How much do coaches matter ?

[BengalChris]

(12-28-2018, 12:09 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Coaching obviously makes a big difference, but pretty much every coach ever has a had a losing season when he did not have talent.  It takes both talent and coaching to win it all.

If you read the article it says basically that talent can win with out great coaching, and that coaching has the greatest effect when there is less talent.  I agree with this.

But this whole argument can be turned into a circle with the argument that "talent" is something that is developed by coaching.  This is true to some point, but in the NFL even the best teams have high draft picks that flop, so, again, it takes talented players for a coach to win. 

Yeah, but some coaches consistently lose even with talent and some consistently don't develop talent and some consistently have flopping 1st round picks. Usually, however, coaches don't get to display all these losing traits because they are fired long before they can display them all. Merv is a special case in that he's survived long enough to show us each of these losing traits.