whenever I hear people talking about the Illini’s great D so far I hear Walters name not BB’s.

But Walters is on BB's staff. BB has the resources to get a great staff, does Walters have the connections in this stage of his career to run a P5 team. I hope not for my personal reasons and Fandom, but hope he does for he dreams and hopes should that be what he wants.

 

[Mr. Tibbs]

I'll take his coaching chops. His record should speak for itself.

two years of coaching in that league theyre in qualifies him for P5 ?
how did that work out for Scott Frost going 13-0 at UCF when he went to the big stage ?