Impact of New Head Coaches and New Offensive Coordinators
One of the factors that is
often undervalued in fantasy football is the impact of head coaches
and offensive coordinators. They are very hard to evaluate because
although some offensive coordinators are more run or pass oriented,
they will generally adjust to the players they have. Every year
there are a number of head coaches and offensive coordinators that
are replaced and those offenses are usually the hardest to analyze
for fantasy football players. In this analysis we will look for
general trends to try and determine whether new head coaches and
offensive coordinators have a positive or negative impact on their
new team.
Since 2004, there have been
94 teams that started the season with the same head coach and same
offensive coordinator as the previous year, 35 teams that started
the season with only a new offensive coordinator and 31 teams that
replaced both. The following chart shows the percentage increase or
decrease (compared to the previous year) for a number of statistics
for those three groups of teams:
| |
Nb |
PAtt |
PYds |
PTDs |
RAtt |
RYds |
RTDs |
Pass FPTS |
Run FPTs |
|
Same HC and
Same OC |
94 |
1.1% |
1.2% |
-1.9% |
-1.8% |
-1.3% |
2.0% |
0.1% |
-0.3% |
|
Same HC and
New OC |
35 |
0.9% |
0.7% |
-2.1% |
-1.9% |
-2.6% |
-1.5% |
-0.3% |
-2.2% |
|
New HC and
New OC |
31 |
-4.1% |
1.0% |
9.1% |
5.1% |
5.6% |
7.9% |
4.9% |
6.3% |
As you can see, teams with
new head coaches will generally use a much more run oriented offense
in the following year. Despite attempting less passes, they have on
average 4.9% more passing fantasy points and 6.3% more running
fantasy points than in the previous year. However, teams that hire
new head coaches are generally teams that had poorer offenses in the
previous year and have much more room for improvement. For that
reason, we decided to look at teams that had less than 225 passing
fantasy points and those that had more than 225 passing fantasy
points separately:
Less than 225 passing
fantasy points in previous year:
| |
Nb |
Pass FPTS |
Next Pass
FPTS |
% Change |
|
Same HC and
Same OC |
37 |
194.4 |
222.3 |
14.3% |
|
Same HC and
New OC |
19 |
186.0 |
204.5 |
10.0% |
|
New HC and
New OC |
22 |
186.0 |
202.4 |
8.9% |
More than 225 passing
fantasy points in previous year:
| |
Nb |
Pass FPTS |
Next Pass
FPTS |
% Change |
|
Same HC and
Same OC |
57 |
283.8 |
266.2 |
-6.2% |
|
Same HC and
New OC |
16 |
261.2 |
237.9 |
-8.9% |
|
New HC and
New OC |
9 |
250.5 |
244.6 |
-2.4% |
As you can see, poor passing
teams that bring back the same coaching staff manage to improve the
passing game much more than teams that bring in a new head coach.
The difference for teams that had more than 225 fantasy points is
negligible because the main reason for the percentage difference is
that their average fantasy points in the previous year were
different.
|
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