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Why Coaches And QBs Should Divorce After Five Years Of Not Winning


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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-coaches-and-qbs-should-divorce-after-five-years-of-not-winning/  ( CHART AT LINK< CLICK TO SEE IT)

 

really interesting article...and concept.

 

here the thing.. winning a superbowl is REALLY hard to do. its not like 31 teams are "too cheap" or "too loyal" or whatever lame pointless fact-less shit fans come up with around here and most other fanbases.

 

my concern is what about crazy shit like injuries, like with palmer in 2005, not sure there was any AFC team that could beat us that year, steelers won the SB that year and we almost beat them with kitna coming in cold off the bench. what about david carr, the raiders were on fire.

 

but to the articles point, look at the chargers and rivers, lots of up and down, they stuck with rivers over the coaches he has had.. what if they parted ways, would rivers ahve flourished somewhere else? palmer made it to NFC champ game with arians. now they will likely be parting ways one way or another.

 

brees parted from san diego and won in NO. 

 

so anyway i guess what im sitting here pondering.... is it worth it to keep a duo of HC and QB together to keep winning gmaes with little chance of a real run.

 

in 2003 this fanbase was digging 8-8 really hard, but 2-3 years later it wasnt good enough anymore. and 2011-2017 has been fan hell for me. i have never cared less about the bengals season that i do this year. the traffic here and fans in the stands at games proves the same. it has declined year after year since then. 

 

so as an organization, do you want away from 10-6, 11-5, etc if you know you cant get further along, and blow shit up, and go 4-12, 6-10 to give a chance of a rebuild and try again.

 

a 5 year rotating run then throw a grenade in it..  its super interesting to think that year 6, you either keep the coach and walk away from all the big contracts, trade andy, trade gio and or hill, etc.. we would be better off today.. we would be 2 years into a rebuild instead ofgetting ready to start one.. we would know what we had in mccarron, and know for a fact if we need to talk out for a QB in the draft or trade up, etc..  so in the benglas case we should ahve blown this up after the mcaron getting fucked in palyoff game and kept him or someone else, and or pop a new coach which could ahve been Hue or whoever..

 

Quote

Marvin Lewis’s time as head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals is expected to come to an end after this season. It has been a remarkable run of longevity given that Lewis has compiled a 0-7 playoff record in 15 seasons on the job. No head coach in NFL history has more playoff losses without a win than Lewis.

Lewis, who was hired by Cincinnati in 2003, is one of seven active coaches to have started his current job prior to the 2010 season. It’s an illustrious group that includes Bill Belichick, Mike McCarthy, Sean Payton, Mike Tomlin, John Harbaugh and Pete Carroll. Next to those names, Lewis sticks out for an obvious reason: Every coach on the list has won a Super Bowl on his current team. But perhaps more telling, each one of them did so within five seasons on the job.

This is strikingly common in NFL history. Of the 31 head coaches to win at least one Super Bowl, 27 of them won their first championship within the first five seasons with that team. Only Chuck Noll (six years in Pittsburgh), John Madden (eight years in Oakland), Tom Landry (12 years in Dallas) and Bill Cowher (14 years in Pittsburgh) needed more than five years to capture that elusive first ring.

It could be argued that Lewis has lacked something most of those coaches enjoyed: a future Hall of Fame quarterback. Lewis never had an Aaron Rodgers or a Tom Brady. Instead, he’s had Carson Palmer and Andy Dalton, the current Bengals’ quarterback. Oddly enough, the closest Lewis ever came to winning a playoff game was in 2015, when Dalton was sidelined with an injury. AJ McCarron helped the Bengals to a late lead over the Steelers in the wild-card round, but Pittsburgh still won 18-16. That was the fifth season for the duo of Lewis and Dalton, and the Bengals haven’t made the playoffs in the two years since. Based on NFL history, there’s reason to believe that Lewis should have parted ways with the Bengals — or vice versa — after that season and not waited until now.

Call it The Five-Year Rule: No team has ever started the same quarterback under the same head coach for more than five years and seen that duo win its first championship. As you can see in the table, some really great duos just got their title together in the fifth year, but all 35 duos required no more than five years together.

This list raises a red flag for any quarterback-coach combination that has logged a lot of mileage together and not won it all — like Lewis and Dalton. If championship success doesn’t come within five years, things tend to get stale, and someone eventually has to move on from their position of power.

Plenty of great coach-QB combos have played together for longer periods of time without a Super Bowl, but even those pairs’ best years have tended to come early in their tenures. The great Don Shula coached Dan Marino for 13 years in Miami, but the duo reached only one Super Bowl — in 1984, Marino’s second season. Incredibly, some of the best duos to never win a championship had their best shot at one in their fifth season.

  • John Elway and Dan Reeves (1987 Broncos): The pair reached three Super Bowls together, but the only one that looked optimistic was Super Bowl XXII in year five, when Denver opened up a 10-0 lead before an avalanche of points by Washington buried the Broncos. Elway would win his first title with Mike Shanahan in their third year together.
  • Boomer Esiason and Sam Wyche (1988 Bengals): The high-powered offense was shut down by San Francisco in Super Bowl XXIII, but one more defensive stop against Joe Montana would have clinched a title.
  • Jim Kelly and Marv Levy (1990 Bills): The Bills lost Super Bowl XXV after Scott Norwood missed a potential game-winning field goal. Buffalo lost the next three Super Bowls as well but never came closer to winning than the first shot.
  • Matt Ryan and Mike Smith (2012 Falcons): The Falcons never had back-to-back winning seasons before Ryan was drafted and Smith was hired in 2008. Then they had five winning seasons in a row, but the peak was the 2012 season, when the Falcons blew a 17-point lead at home to the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game.

And more recently, Carolina’s Ron Rivera and Cam Newton reached the Super Bowl in 2015, their fifth season together, but lost to Denver. Now in their seventh year, the two are 10-4 and have an opportunity to defy The Five Year-Rule by winning their first championship this season.

A couple of other duos have also recently seen their five-year clock expire. In Arizona, this season was Bruce Arians and Carson Palmer’s fifth together. But a championship was not to be as Palmer broke his arm in Week 7, derailing the Cardinals’ season. This season was supposed to be the sixth year for Chuck Pagano and Andrew Luck in Indianapolis, but Luck couldn’t even get on the field in his recovery from shoulder surgery. Pagano is unlikely to return in 2018, while fans just hope that Luck can return to action.

Finally, there is the intriguing case of Andy Reid and Alex Smith in Kansas City, who are in the middle of their fifth season together. Reid and Smith already have some history working against them: Reid is in his 19th season as a head coach, and Smith is in his 13th season. Only one quarterback (Elway, 15th season) and one head coach (Cowher, 14th season) won their first championship more than a dozen years into their careers.

After a roller-coaster season, Kansas City has rebounded in recent weeks, easily dispatching of the Raiders and Chargers to regain control of the AFC West. Smith is enjoying a career-best season, but this fifth try may very well be his last shot at leading the Chiefs to a championship.

If Smith and Reid can’t bring home the trophy, their tenure together may be over. The Chiefs are likely to obey The Five-Year Rule and give another combo a try — as the Bengals and Lewis probably should have done two years ago.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

CORRECTION (Dec. 21, 5 p.m.): A previous version of this article contained two errors. First, it referred incorrectly to Alex Smith as a free agent. He will hit free agency after the 2018 season. Second, the table in this article incorrectly said that Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy won a Super Bowl after five seasons together. The Packers won the 2010 Super Bowl in Rodgers’ third year as a starter.

 

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As someone who deals in statistics, that just seems like a flawed argument. It's only happened 35 times and 3 times the rule didn't pan out... 10% of the time? That's not bad odds.

And I know my counter argument is statistically flawed as well. I can't put my finger on it, but the whole premise is flawed. It's rare to find diamonds, rarer still to find huge diamonds, there are no huge diamonds - is the logic chain.

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23 minutes ago, LostInDaJungle said:

As someone who deals in statistics, that just seems like a flawed argument. It's only happened 35 times and 3 times the rule didn't pan out... 10% of the time? That's not bad odds.

And I know my counter argument is statistically flawed as well. I can't put my finger on it, but the whole premise is flawed. It's rare to find diamonds, rarer still to find huge diamonds, there are no huge diamonds - is the logic chain.

yea its not a perfect sample but there is some truth to the idea... if you are just ALMOST there for 5 years.. one of the two needs to change.. unless its just a horrible defense or something... but is that on the HC too...

19 minutes ago, fredtoast said:

In general I agree with the premise of this article, but it is kind of silly to point to the Bills making 4 straight Super Bowls as "failure".

not saying kelly should go, but did levy(that was coach right?) NOT do something in those offseasons to win one of those?  honestly this example is the toughest one to argue in favor of the article...

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1 minute ago, GoBengals said:

yea its not a perfect sample but there is some truth to the idea... if you are just ALMOST there for 5 years.. one of the two needs to change..

That's just the problem, it doesn't.

Thing A is rare
Variant B of Thing A is rare within Thing A distribution
Variant B does not exist (Except for these times when it did exist)

Really, I don't want to break this down 35 teams at a time... But the reason the Bills went to 4 SB's and lost all of them had nothing to do with Dan Reeves and John Kelly. The reasons Don Shula and Dan Marino couldn't win a Super Bowl had nothing to do with QB play. So the correlated data in no way shows causation.

4 out of 31 head coaches took more than 5 years to win a championship. Ok. Knoll, Madden, Landry, and Cowher?!? Those are all some very respected names. Should their teams have cut bait after 5 years? And is 4 out of 31 even a bad ratio in the "Not For Long" NFL?

Good coaches are successful over a long time. Good QB's start for an extended stretch. Mediocre owners and GM's field mediocre teams over and over again. Good owners and GM's can build a team in under 5 years.

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On 12/22/2017 at 12:21 PM, LostInDaJungle said:



4 out of 31 head coaches took more than 5 years to win a championship. Ok. Knoll, Madden, Landry, and Cowher?!? Those are all some very respected names. Should their teams have cut bait after 5 years? And is 4 out of 31 even a bad ratio in the "Not For Long" NFL?

 

In the case of these 4 coaches, it wasn't until they got a hall of fame caliber QB that they won their first Superbowl so I actually think the 5 year rule was right. Madden sat Daryle Lamonica after 6 years and went with Stabler despite the fact Lamonica was 66-16-6 as the starter and was 10-2-1 his last year as the starter. The Chin had garbage at QB until the Rapist and actually had some good seasons with said garbage. Staubach was simply a great QB who made Landry look good. Bradshaw was a douche but way better than the forgettable trash who played before him.

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