The Cheat Code That Lasts For One Week
Jack Del Rio, Todd Haley, Tony Sparano, Dennis Allen, Joe Philbin, Ken Whisenhunt, Chip Kelly, Jeff Fisher, Gus Bradley, Rex Ryan, Ben McAdoo, Hue Jackson, Mike McCarthy, Jay Gruden, Ron Rivera, Bill O’Brien, Dan Quinn, Jon Gruden, Urban Meyer, Matt Rhule, Frank Reich (twice), Nathaniel Hackett, Josh McDaniels, and Brandon Staley.
What do these people have in common? These are all of the head coaches that were fired in the middle of the season since 2010.
16 of those coaches were let go in the second half of the season, and nine were so bad that they were fired within the first seven games of the year.
As you can see, there’s a good reason for this. The combined records of all of these teams before they fired their head coaches is 67-164-3 which is good for a win percentage of 0.293—3% worse than the Jaguars who have the worst record of any team since 2010.
For some of these teams, their records do not do justice how terrible they actually were. Take Brandon Staley’s Chargers for example: they had won 5 games by week 13, but were without their star quarterback, Justin Herbert, and had just lost 63-21 to the Raiders by the time Staley was canned. The Browns were 0-16 the year before they fired Hue Jackson after a 2-5-1 start. And although the Chiefs’ 5-8 record in 2011 under Todd Haley looks respectable, they had the 2nd fewest PPG, 5th worst point differential, and 4th worst SRS. Point being, these are some god awful teams.
Each time a head coach is fired, an interim head coach takes over for the remainder of the season. Most interims are offensive, defensive, or special teams coordinators and are often expected to simply keep the locker room intact—winning isn’t the primary goal. In fact, the record of the interim coaches that have took over for the 25 guys in the graphic above is 56-101, which would be third to last for any team since 2010, so like any organization, NFL teams struggle when they get rid of their leader. Except for one game.
In 2022, the Colts lost the final seven games of their season. Within their seven game skid, they blew a 33-0 lead to the Vikings (the largest comeback of all time), took a 54-19 romp from the Cowboys, a game in which they only put up 173 yards of total offense, endured a 38-10 loss to the Giants, and fell to the Texans who were 3-12-1 at the time. Jeff Saturday, who had never coached at a level higher than high school football, was the interim head coach of the Colts at this time last season after the firing of Frank Reich, and these losses were seven of the eight games that Saturday coached. The 8th game occurred in week 10, when the moribund Colts came back to beat the Raiders 25-20 after Derek Carr failed to lead a game-winning drive ending with a 4th and 11 incompletion to Davante Adams.
How did the Colts, a team that was utterly dominated from week 11 on, manage to beat the Raiders in their first week under Saturday, who joined the organization six days prior to the game? Well, to tell you the truth, we shouldn’t even be surprised.
Since 2010, teams playing in their first game with an interim coach have had an unprecedented amount of success given how bad the teams that they picked up were.
2011 Chiefs — Was the Packers first and only loss of the entire season.
2015 Dolphins— Won by 28 points—their largest margin of the season.
2015 Titans — Were on a game losing streak before win and averaged 9 PPG in 4 games prior to scoring 34 in win.
2016 Jaguars — Coming off a nine game losing streak, won by 21.
2018 Packers — Were coming off 3 game losing streak.
2019 Redskins — Were 0-5 at the time, and averaged 30.2 PAPG before allowing 16 in win.
2020 Texans — Were 0-4 at the time, and averaged 31.5 PAPG before allowing 14 in win.
2020 Falcons — Were 0-5 at the time, and averaged 32.2 PAPG before allowing 23 in win.
2022 Colts — Saturday would go 0-7 following the win.
2023 Raiders — Largest margin of victory that season was 4. They won by 24.
In these 25 games, the team playing in their first game with an interim head coach was 13-12. I used a Binomial PDF test on a TI-84 calculator (a concept that I and many of you have learned in senior year statistics) to see if this 13-12 record is truly improbable given the 110-253-3 combined record that these teams had in all other games. I calculated the the likelihood of these 25 teams winning at least 13 games, and the probability of such an occurrence was 0.0199—less than the alpha value of 0.05. This means that the 13-12 record in interim head coaches’ first games is statistically significant, thus, there is something going on here beyond luck.
There are several games on the graphic above that were not won by the team with the interim coach, but they played much better than they did with the fired coach. Look no further than this year’s Chargers. After getting beaten down by 42 in the previous week, they were expected to be demolished against the streaking Bills, but were only beaten by two points courtesy of a game winning field goal. Last year’s Broncos team was a similar case—they were crushed by the Rams 51-14 on Christmas before the firing of Nathaniel Hackett, but were only beaten by three points against the Chiefs who were 13-2 at the time in their first game under interim coach, Jerry Rosberg.
All in all, against the spread, teams in their first game with an interim coach are 16-9 since 2010. The probability of that record is just 0.0538.
If we dig in a little bit deeper to these games, the stats tell the same story as the results. Here is a graph showing the YPG margin (yards per game - yards allowed per game) for each of the 25 teams with an interim coach since 2010 and the yard margin in the interim’s first game.
As expected, the red line fluctuates much more than the blue line, but the blue line stays well below the x-axis for all but three of the teams, whereas the red line is above the x-axis 12 times due to elevated play by teams under an interim head coach for the first time. Like yard margin, PPG, DVOA, QBR, and countless other stats are better in the one game than the whole season.
So, what does this all mean? If we trace back to the probability of 0.0199 that implies there is a factor outside of luck contributing the 13-12 record in these particular contests, we can infer that players feel more motivated to win when playing for a coach for the first time, especially when they know how hard the coach has worked to rise from the bottom of their organization to the top. The excitement of Raiders players during this locker room speech by Antonio Pierce after his first win of the season proves that point.
Ask any athlete or listen to any talk show, and they will tell you that the coaching staff affects how hard the players compete. Bart Scott of ESPN even flirted with picking the Commanders to beat the Cowboys this week because he believes Washington’s players will compete harder for Ron Rivera in order to “send him off right” before his inevitable firing.
Obviously, this system of success is not at all sustainable. If a team fired their head coach every week, I would expect them to go 3-14, but if anything, the numbers that I presented to you should show how NFL teams should never fear a fresh start. The NFL isn’t just a game of numbers, but a game of emotions and people. As shocking as 13-2, 0.0199, 16-9, 3/25, and every number seems, we shouldn’t be surprised.