 Mean reversion or a breath of fresh air? The effect of NFL coaching changes on team performance in the salary cap eraM. A. Roach Applied Economics Letters, 2013, vol. 20, issue 17, 1553-1556 Abstract: Just as firms must consider the impact of changes in management, sports teams must consider whether a coaching change will improve the team's on-field performance. I examine the effects of coaching changes for National Football League (NFL) teams between the 1995 and 2012 seasons. A variety of factors contribute to an NFL team's performance reverting towards league-average levels between seasons. Thus, a nominal improvement in team performance could be due to improved management or it could simply be mean reversion. I find that, after accounting for the highly significant mean reversion effect during this time period, firing a coach reduces a team's expected performance during the next season and the team's average performance over the next two seasons. This effect is present when wins are used to measure performance, but also when performance is measured by point differential and playoff appearances, two variables that avoid some shortcomings of using team wins as a measure of performance. I conclude that teams are firing coaches an inefficiently high percentage of the time. Date: 2013 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:20:y:2013:i:17:p:1553-1556 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2013.829181 Access Statistics for this article Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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