Doubt highly it was the NYT Article... more likely
this. Good read for data/statistic geeks.
Pushing “Reset”: The Conditional Effects of Coaching Replacements on College Football Performance. It has a University of Michigan tie in co-investigator.
Abstract
- Top of page
- Abstract
- Consequences of Leadership Replacement
- Data Sources
- Assessing the Effects of Performance-Based Coaching Changes
- Leadership Succession and College Football
- REFERENCES
- Appendix
Objectives
We assess the effects of coaching replacements on college football team performance.
Methods
Using data from 1997 to 2010, we use matching techniques to compare the performance of football programs that replaced their head coach to those where the coach was retained. The analysis has two major innovations over existing literature. First, we consider how entry conditions moderate the effects of coaching replacements. Second, we examine team performance for several years following the replacement to assess its effects.
Results
We find that for particularly poorly performing teams, coach replacements have little effect on team performance as measured against comparable teams that did not replace their coach. However, for teams with middling records—that is, teams where entry conditions for a new coach appear to be more favorable—replacing the head coach appears to result in worse performance over subsequent years than comparable teams who retained their coach.
Conclusions
The findings have important implications for our understanding of how entry conditions moderate the effects of leadership succession on team performance, and suggest that the relatively common decision to fire head college football coaches for poor team performance may be ill advised.
“We're in the era of PlayStation. If you don't like it, just hit ‘reset.’”
Former University of Colorado football coach Dan Hawkins responding to a media question about the ease of replacing head football coaches
At the highest levels of competition, college athletics departments are extraordinarily dependent upon the revenue generated by their football programs to finance coaches, staff, facilities, and an array other athletic teams. Football team success affects television and bowl revenues, ticket and merchandise sales, and potentially alumnae contributions to athletics departments. When team performance is disappointing, athletics administrators and university officials are often pressed to find ways to reverse the trend. The prominent leadership role held by head coaches means that, fairly or unfairly, they are often blamed for poor records and are regularly fired or pressured to resign as a way of “fixing” the program. Over the last decade, on average approximately 1 in 10 teams annually replaced their coach for performance reasons.
The stakes involved in college football are high. A recent conservative estimate finds that, on average, football accounts for almost half of the generated revenue in Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS; formerly Division I-A) athletics departments (Fulks,
2009). Additionally, the costs of replacing a coach are typically substantial—often involving hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in contract buyouts. However, there are no studies that empirically analyze the consequences of this particular variety of leadership succession. Little is known about whether replacing the coach is an effective strategy for improving performance.
1 To date, studies investigating leadership succession effects in sports focus almost exclusively on professional teams (for two exceptions, see Fizel and D'Itri,
1997,
1999). In this article, we present the first analysis of the effects of performance-based coaching replacements on the performance of college football teams.'
Our examination of the understudied environment of college football has several innovations over previous research on leadership succession in sports. To start, we analyze a large numbers of teams—about 120 programs in the FBS. We employ matching analysis to compare teams that undergo a treatment (coach replacement) with similarly performing teams that do not. We also examine whether replacement effects are conditioned on whether team performance prior to the replacement was extremely poor or merely mediocre. This analysis allows for an assessment of the conditional effect of entry conditions on leadership succession and team performance. We find that while coaching replacements may provide a short-lived boost to performance among teams that have been performing particularly poorly, they have a deleterious effect on mediocre teams (those that won approximately 50 percent of their games in the year prior to the replacement). Our final innovation is that we track postsuccession performance over the five years following the replacement while all previous work—with the exception of Giambatista's (
2004) study on professional basketball coaches—has only examined performance in the year immediately following the replacement.
The section that follows provides a brief survey of the research on sports leadership succession and describes a number of possible ways coaching replacement might be expected to affect team performance in college football. We then describe our data. Next, we present our empirical analysis, which reports our estimates of the effects of coaching replacements based on various matching techniques. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings.
