There Are Actually No Winners in a Press Conference – Changing Results Means Changing Culture

This is NFL hiring season, an annual ritual in which somewhere between 25% and 33% percent of the league’s 32 franchises fire and hire new head coaches every year. Can you imagine the chaos that would follow if one third of Fortune 500 companies changed CEOs or COOs annually?

But this is a ritual that I’ve watched carefully over the last 20 years, first as a player-agent watching for signs as to what coaching changes might mean for my clients, whether doors would open or close based on styles of play or leadership. Later as a lawyer, professor and consultant, I watched because of the issues of allocation of franchise resources, the contracts involved, and whether there were any predictable traits of successful hires versus unsuccessful ones. I watched so carefully, I convinced an NFL President and a General Manager that I was a worthy consultant to work on their search based on the historical analysis of head coaching hiring decisions and success in the salary capped era that I developed.

Professional sports franchises today represent multi-billion dollar assets owned by some of the most successful business people and families in the United States (and now the world). But they are also wildly inconsistently led and managed. So many decisions in sports business are made to win the press conference, satisfying a vocal media and mollifying disheartened fans, in other words, with long term principles sacrificed for short term outcomes.

It doesn’t take a lengthy historical study to prove this point, one only needs to look back to this time in 2016, when seven NFL teams announced a new head coach. All seven of those hires are gone now, just four years later. 2017 looks remarkable with three of six new hires still in place, with two having made it to a Super Bowl and one still in contention this year. But of 2018’s class three of the new seven are already gone and two of the 2019 class have already been let go.

Yet no NFL owner, team president, or general manager has or will step to a microphone this week and acknowledge, “that unless we make substantive changes in our organizational philosophies, starting with how we define success and how we evaluate, procure, and develop talent, all essential elements of organizational culture, we are likely to be right back here in two or three years praising the next, new head coach who will bring an exciting new era to the team.”

Before you interject, ‘isn’t it the coach who is supposed to create that cultural change?’ The coach’s influence only goes so far and if your favorite team is one that has perennially struggled, the fault more likely lies within the organization and its culture and not with the coach. The fact that bears this out, is 14 of the last 20 Super Bowls have been won by a head coach who was let go-in one form or another- by another NFL team.