After the Browns dropped consecutive disappointing road games to 2-win teams, the sports punditry seems to have decided once again that Eric Mangini is running out the clock on death row.
I’m still not entirely sure that I agree with this opinion or, if it is true, the actual decision. As Mike pointed out earlier, good teams require continuity, and firing a coach every two to three seasons is a pretty huge impediment to continuity. It’s also no secret that the Browns’ are still lacking in the personnel department, and they’ve had a rash of injuries to make matters worse. In light of all that, dumping Mangini seems at best a grey area.
Still, nothing reflects more poorly on a coach than losing games to teams like Buffalo and Cincinnati. Even if the Browns somehow manage to beat either Baltimore or Pittsburgh in the final two weeks, losses in games like the previous two carry a stench that clings to the head coach.
With all that in mind, the punditry has begun flinging around names for possible Mangini replacements. There’s almost universal agreement that whomever would come in would be a client of Bob LaMont, Holmgren’s agent and possible shadow President of the team. But aside from John Gruden (who still may not coach at all next season), the other early favorite appears to be Carolina’s John Fox.
Fox is one of those coaches who the NFL analyst community loves unconditionally. They talk about what a great motivator he is, what a sharp football mind he has—all kinds of intangibles that would make him a steal for any organization.
This is precisely the problem for laymen like us, though. Coaching is essentially all intangibles, and everyone but the players is cut off from most of those. We’re not in the locker room; we don’t know what the players think of the coach; we can’t access the X’s and O’s side of what he provides. Hell, most of the time we don’t even get to see what formations he’s running out on defense since the standard NFL camera angle doesn’t show the secondary.
Really, there’s only one quantitative measure that people like you and me can use to try to decide whether or not a coach is “good”: his win-loss record. So the question is, does John Fox’s record support the euphoria from the NFL congregation?
Counting the current season, John Fox has coached Carolina for 9 years. To date, he’s compiled a 73-69 record (51.4% wins) with the very real probability that Carolina loses its final two games of the season and drops that record to 73-71. In short, through his career, Fox is a .500 coach.
What about the topic of consistency? Well, here’s a year-by-year recap of the Panthers under Fox:
2002: 7-9, missed playoffs
2003: 11-5, lost to NE in Super Bowl
2004: 7-9, missed playoffs
2005: 11-5, lost to SEA in NFC Championship game
2006: 8-8, missed playoffs
2007: 7-9, missed playoffs
2008: 12-4, lost to ARI in NFC Divisional game
2009: 8-8, missed playoffs
2010: 2-12 (currently), worst record in the league
There are two ways to look at the above. One is that with the exception of this season, Fox has never won fewer than 7 games, and 44.4% of his teams have made it to the playoffs.
The second is that his career is marked by a serious yo-yo effect. Fox’s Panthers (which sounds like a villainous faction in a Disney movie) have never posted consecutive winning seasons. Further, every time they’ve made it to the playoffs, they’ve performed worse than the previous time. Super Bowl losers in 2003, booted from the NFC Championship game in 2005, blown out in the Divisional round in 2008.
Call me a pessimist if you will, but this doesn’t exactly give me a great deal of confidence that Fox is the guy to turn the Browns around at a coaching level.
In fact, it reminds me of a disturbing parallel. It was less than a year ago when the members of the NFL analyst fraternity collectively started touching themselves over Washington’s hiring of the great Mike Shanahan. I am on record as being critical of Shanahan’s godly status in the football world, at least based on recent reality. For all the clamor about his defense and rushing expertise, he won a grand total of 2 playoff games in the 10 years after John Elway retired. Flash forward to today: Washington is not only tied for last place in the NFC East at 5-9, but their personnel situation and Shanahan’s handling of players like McNabb and Haynesworth has been almost universally panned.
The truly scary part: even in the post-Elway era, Shanahan’s ten-year record with the Broncos (91-69) was still significantly better than Fox’s nine years in Carolina, regardless of what happens in the final two games of the 2010 season.
I’m not saying definitively that Fox is a bad candidate. On some level, coaching is sorcery. But I am saying that based on the only hard facts we have available, I think it would be wise for Browns fans to be skeptical.
As I concluded in the coaching post I linked to regarding Shanahan, the goal for GMs around the league should be to find the next great coach, not hire some guy beloved by the old guard who’s had some past success. Analysts talk all the time about how the keys to the AFC North are smash-mouth defense and a good running game. It’s rarely mentioned that the consistent rulers of the division, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, not only have good-to-great young QBs, they also have (supposedly) two of the great young coaches in the league in Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh—both of whom were hired out of obscurity and initially met with skepticism around the pundit community. If Mangini is fired, the Browns’ brain trust would do well to keep that in mind.
-T
