Yesterday (the Monday after the final game of the NFL season) marked a sort of annual tradition when different NFL team owners and general managers get together and decide whether or not to fire their head coach ("Black Monday"). At least by my count, 4 coaches were fired (though 2 of these were fired mid-season and there is at least one more coach, Jason Garrett of the Dallas Cowboys, who may not make it through the end of the week). The two question on everyone's minds (at least the fans of the four teams that lost their head coach) today are:
1. Who can these teams get for their new head coach?
2. Will a new head coach make a difference?
I've talked about this issue before in the past (see "Lovable Losers" once more... and "You're fired!"). At least to answer the second question, most of the time, changing a head coach doesn't really help a team start to win (at least if they are losing, and I would assume that is the case for most teams that fire their head coach). In other words, changing the coach is not the answer.
Case in point - just take a look at the Cleveland Browns, who fired their head coach, Freddie Kitchens after just one season (in which their win-loss record was 6-10). If you are about my age, you will remember the last time that the Cleveland Browns were winning was when Marty Schottenheimer was their head coach from 1984 to 1988 (the overall record during that stretch was 44-27-0). Since the 1988 season, the Cleveland Browns have had 14 head coaches with an overall record of 149-297-2 (winning percentage of 0.498). Now, during this same period of time, the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Ravens, and then a few years later a new franchise was created for Cleveland with the original name.
One could certainly ask whether the Browns are just incredibly unlucky with their head coaching hires. Until my next point. Most of you may not remember, but Bill Belichick, who will likely go down in history as one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) head coaches in NFL history, served as head coach of the Browns from 1991-1995 with an overall record of 36-44. Recall that Belichick's overall win-loss record as head coach of the New England Patriots is 237-83 with six Super Bowl victories (he's also lost the Super Bowl three times). So, either Belichick learned from his mistakes in Cleveland or there's something else different about the Browns versus the Patriots. I would argue (see my previous posts on this topic, "The Patriot Way", "The Patriot Way Redux", and "That makes it twice...") that it has more to do with the latter than the former - the culture throughout the Cleveland Browns organization is just not a winning culture.
Clearly then, changing your head coach doesn't help if the rest of the organization is terribly run. And I would also argue that firing your head coach is not always the best answer. Case in point - just take a look at the University of Virginia men's basketball team. After the 2018 season, the UVa Cavaliers were the number one ranked team in the country and the number one overall seed in the NCAA tournament. Many experts thought that 2018 was their year to win it all. As the top-ranked seed in their region, they were scheduled to play the team that was the number 16 (last) seed, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County Retrievers team.
What happened? The UMBC team beat the UVa team! For the first time in the 880 year history of the NCAA men's college basketball tournament, a number 16 seed beat a number 1 seed in the first round. At least one sports journalist compared the magnitude of this upset to the famous defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588! He went on to say that UVa's head coach, Tony Bennett "will be remembered in years, perhaps decades, to come, for becoming the first No. 1 seed... to lose to a No. 16 seed. That stain does not easily, if ever, wash away." The same journalist didn't call for Coach Bennett to be fired, but he did say that "Something is missing. Something has to change. An answer must be found."
What did Coach Bennett have to say after the loss? During the postgame press conference he explained his philosophy, "That's life. We talk about it all the time...If you play this game, and you step into the arena, this stuff can happen...And all those who compete take that on. And so we'll accept it."
In other words, take the loss and learn from it. As Ryan Holiday wrote in a recent post on his "Daily Stoic" blog, "What matters is what you do next." He goes on to talk about what the ancient Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, would say, "If you accept this obstacle and work with what you're given, an alternative will present itself - another piece of what you're trying to assemble." In other words, learn and move on.
What happened next? The University of Virginia won the NCAA basketball tournament the very next year to become the 2019 National Champions! Again, Coach Bennett said, "All of the ridicule, all of the criticism, all the humility, all the things that happened, at that moment, it was crystal clear that it was all worth it...If you learn to use failure, suffering, adversity right, it will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn't have gone any other way."
That is how you build a winning culture folks! You don't need to fire your coach, or for that matter, your CEO, if you build the right culture around that individual. I would bet that the next head coach of the Cleveland Browns will last a couple of years and get fired for yet another losing record. We won't know for sure until the next "Black Monday" in 2020 (or the one after that), but I think we can almost guarantee it will happen, unless something drastically changes in the Browns organization.
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