Clearly just an oversight that he’s at a place like Illinois right now then, eh?
Not at all; if he were white he would still be a head coach in the NFL. Anything else you would like to know?
“On Sunday, the Detroit Lions defeated the Green Bay Packers for their ninth win, leaving them just shy of the playoffs but ensuring they finished the season with a winning record. In addition, the victory was the 36th in the four-year tenure of head coach Jim Caldwell, lifting his winning percentage with the Lions (0.562) above the 0.558 mark of Joe Schmidt, who coached the team from 1967 to 1972, and giving him a win-loss record better than that of every head coach in Detroit since Buddy Parker left the team in 1956 (i.e., across the last 60 years!).
Despite this record, though, Detroit fired Caldwell on Monday.
The Lions were not the only NFL team to see their coach depart that day, but they were the only one with a winning record to fire their coach. That might lead one to ask: How often do NFL teams with winning records fire their coach?
The NFL has played a 16-game schedule since 1978. Since that time, 538 teams have finished with a winning record. Using data from Pro-Football-Reference and news stories detailing why coaches left specific jobs, I was able to ascertain that, since 1978, 16 winning teams (or about 3%) fired their head coach.
Half of these 16 coaches led teams that had winning records of 9-7 (or slightly worse) — 6% of the 145 total teams with such a record since 1978.
Or to put it another way, in 94% of cases where a team was like the 2017 Lions, the team brought back its head coach.
When we look at the 16 coaches who were fired from winning teams, though, something immediately jumps out. Four of these coaches — Art Shell, Tony Dungy, Lovie Smith and now Caldwell — were black.
In the history of the NFL, there have only been 17 black head coaches who have coached at least one entire season (minimum 16 games) with a team. But four of these — or 23.5% — were fired from winning teams.
Since 1978, there have been 174 white head coaches who led a team for at least 16 games. Of these, only 12 — or 6.9% — were fired from a winning team. So black head coaches appear much more likely — relative to white head coaches — to be fired coming off a winning season.
In 2003, the NFL implemented the Rooney Rule, which requires that NFL teams interview minority coaches for head coaching positions. But the history of the rule tends to be forgotten: The league put this rule in effect after Tony Dungy and Denny Green — two successful black coaches — were fired.
We can now see in the data that there is some evidence that when it comes to diversity in the NFL coaching ranks, hiring is not the only issue. For black coaches, being successful doesn’t seem like it is enough.
It is immensely rare for a coach of a winning team to be fired. Unless that coach is black.
The NFL does not have anything like the Rooney Rule when it comes to firing coaches, and it is not clear how such a rule could even be created. But research by Devin Pope, Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers suggests that being aware that a bias might exists can help eliminate a bias.
Their research focused on how NBA referees called personal fouls. Earlier research by Price and Wolfers indicated that there was a racial bias in how referees made these calls. But after that research was publicized, the pattern observed earlier with respect to race vanished in the data. This suggests that if decision makers are aware that a bias exists, it can then be eliminated.
We should stress that the data set used to examine referee bias was quite large. In contrast, the number of head coaching positions means that this data set may never be large enough to establish a clear evidence of racial bias.
In other words, the data clearly indicates that black head coaches are much more likely to be fired with a winning record. But what is not clear is whether in any specific instance racial bias was why that happened.
What we might be more certain about is what happens after any coach with a winning record is fired.
In defending this particular move, Detroit general manager Bob Quinn said that he expects the Lions to contend with the top teams in the NFL and that Caldwell’s Lions have not done this. So will this move likely change the ability of the Lions to contend?
Unfortunately, the history of teams that fire winning head coaches doesn’t suggest that. Of the 15 teams that previously fired a winning head coach, 10 had a worse win-loss record the next season, and four managed to post the same record. That means only one team — the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2002 — actually got better the next season.
The Buccaneers are also the only team to have tried this move twice. After firing Dungy in 2002, the team acquired Jon Gruden from the Oakland Raiders. Gruden stayed with the Buccaneers until 2008. That season, the Buccaneers went 9-7 again, and the team once again fired the head coach. And as in every other instance, the team failed to get better.
Quinn said he spent many hours thinking about this decision. Perhaps some of those hours should have been spent looking at what happened next when other teams followed a similar path. It is incredibly rare for teams to get better when they fire a winning coach. Perhaps if Quinn had seen this research, well … maybe his decision would have been different.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidb...ore-likely-to-be-fired-with-a-winning-record/
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