4 ms·

> in every elite sport, physical or otherwise, a coach is pretty much always someone who has previously been an elite player or participant. It's a common refr

> in every elite sport, physical or otherwise, a coach is pretty much always someone who has previously been an elite player or participant. It's a common refrain in many team sports that great players rarely make great coaches. The majority of NFL coaches have no NFL experience. A handful didn't even play at the college level, and most of those that did played in "non-elite" college divisions.

ACow_Adonis 10y ago
If that is true (forgive me, I'm not from America and know nothing about NFL at all), then forgive me for being an ultra cynical bastard. At some level, I'm taking it you're still telling me that they at least all played the game to some level, which is still a distinctly different level from common corporate messages that you wouldn't even have had to play or understand the game of the team you're managing. So it sounds to me like there's still some level of fundamental skill attribution there, though maybe not to the levels found in other sports/professions. It is also true that the correlation between coach and skill is not perfectly bi-directional/symmetrical. Great skill does not necessarily imply great manager/coach. But my contention is that great manager/coach has some necessary correlation/causative connection with having great skill and that this connection grows stronger the more an activity relies upon high skill and the direct measuerable application thereof. It is the nature of this connection, that one (coach) requires the other (skill), but that one (skill) does not imply the other (coach), that makes such positions so rare in highly valuable high-skill-verifiable games. Of course, the other dimension of this analytically is the supply side: what is the shape of the skill curve (does it taper off quickly or is there a long tail), and how many people/resources are put towards producing people in this game. As an ultra cynical bastard though, I think it would raise for me some interesting questions about the nature of NFL coaches, remuneration, players, how easy or hard it is to measure their skills and value their contribution to a team's success, how directly their skills affect an outcome of a game, how important/connected this application is to a team's success, and how much such things are the things being chosen for. Now I should state that I've done a little bit of analytics on sports (primarily rugby and tennis) in my own time over the years, so the notion that such positions and remuneration in team sports is tied more to stereotypes, marketing, showmanship, reputation advertising and superstition in the team sports vs the individual ones/frequent contest/high-verifiable ones is actually what I would expect to see, rather than as something I think invalidates my theory. If you put sports on a spectrum, the variability and difficulty in finding empirical relationships between skill and game contribution does become increasingly difficult the more you move away from the frequent contest, high skill (by which I mean in a technical sense: the amount of variance in an outcome directly attributable to some kind of notion of measurable skill rather than randomness), individual participant games. There's a whole lot more I haven't touched on. /I also think, although I haven't put effort into analyzing it, so I accept it as a personal bias/belief at this stage, but I haven't found anyone else that has been able to demonstrate it, so I think i'm pretty safe, that there is almost no demonstratable connection between higher corproate executive remuneration and actual measurable skills/outcomes, and that this is this culture/phenomenon that explains where the "non-technical manager" idea comes from...
CarpetBench 10y ago
Just because I was curious, here's the actual breakdown: Highest level of play by current NFL head coaches NFL: 10 Division I: 7 FCS: 6 Division II: 2 Division III: 4 High School: 3 This is pretty generous bucketing, i.e. the NFL bucket includes people like Sean Payton (played 3 games as a replacement during a strike) and Gruden (practice squad player). The DI/II/III breakdown is also based on the school's current NCAA status (not when the coach played), which is probably inaccurate in some instances as well.
quirkot 10y ago
I agree. Perhaps another way to generalize it is to say: The ability to critique and improve the product of others is only loosely correlated to the ability to produce a high level product yourself. Another place you can see this is in art production (written or visual, particularly). Many great art critics have only moderate ability as artists themselves.

ACow_Adonis 10y ago

If that is true (forgive me, I'm not from America and know nothing about NFL at all), then forgive me for being an ultra cynical bastard. At some level, I'm taking it you're still telling me that they at least all played the game to some level, which is still a distinctly different level from common corporate messages that you wouldn't even have had to play or understand the game of the team you're managing. So it sounds to me like there's still some level of fundamental skill attribution there, though maybe not to the levels found in other sports/professions. It is also true that the correlation between coach and skill is not perfectly bi-directional/symmetrical. Great skill does not necessarily imply great manager/coach. But my contention is that great manager/coach has some necessary correlation/causative connection with having great skill and that this connection grows stronger the more an activity relies upon high skill and the direct measuerable application thereof. It is the nature of this connection, that one (coach) requires the other (skill), but that one (skill) does not imply the other (coach), that makes such positions so rare in highly valuable high-skill-verifiable games. Of course, the other dimension of this analytically is the supply side: what is the shape of the skill curve (does it taper off quickly or is there a long tail), and how many people/resources are put towards producing people in this game. As an ultra cynical bastard though, I think it would raise for me some interesting questions about the nature of NFL coaches, remuneration, players, how easy or hard it is to measure their skills and value their contribution to a team's success, how directly their skills affect an outcome of a game, how important/connected this application is to a team's success, and how much such things are the things being chosen for. Now I should state that I've done a little bit of analytics on sports (primarily rugby and tennis) in my own time over the years, so the notion that such positions and remuneration in team sports is tied more to stereotypes, marketing, showmanship, reputation advertising and superstition in the team sports vs the individual ones/frequent contest/high-verifiable ones is actually what I would expect to see, rather than as something I think invalidates my theory. If you put sports on a spectrum, the variability and difficulty in finding empirical relationships between skill and game contribution does become increasingly difficult the more you move away from the frequent contest, high skill (by which I mean in a technical sense: the amount of variance in an outcome directly attributable to some kind of notion of measurable skill rather than randomness), individual participant games. There's a whole lot more I haven't touched on. /I also think, although I haven't put effort into analyzing it, so I accept it as a personal bias/belief at this stage, but I haven't found anyone else that has been able to demonstrate it, so I think i'm pretty safe, that there is almost no demonstratable connection between higher corproate executive remuneration and actual measurable skills/outcomes, and that this is this culture/phenomenon that explains where the "non-technical manager" idea comes from...

CarpetBench 10y ago

Just because I was curious, here's the actual breakdown: Highest level of play by current NFL head coaches NFL: 10 Division I: 7 FCS: 6 Division II: 2 Division III: 4 High School: 3 This is pretty generous bucketing, i.e. the NFL bucket includes people like Sean Payton (played 3 games as a replacement during a strike) and Gruden (practice squad player). The DI/II/III breakdown is also based on the school's current NCAA status (not when the coach played), which is probably inaccurate in some instances as well.

quirkot 10y ago

I agree. Perhaps another way to generalize it is to say: The ability to critique and improve the product of others is only loosely correlated to the ability to produce a high level product yourself. Another place you can see this is in art production (written or visual, particularly). Many great art critics have only moderate ability as artists themselves.