You're Not a Winner...Until You're a Winner

Wade’s had a pretty long career in football at this point, and he has had a bit of playoff experience (or has had missed chances to get his teams to the playoffs and earn more experience), which he obviously has not performed all that well in, the Home Run Throwback notwithstanding. And it may be that he’s just a good coordinator and never will be a champion as a head coach.

But part of what I think is so maddening about fans’ rush to judgment on players and coaches is that even with a history as long as Wade’s, unless it is one of really significant incompetence, you STILL don’t really know if a guy can win a championship or not. There are a lot of examples out there of guys who were thoroughly dismissed, guys who had terrible post season track records, who managed to win a championship either through some good fortune or finally happening into the right set of circumstances or any number of other things bouncing the right way.

I’m not trying to argue that a coach’s track record is not indicative of his chances for success— certainly I have more confidence that Andy Reid can win this year’s Super Bowl than Dick Jauron, based on what I know about their coaching ability and history. But you can always find examples of guys like who had presided over some pretty terrible seasons who are at least able to get their teams into a championship game (Sam Wyche, for instance).

But yes, I think I’d agree with your overall point that Wade’s larger track record makes it less likely he will make a leap to the next level of success, and I do think it’s more valid to label a veteran coach as not capable of getting it done than it is a veteran player, since coaches have more control over their team’s success than individual players, who are the victims of many other situational factors.

aand… if the Giants had crapped out against TB in the 2008 wild-card round, every fan in New York or at least 90% would have chased Eli and Tom out of town with torches and pitchforks for 3 straight 1-and-dones.

It is AMAZING to me the level to which the media can embrace these labels without any data to support them, and often in the face of contradicting data! You would think professional journalists would want to seek out facts backing their claims, but particularly in the sports world they almost seem to actively go in the opposite direction, reveling in conjecture and mistrusting statistics.

There are many examples, but an easy one is Alex Rodriguez’s postseason career. Yes, he has had a few bad series with the Yankees in recent years. However, most media members instantly translated that to “ARod is awful in the playoffs, has always been so, and is vastly inferior to his clutch teammate Derek Jeter in these situations.” Pay no attention to the fact that while in Seattle (a number of games which until last year constituted the more signficant part of his playoff experience), ARod was a beast in the playoffs and performed just about at the level of his career averages (which are exceptional). In fact, through the start of last year, Jeter and ARod had almost identical postseason batting averages, and I believe with his monster 2009 thus far ARod has passed him in BA and RBIs/game.

I say this not because people on this board particularly care about ARod and Derek Jeter, but because I think you see similar blather coming from ESPN’s football “analysts” like Mark Schlereth, Cris Carter, etc. There is no pressure at all for them to be responsible journalists.

I think there is a legitimate argument for “clutch” with baseball pitchers (per Baseball Prospectucs’ studies) and basketball players. NFL and MLB hitting, I haven’t seen it.

To say his passer rating is lower in clutch situations proves nothing. You would have to control for quite a few variables for that conclusion to be valid. And by the way, I think you would get some good arguments from Denver fans that Kyle Orton sucks.

Two points in response—

First, I think being labeled a “winner” and being labeled “clutch” are two separate things— I tackled them both in my post because the media and fans seem to use both labels without underlying logic, but the big question I was trying to ask was: “How do you tell if a guy is a ‘winner’?,” with my conclusion being that there is no inherent way to do it, as I tried to show by the Andy Reid vs. Bill Cowher example.

Second, in response to your question on “clutch”: I am hoping that the point I am making is independent of definition, so how you define clutch (as long as the sample size is decent and the definition is within sane boundaries) doesn’t matter— most players will play at about the same level ALL OF THE TIME. Players perform to about their career averages in most cases. (Brief side note— I’m not saying that Kyle Orton 2009 should play the same as Kyle Orton 2006. Obviously there is a trajectory to careers. But I am saying that Kyle Orton in the first quarter of Week 5 2009 should probably play about the same as Kyle Orton in the 4th quarter of Week 7 2009, for example.).

So would I have confidence in Tom Brady in the situation that you describe (1:42 left to play)? Definitely. But would I also have the same amount of confidence in him in the first quarter with 8 minutes left to play? Definitely. The reason I prefer Brady over McNabb in that “1:42 to go” situation is not because Brady is “more clutch” than McNabb— it’s because he’s a better quarterback. Brady will, on average, perform better than McNabb IN ALL SITUATIONS, including those you define as “clutch.”

…but I tend to think that any professional athlete, particularly one with a career of more than 2-3 years (enough to establish a pretty good sample size of playing stats), can deal with pressure at a reasonably high level. Otherwise they’d never have made it to the level that they are at.

Are some guys slightly more calm in nerve-wracking situations? I’m sure they are. But these athletes are so good at their craft, and have gone through these motions and made these plays or taken this swing or dealt with this pitch or whatever it is, that I believe they’re going to perform in these situations at pretty much the level their talent allows them to. And that the “clutchness” of the moment will not be a huge factor, at least over a large enough sample size of a career. And I think that most statistics bear this out, at least for the types of players that I’m talking about here (quarterbacks, baseball hitters, etc.)

I will point out, however, that there are some roles in sports where there has been a noted difference between clutch and non-clutch players. One of those is pitching in baseball, which Baseball Prospectus has done a number of studies on which I am not smart enough to remember right now.