Our situation is a little better. But overall, it’s wild.
January 8, 2026
Our situation is a little better. But overall, it’s wild.
21 comments
Coach of the year generally goes to the person who over performs on the year, so regression is likely to happen. When it does a lot of teams get antsy and fire the coach thinking they have slipped when usually it’s just natural regression and roster make up.
Look at some of the names not on that list and it explains a lot. In the NBA, Spo has never won but he’s on the NBA’s list of 15 best coaches ever.
This graphic is stupid. If you wait enough time, every coach will get fired. Jim Harbaugh had 7 years after he won COY, that COY award must have sealed his fate.
The problem with coach of the year is that they usually give it to the fluke team and not the actual best coach
Cleveland weirdly overrepresented
Coach of a Year award usually goes to a team that overachieved meaning they are more inclined to to be worse the next year and a disappointment to owners and fans.
Can’t replace the whole team so the coach/manager is what’s more likely to get replaced.
Hockey in general is really crazy with firing coaches. Martin St-Louis was hired as the Canadiens head coach on Feb. 9, 2022. He’s already the 4th longest tenured coach in the league.
Daboll was fired in 25 not 24.
This is rough, because almost all coaches are eventually fired in the modern sports world.
Bill Belichick was essentially fired.
COY is a completely broken award.
In the midst of a Chiefs dynasty, one that nobody disputes that Andy Reid built from the ashes of a garbage 2012 Chiefs team, Andy wins zero COY and the HC of the fucking BROWNS wins two.
One of them in a year when they ***literally lost to the Chiefs*** in the playoffs.
It’s basically an award for the team that surprised everybody very quickly – one that often regresses the next year – not for the coaches who are building durable programs.
That said, the NBA is even weirder, in that they’ll happily fire coaches even after they *actually win a championship.*
The coach of the year hot seat is the new sophomore slump lol
This tells us very little.
What this doesn’t show is how long they were coaching for that team in consecutive years.
Does a coach of the year have an above average time coached for a given team?
If you took all the coaches in any given year and mapped out when they got fired, how many got fired and when? I’m giving some coaches, the grace that they may have retired or stepped away from coaching. How does that compare to coach of the year getting fired. That might tell you something.
I actually think baseball has the worst set – so many more of those managers were fired the season after winning
Hockey being on here is a tough look. The NHL cycles through coaches ridiculously fast. Plenty of coaches get fired midseason in the NHL and those teams will still make the playoffs. Seems like they have a quick trigger for not playing up to expectations in that league.
Coach of the Year is basically the “your team overperformed preseason expectations” award, with some extra credit given if the coach was just brought in and/or the roster doesn’t have a lot of big name talent.
I think this is because a lot of what coaches do is invisible. Generally the only times fans get much insight into what sort of conversations are being had internally are when things go sideways and some aggrieved party starts leaking about gossip and drama, so a coach who is good at maintaining a cohesive and functional team dynamic will fly under the radar. The more visible parts of a coach’s job, strategy and playcalling, are mostly evaluated by fans and media based on outcomes, i.e. it was a good call if it worked and a bad one if it didn’t. But since players are the ones who actually have to execute a gameplan, great players will tend to get a lot of the credit for successful outcomes, which means “good coaching” just gets boiled down to “a lot of the plays he called worked out, and the players aren’t established stars so we don’t just want to give them all the credit…he must be a coaching genius!”
This is, obviously, really reductive and stupid. For one thing, just because a team isn’t stocked with big names doesn’t mean it doesn’t have talented players—plenty of coaches have been brought into situations where young talent or new acquisitions performed at a high level that resulted in the team “overachieving”, and that’s not necessarily because the coach did something brilliant. Also, coaching a team to sustained success season after season isn’t any less of an achievement than helping a previously shitty team improve, particularly because variance is a thing and plenty of teams have one good season that turns out to be a fluke, but “this guy’s teams are always solid” is somehow never a serious argument for coach of the year in the way that “they sucked last year and are decent this year” often is.
This reductive way of evaluating coaches is especially true in baseball, because there isn’t really a lot of strategy or playcalling to be done by a manager apart from choosing a lineup order and deciding when to pull a pitcher or sub in a defensive replacement, so if a manager pulls their starter and the reliever does a good job the manager is considered smart and if the reliever blows it the manager is dumb and “obviously” should have left the starter in or gone with a different reliever. The entire job gets reduced to retroactively attributing outcomes to the manager’s intelligence, when the truth is baseball has *incredibly* high variance and plenty of moves that “should” work out don’t, and plenty of moves that are arguably kinda foolish happen to have happy outcomes.
The result of all this, in every sport, is that many of the consistently successful coaches who won a lot of rings and had sustained dominance year over year have never won coach of the year, because its hard for consistently good team to wildly overperform expectations, while a whole lot of coach of the year winners turned out to just be one year flukes who got fired as soon as they regressed to the mean.
Did Spencer Carbery get fired?
What percentage of pro coaches are eventually fired overall? I bet it’s an even higher percentage.
If I had a nickel for every time my team’s coaches got a CoTY award I’d have 5. Which isn’t a lot of nickels, but kinda crazy that it happened 5 times.
99% of head coaches get fired, 100% of people who win coach of the year are head coaches. Ya that checks out.
Coach/Manager of the Year is an award that typically goes to a team that outperforms expectations. More often than not, the expectations are low for a reason, and thus the coach is right back on the hotseat when the team regresses to the mean.
In Baseball in particular, it most often goes to a team that does well despite a low payroll. It’s why it’s a much easier award to win as Manager of the Brewers, Marlins, Guardians, or Rays than it is to win as manager of the Yankees or Dodgers.
Ultimately, the lack of payroll eventually catches up to even well run organizations like the Brewers and Guardians, at which point Vogt and Murphy could either be back on the hot seat or ready to be poached by another opportunity in a bigger market.
Tocchet wasn’t fired tho.
Half of these guys were fired multiple years after winning. Like saying winning 6 super bowls is a curse because Belichick eventually got fired by the Patriots…
Everyone knew that the Titans were stupid to fire Vrabel.
21 comments
Coach of the year generally goes to the person who over performs on the year, so regression is likely to happen. When it does a lot of teams get antsy and fire the coach thinking they have slipped when usually it’s just natural regression and roster make up.
Look at some of the names not on that list and it explains a lot. In the NBA, Spo has never won but he’s on the NBA’s list of 15 best coaches ever.
This graphic is stupid. If you wait enough time, every coach will get fired. Jim Harbaugh had 7 years after he won COY, that COY award must have sealed his fate.
The problem with coach of the year is that they usually give it to the fluke team and not the actual best coach
Cleveland weirdly overrepresented
Coach of a Year award usually goes to a team that overachieved meaning they are more inclined to to be worse the next year and a disappointment to owners and fans.
Can’t replace the whole team so the coach/manager is what’s more likely to get replaced.
Hockey in general is really crazy with firing coaches. Martin St-Louis was hired as the Canadiens head coach on Feb. 9, 2022. He’s already the 4th longest tenured coach in the league.
Daboll was fired in 25 not 24.
This is rough, because almost all coaches are eventually fired in the modern sports world.
Bill Belichick was essentially fired.
COY is a completely broken award.
In the midst of a Chiefs dynasty, one that nobody disputes that Andy Reid built from the ashes of a garbage 2012 Chiefs team, Andy wins zero COY and the HC of the fucking BROWNS wins two.
One of them in a year when they ***literally lost to the Chiefs*** in the playoffs.
It’s basically an award for the team that surprised everybody very quickly – one that often regresses the next year – not for the coaches who are building durable programs.
That said, the NBA is even weirder, in that they’ll happily fire coaches even after they *actually win a championship.*
The coach of the year hot seat is the new sophomore slump lol
This tells us very little.
What this doesn’t show is how long they were coaching for that team in consecutive years.
Does a coach of the year have an above average time coached for a given team?
If you took all the coaches in any given year and mapped out when they got fired, how many got fired and when? I’m giving some coaches, the grace that they may have retired or stepped away from coaching. How does that compare to coach of the year getting fired. That might tell you something.
I actually think baseball has the worst set – so many more of those managers were fired the season after winning
Hockey being on here is a tough look. The NHL cycles through coaches ridiculously fast. Plenty of coaches get fired midseason in the NHL and those teams will still make the playoffs. Seems like they have a quick trigger for not playing up to expectations in that league.
Coach of the Year is basically the “your team overperformed preseason expectations” award, with some extra credit given if the coach was just brought in and/or the roster doesn’t have a lot of big name talent.
I think this is because a lot of what coaches do is invisible. Generally the only times fans get much insight into what sort of conversations are being had internally are when things go sideways and some aggrieved party starts leaking about gossip and drama, so a coach who is good at maintaining a cohesive and functional team dynamic will fly under the radar. The more visible parts of a coach’s job, strategy and playcalling, are mostly evaluated by fans and media based on outcomes, i.e. it was a good call if it worked and a bad one if it didn’t. But since players are the ones who actually have to execute a gameplan, great players will tend to get a lot of the credit for successful outcomes, which means “good coaching” just gets boiled down to “a lot of the plays he called worked out, and the players aren’t established stars so we don’t just want to give them all the credit…he must be a coaching genius!”
This is, obviously, really reductive and stupid. For one thing, just because a team isn’t stocked with big names doesn’t mean it doesn’t have talented players—plenty of coaches have been brought into situations where young talent or new acquisitions performed at a high level that resulted in the team “overachieving”, and that’s not necessarily because the coach did something brilliant. Also, coaching a team to sustained success season after season isn’t any less of an achievement than helping a previously shitty team improve, particularly because variance is a thing and plenty of teams have one good season that turns out to be a fluke, but “this guy’s teams are always solid” is somehow never a serious argument for coach of the year in the way that “they sucked last year and are decent this year” often is.
This reductive way of evaluating coaches is especially true in baseball, because there isn’t really a lot of strategy or playcalling to be done by a manager apart from choosing a lineup order and deciding when to pull a pitcher or sub in a defensive replacement, so if a manager pulls their starter and the reliever does a good job the manager is considered smart and if the reliever blows it the manager is dumb and “obviously” should have left the starter in or gone with a different reliever. The entire job gets reduced to retroactively attributing outcomes to the manager’s intelligence, when the truth is baseball has *incredibly* high variance and plenty of moves that “should” work out don’t, and plenty of moves that are arguably kinda foolish happen to have happy outcomes.
The result of all this, in every sport, is that many of the consistently successful coaches who won a lot of rings and had sustained dominance year over year have never won coach of the year, because its hard for consistently good team to wildly overperform expectations, while a whole lot of coach of the year winners turned out to just be one year flukes who got fired as soon as they regressed to the mean.
Did Spencer Carbery get fired?
What percentage of pro coaches are eventually fired overall? I bet it’s an even higher percentage.
If I had a nickel for every time my team’s coaches got a CoTY award I’d have 5. Which isn’t a lot of nickels, but kinda crazy that it happened 5 times.
99% of head coaches get fired, 100% of people who win coach of the year are head coaches. Ya that checks out.
Coach/Manager of the Year is an award that typically goes to a team that outperforms expectations. More often than not, the expectations are low for a reason, and thus the coach is right back on the hotseat when the team regresses to the mean.
In Baseball in particular, it most often goes to a team that does well despite a low payroll. It’s why it’s a much easier award to win as Manager of the Brewers, Marlins, Guardians, or Rays than it is to win as manager of the Yankees or Dodgers.
Ultimately, the lack of payroll eventually catches up to even well run organizations like the Brewers and Guardians, at which point Vogt and Murphy could either be back on the hot seat or ready to be poached by another opportunity in a bigger market.
Tocchet wasn’t fired tho.
Half of these guys were fired multiple years after winning. Like saying winning 6 super bowls is a curse because Belichick eventually got fired by the Patriots…
Everyone knew that the Titans were stupid to fire Vrabel.