We've hit that point in the year when the days are starting to get longer again! The College Football Play-offs are in full swing and finished the inaugural first round weekend. The NFL season is getting really interesting, as the play-off race starts to get tight. And, more than a few NFL head coaches are likely preparing to coach their final games of their tenures - that's right, NFL's Black Monday is just around the corner! So far this season, the Chicago Bears, the New York Jets, and the New Orleans Saints have fired their head coaches and have started searching for their next one. There will undoubtedly be more on that infamous Monday morning after the last NFL regular season weekend!
What's interesting this year is that legendary coach Bill Belichick (see my post "All Things Must Pass" and "All Things Must Pass II" for more on his career) passed up a potential opportunity to go back to the NFL and try to break Don Shula's all-time coaching wins record (328 regular season wins) and accepted a job as the University of North Carolina's new head football coach. I'm not sure whether there were any teams seriously considering hiring Belichick, who needs 26 more NFL wins to tie Shula's regular season wins record. I heard that age was at least one potential reason - Belichick is 72 years old and most NFL teams want a coach with a longer tenure than perhaps Belichick would be able to provide. What's remarkable is that the average tenure of an NFL coach is just about 3 years! With that in mind, Belichick would have been 75 years old at the end of a typical NFL head coaching tenure. He would still likely have been the oldest active head football coach, but it still would have been reasonable in my opinion.
Business school professor and author (and New England Patriots fan) Michael Roberto recently posted about Belichick's successor at the New England Patriots, Jerod Mayo (see "Selecting a Leader: Lessons from the Patriots' Jerod Mayo Experiment"). Mayo's team has only won 3 games this season, at least so far, and there is at least some speculation that he may be one of the coaches looking for a new job come Black Monday 2025. Firing a coach after just one season would be fairly unprecedented, but Roberto provides some compelling statistics. First, Mayo was hired with only 5 years of coaching experience (most NFL head coaches have close to 20 years coaching experience at the college and professional level). Second, Mayo had only worked as a coach under Bill Belichick. Most NFL head football coaches have worked under several different head coaches, suggesting that a diversity of experience and exposure to a number of different coaching philosophies is important. What's also important here is that many of Belichick's assistants have not been successful as head coaches (see Roberto's 2022 blog post "When Hiring Leaders from the Outside Fails"). Finally, Roberto suggested that the so-called "Curse of Expertise" (also known as the "Curse of Knowledge") may be playing a role here as well (see his 2021 post "Super Bowl Coaches, The Curse of Expertise, and The Importance of Perspective Taking" and my 2021 post "The curse of expertise" and my 2024 post "See one, Do one, Teach one" for more). The thinking here is that star players rarely, if ever, go on to succeed as head coaches. As Roberto writes, "Experts sometimes have a difficult time teaching much less experienced and accomplished people. Why? They forget what's it like to be in the novice's shoes."
Professor Roberto makes some great points about the challenges that NFL owners and general managers will face when considering who to hire as their next head coach, but more importantly he argues that organizations outside of sports face similar challenges! For example, according to recent research by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, the median CEO tenure for S&P 500 companies is 4.8 years, which is a 20% decreased from 2013-2022. Given all of the challenges in leadership today (see my post "Welcome to the age of chaos..."), I suspect that most corporate boards will be risk-averse and look to hire individuals with a proven track record. But experience is certainly not the only factor that they should consider. Boards also prioritize strong leadership skills, ethical conduct, excellent communication skills, the ability to build relationships with key stakeholders, and the capacity to adapt to changing market conditions. Regardless, as Roberto writes, "Learning on the job is difficult for any leader, but particularly for those who don't have a reservoir of relevant experiences upon which they can draw in challenging situations." Particularly in today's turbulent climate, finding leaders with at least some experience with crisis leadership would seem to be crucial.
NFL's Black Monday is always entertaining and usually educational for me. It will be interesting to watch how Jerod Mayo's career turns out. I wish him well. I also think that it will be interesting to see what happens with leadership transitions and trends in the world outside sports.
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