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The Dungy Index updated
Same as yesterday, but this time with coaches instead of quarterbacks. Includes all coaches who debuted in 1970 or later and have coached in at least 10 postseason games.
Player Expected Actual DIFF
==========================================
Bill Belichick 8- 8 13- 3 +4.9
Joe Gibbs 13-10 17- 6 +3.7
Chuck Noll 12-12 16- 8 +3.9
Jimmy Johnson 6- 7 9- 4 +2.8
Bill Walsh 8- 6 10- 4 +2.1
Tom Flores 7- 4 8- 3 +1.5
Bill Parcells 9-10 11- 8 +1.6
John Robinson 3- 7 4- 6 +0.7
Dan Reeves 10-10 11- 9 +0.8
Mike Shanahan 7- 6 8- 5 +0.7
Bill Cowher 11-10 12- 9 +0.5
Mike Holmgren 12-10 12-10 +0.4
Marv Levy 11- 8 11- 8 +0.3
Tony Dungy 8- 8 8- 8 +0.2
George Seifert 10- 5 10- 5 -0.2
Andy Reid 8- 6 8- 6 -0.2
Tom Coughlin 5- 5 4- 6 -0.5
Chuck Knox 8-10 7-11 -1.0
Dick Vermeil 7- 4 6- 5 -1.0
Mike Ditka 7- 5 6- 6 -1.5
Dennis Green 6- 6 4- 8 -2.0
Marty Schottenheimer 9- 9 5-13 -4.5
In the span of five weeks last year, Bill Cowher turned from A Coach Who Can't Win The Big One to unquestionably one of the best coaches of his generation. I don't have inside knowledge, but I can only assume that happened because he radically changed everything about the way he coached. I mean, what else could possibly explain how a Coach Who Can't Win The Big One could win the big one?
As of right now, it appears that Tony Dungy might have completely and totally changed his coaching style and philosophy too, but we can't be sure about that until next Sunday.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 5:01 am and is filed under General, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Ditka's expected record was 7-5?? I thought he was supposed to be undefeated!
That's interesting that despite all the AFC Championship losses at home, Cowher has still outperformed his expected W-L record.
Richie, Cowher picked up 2.83 wins in the DIFF column last year, which certainly explains his new place above zero.
I know it's not the point of the metric, but it'd be extremely nice to have some sort of measure which isn't as "fast climbing" and "slow falling" as postseason records are (you can only lose one game, you can win many).
Possibly something like "if a 13-3 team loses to a 9-7 team, we'll penalize them even more, because not only should they have beaten them, they should've beaten the next 10-6 team that the 9-7 team faced, and the 11-5 team after that."
It still seems like a bit of an odd metric, though - Belichick couldn't possibly have ended up with an 8-8 record, considering he's only ever made 6 playoffs. I guess that's more like "he should've been 8-8 in the games he was in".
(Which, makes me wonder again about an even different metric, using, say, Pythagorean wins, and calculating the average number of postseason wins based on Pythagorean winning percentage, and comparing the actual number of postseason wins to that. Maybe "wins plus 1", because you want to reward getting into the playoffs. In that case, you'd penalize a team that didn't get into the playoffs, but should've, and you would reward a team that gets into the playoffs, but shouldn't've)
This reminds me of some research I did a few months ago about the playoff record of coaches. I adjusted all coaches records to reflect losses for any games they didn't play. (Schottenheimer gets a lot of grief for losing 13 playoff games, but Jeff Fischer has missed the playoffs 8 times, so that should count against his postseason record.)
There goes the Dungy Index. Congrats, Tony.