The NFL’s coach-hiring process is broken, but you all know that. Each year a third of the league turns over as decision makers vacillate between one of two choices, each the opposite of the previous choice. It would seem the intricacies of the league and what makes a coach successful are often lost on those who make decisions. That, or, coaches are (relatively, from an ownership perspective) cheap to hire and fire, so there isn’t a great deal of urgency to fix the process.
Some owners spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for firms to search for people on their behalf. Some owners are just looking for a person who sounds like their sons’ friend from Dartmouth who is taking entrepreneurial business classes and is really excited about the future of synthetic almonds. Or, they pivot to the kind of high-end used-car salesman who tells them about The Way It Works, which provides them with a sense of comfort because they, like many people in the owners’ orbit, are simply really good at convincing powerful people to give them money.
In the process, a lot gets lost. I’ve complained about this before, but I’ll continue to stand on a soap box in regards to how coaches get lumped into buckets. The Old Guy. The Minority Guy. The Young, Exciting (White) Guy. The Serious Guy. The Fun Guy. Some people will deny this, but there is a real feeling out there among coaches that they are scanned, stereotyped and spit out before they get a chance to make their pitch.
