PHILADELPHIA — The best way to start any story about coach of the year voting is with a big deep breath and a long, exaggerated eye roll. Same goes for most end-of-year voting. Remember, these awards exist mostly for parochial reactions like the one you are about to get here.
Once you get to a certain level of accomplishment, the only way to distinguish between candidates is with your own firsthand testimony. Because each local market watches its own candidate closer than any of the other, and because observation bias is a thing, everybody comes away thinking they wuz robbed.
Of course, I am immune to cognitive biases, which is why you should trust me when I say that the Eagles’ Nick Sirianni really, truly, actually was robbed when the NFL left him off its list of finalists for the league’s coach of the year award.
My case for Sirianni is simple: No team exceeded the preseason consensus more than the Eagles did. There’s a quantifiable way to measure such things: Just look at each team’s projected win total in Vegas at the start of the season and compare it to its final win total. The Week 1 line for the Eagles was 9.5. They ended up with 14, plus-4.5 games, or 47.4% more.
None of the three finalists came close to that mark. The Giants’ Brian Daboll was plus-2 wins over the preseason line of 7. Same goes for the Jaguars’ Doug Pederson. Kyle Shanahan was plus-3 over the 49ers’ line of 10 wins. I wasn’t a math major, but 30% is less than 47%.
That’s it. That’s the argument. Is it a strong one? Absolutely not. The conclusion is based on a premise that I invented sheerly for the sake of the argument, i.e. that coaching is the reason why teams exceed preseason expectations. It’s possible that the Eagles finished plus-4.5 wins because Jalen Hurts got that much better. Or because people underestimated him to begin with. Or because the people in Vegas underestimated the rest of the roster that Sirianni had to work with.
If we’re being honest, Daboll and Pederson both exceeded expectations more than the Eagles did. Was it a bigger surprise that the Eagles won 14 games or that the Giants made the playoffs at all? I would argue that the Jaguars were less of a surprise, because I picked them to make the playoffs. That said, the coaching job Pederson did with Trevor Lawrence over the course of the season deserves as many accolades as the job Sirianni has done with Hurts.
The one thing we can all agree on is that Sirianni should have gotten the nod over Shanahan. Right? I mean, winning 14 games with an MVP candidate at quarterback is far more impressive than winning 13 games with Trey Lance, Jimmy Garoppolo, and Brock Purdy.
Right?
Dang it.
Again: deep breath, eye roll. If Sirianni beats Shanahan on Sunday, does any of this really matter? Fact is, coach of the year is more often than not a consolation prize. A bad quarterback situation is usually a prerequisite. I probably would have voted for Sirianni, but that’s mostly because he’d be my first hire out of the four. I think he’s the best coach, generally speaking. As for 2022, who knows. Unless they offer some criteria for the award, it pretty much comes down to inventing your own.
