What I see is the ton of work it took to put that together. Surprisingly only 7 or 14% of the coaches who made the "Continuity List" won the super-bowl. So continuity don't mean ****. The game is played to win the super-bowl. There is no trophy for second place
I've seen clips of Rodgers yelling at McCarthy, and I'm sure there are 100's of other examples of even great coaches getting "disrespected." Just this season Lynch didn't go into the locker room with his teammates at halftime and Blount quit on Tomlin.
It seems really flimsy to me that people are judging Philbin's performance along these lines. The team had a QB who performed at the average to slightly above-average level, and two Pro Bowl players on its roster, all of which is consistent with the average record it attained. If the team had QB play and talent on the roster that suggested it should've performed much better than it did, then it would make sense to start evaluating Philbin along these lines and lending some credence to these sorts of "interpersonal" events. When the team is performing at the expected level based on its talent, the most accurate interpretation of Philbin's performance in my opinion is that he's doing about as well as the average coach in the league. Cam Cameron on the other hand finished 1-15, which is a highly unexpected result in today's parity-driven NFL. Certainly there was more credence in evaluating his performance along these more "interpersonal" lines. With Philbin, however, it's very likely to be a case of ascribing greater meaning to something than is warranted, by people who are on the outside looking in. It's very difficult to care about something (the Dolphins) so much and have absolutely no control over it. I think that lack of control makes people strive to feel more certain in their appraisals of the team than they should be. They achieve the illusion of some measure of "control" by thinking they know more about the team than they can possibly know. Then when you gather all of those sorts of people into one place (i.e., here), they simply feed off of that illusion with each other, and the forum itself serves as the representation of that "knowledge," that in reality doesn't exist. Look at how much we "know" about the team. There must be thousands of threads here that "prove" our knowledge!
Even assuming these two incidents did occur, they are nothing more than isolated incidents. We have a clear pattern with Philbin.
...or we have a clear pattern with the absence of established leadership among the players. "The theory determines what you see." Again, we're far more likely to be accurate in my opinion in judging Philbin's competence as a function of how discrepant the team's performance was from what would be expected based on its talent. When there is a large discrepancy there, then it makes sense to start looking at these other sorts of issues, and thinking they may have some significant meaning. If you're looking at them when there isn't a large discrepancy between talent and performance, then you're very likely to be making meaning out of something that's the equivalent of an "inkblot," and your own personal theories, rather than anything going on in reality, are likely to be driving the bus on your perceptions and conclusions. Every time someone posts something here about Joe Philbin, in my opinion we're learning a whole lot more about that person than we are about Joe Philbin.
You are juding the team's talent based on pro bowlers, when its just as likely pro bowlers are determined by the team's W/L. Its a non-sequitor. You could make the argument that plenty of players have the talent to be pro bowlers, but have been mis-managed. Either way, the debate shouldn't even reach that point. Having players continually humiliate and embarrass you publicly is more than enough to say you're not a good leader. To your argument that theory is determining what I see, please refer to Philbin's compensation on the open labor market. My "theories" have been confirmed with objective data. Nobody else in the NFL wants Joe Philbin as a head coach. He is paid as much as as Gus Bradley, Jack Del Rio, and Jim Tomsula. If you're argument is that the team has had such a void of leadership, that has spanned across 100+ players, then I would question whether that is even statistically possible. So many guys have been jettisoned and acquired, that I have a hard time believing Miami has had such an inability to acquire leaders. It is especially more difficult to believe that theory when you consider that veteran players and the QB have routinely undermined and humiliated Philbin.
And whose fault is that? Every time we get players who try to be leaders, the staff gets rid of them.
I'll never forget one of the conversations he had with Chad Johnson while they were in the practice bubble. It was beyond awkward and pretty much solidified for me how incapable Philbin is with speaking to players directly. He couldn't even make eye contact with the man.
That's a pretty bold position to take. Essentially you're reversing the causal relationship between talent and winning, and/or giving a great deal of weight to the mediating variable of coaching and personnel management. That sort of equation may hold true for both the best and the worst coaches, the outliers at either tail of the distribution (Cam Cameron and Bill Belichick, for example), but I doubt you'd get much mileage out of that for the coaches in the average range. If you were to apply that to the Dolphins specifically, what players would you say were mismanaged in 2014, and how many more wins would the proper management have resulted in?
In my opinion, building a winning team culture consists of identifying players who 1) play very well, 2) exhibit in their behavior the head coach's philosophy (in Philbin's case, professionalism), and 3) are going to be with the team a long time. If a player doesn't meet all three of those criteria, there's no reason to keep him and view him as one of the team's leaders. You're better off moving on to other players who may fit the bill, rather than trying to jam the square peg in the round hole with what you have. Right now this team has a nucleus of player leadership that looks to me like it's ready to take that next step of establishing a winning team culture. In no particular order, Tannehill, Wake, Vernon, Suh, Jenkins, Pouncey, Albert, J. James, Landry, Miller, R. Jones. It's possible that if the team would've hung on to Incognito, Dansby, Wallace, Brandon Marshall, Chad Johnson, and Vontae Davis, those sorts of "characters" would've derailed any progression toward the culture the team seems to be establishing right now. It's a precious balance. You could very well see this team turn the corner in 2015, and that may be due in large part to a three-year process of "housecleaning and restocking" in the areas of player leadership and team culture. Most fans aren't patient enough to tolerate a three-year process, however. If a first-time head coach hasn't made the playoffs in three years he must be a bad coach. A three-year big picture, culminating in a huge leap forward in the fourth year, doesn't enter the equation for them.
That bolded part suggests we should choose players GIVEN that we've already chosen the head coach. The head coach is only one piece of the puzzle. You don't want to choose a head coach that gets rid of too many good players because the coach + those players don't mesh. It's better to find a different coach with a different philosophy instead.
The big problem with using only the number of Pro-Bowl players as a measure of talent on the team is that you're measuring the talent on the team by looking only at maybe the top 10% of the players. It's like saying I'll describe a distribution (of anything) by looking only at what lies beyond ~2 (technically a bit less) standard deviations! I think you can see yourself why that is a bad measure.
Consider, however, that the correlation between number of Pro Bowl players and win percentage in the NFL is 0.78.
What if the head coach's philosophy is the one that causes the most winning? Then do you settle on a worse one just for the sake of keeping some players? And I'm not saying Philbin's philosophy is that one, necessarily.
Still chicken and the egg. Does probowl = more wins or does more wins = probowl? Do better and more talented players miss the probowl because their team doesn't win?
That's good for predicting win %. It's not a rebuttal to the question of whether it's a good measure of talent, where you want to know the distribution.
Yeah, implicit in my argument is that we don't know what combination of coach + players is best. Obviously, if we did know, then just do what's best. Point is, if the head coach doesn't mesh with a bunch of arguably talented players, it's a warning sign that you might be going down a path that's to the detriment of the team.
Assuming we can agree that the players who make the Pro Bowl are very talented (which isn't inconsistent with the bolded portion above), what variable(s) other than player talent would drive the correlation between number of Pro Bowl players and win percentage all the way up to 0.78?
I'm not sure you need to know the distribution when you have something that, alone, is associated with 61% of the variance in winning. It's likely that the rest of the rosters in the NFL are largely a wash, and the number of Pro Bowlers is the distinctive factor.
I'll let Dol-Fan Dupree provide his own answer to your response, but let me just point out that assuming players who make the Pro Bowl are very talented IS consistent with the bolded portion in Dol-Fan Dupree's comment. You are saying: "Players in Pro Bowl" => "Talented" He is saying: "Talented players" does not necessarily imply "Pro Bowl" Yes, they are consistent (just means not all talented players make it to the Pro Bowl).
No, he's saying some players don't make the Pro Bowl because their teams didn't win. That doesn't mean the players who do make the Pro Bowl are not talented.
Well, now you're pulling me into the argument that Stringer Bell and Dol-Fan Dupree were making. The correlation is arguably due (at least in part) to there being a causal relationship going both ways. Talented players have a higher probability of making the Pro Bowl, but greater win % makes it more likely you'll be chosen to the Pro Bowl. That's just an "eyeball" argument because we don't have an independent measure of talent. Your proposed one doesn't disentangle the possible confound.
Yeah we both understand what he's saying. You're just not seeing that they're consistent. Consistent means "it is logically possible that both are true". It does not mean "implies". You are incorrectly thinking "consistent" => "implies". Think: I can say.. "There is an apple on the table". That statement is consistent with "The apple is red", and it's also consistent with "The apple is not red".
Oh LOL.. OK, I read too fast. Well, that just means we're both right, except for me saying you didn't see both statements were consistent. OK, so that entire response of mine was a waste of time. Sorry about that dude!!
One way of doing it would be to determine whether the players with a larger number of Pro Bowl appearances made the Pro Bowl when their teams had a poorer record.
Yup, that's one way, and one good thing about that approach is you can do that across longer time spans (no need to restrict this to the Philbin period), so you might actually get decent sample size.
You did a good job. Lets use Reshard Jones. In 2012 he was arguably the 2nd best safety in the league. He did not make the probowl. If MIami made the playoffs, that increases his chances of making the probowl. His talent and play isn't better because Miami wins. Miami winning has a lot of factors. Football is a team sport.
