FanPost

NFL Head Coaches Ranked by Tiers


I thought someone might put together a post on this but nobody has yet so I figured I'd post it with my response. Mike Sando has been doing some pieces where he polls people within the NFL about various topics. In this piece, Sando polled some NFL people about head coaches and how they'd rank them. Each NFL person was asked to put each coach in a tier, 1 through 5. Sando then averaged out each ranking to get a number between 1 and 5 for each coach. The tiers were based on "logical cut-off points" and no coach ended up in Tier 5.

I wanted to share my response mainly to Harbaugh's ranking and what was said about him by anonymous NFL people. Since this piece is behind a pay wall, I'm only going to share the section on Harbaugh and the rankings of a few notable coaches below. Harbaugh ended up at 8th overall with an average of 1.80. 9 people put him in Tier 1, 18 people put him in Tier 2, and 3 people put him in Tier 3:

The 49ers instantly went from colossal underachievers to championship contenders when Harbaugh arrived from Stanford, where he had built that program into a power. No NFL coach has more total victories than Harbaugh since his arrival with the 49ers in 2011. He and Belichick are each 41-14 over that span, with no other team posting more than 37 victories. "Win a Super Bowl and he is a 1 to me," one executive said.

Some noted that Harbaugh inherited a deep and talented roster, and that his hard-charging personality wears on people. One GM said he downgraded Harbaugh from a 1 to a 2 over tension between Harbaugh and the front office. Another executive said a 1 should have no real flaws, and that Harbaugh's combustible temperament qualifies as a flaw. Another GM said, "the personality stuff is going to show up" in a negative way at some point in the future.

"I think the jury is out on Jim still, I really do," a former GM said. "A lot of people think he is a genius. I'd rather have the other brother. I think Jim could get [out-schemed] any day and give you that look afterward like, 'We never saw that [coming].'"

For what it's worth, others have lauded Harbaugh and his staff for their creative use of personnel and formations, and for the nuance within their running game -- and even the former GM quoted above said that he would be OK with having Harbaugh as his head coach.

A former player working as a personnel evaluator downplayed some of the other concerns. "That gets a little old, the animation on the sideline and those things," he said, "but at the end of the day, he is a good coach. He understands what he is doing. He has won everywhere he has been. I think his guys play for him. You may not like the person, but you like the product. As a player and a coach, you separate that from the other stuff. You are not necessarily best friends with everyone you work with, but if I believe in what you are saying, OK, I can roll with you. That is what I see with him."

So Harbaugh ended up behind Belichick, Carroll, Payton, Reid, Coughlin, McCarthy, and Tomlin. I can't really argue about the first three, but I think that's where I'd slot Harbaugh. The perception about Harbaugh is clearly not favorable despite what he's done from an objective standpoint. I believe the perception will change drastically if and when he wins a Super Bowl, but then again, Andy Reid hasn't won one and he's ranked higher. One executive did say it's about the Super Bowl win, so I'm guessing he did not have Reid in his 1st tier.

To address some of the specific points made by these anonymous NFL people:

- The 49ers went 6-10 before Harbaugh joined. The roster wasn't completely awful, but "deep and talented" is not what I would have described it as. From my count, the 2011 roster had 23 new players including several new starters. This also doesn't include the revival of Alex Smith's career. This was clearly far from a rebuilding project, but the correlation between winning and Harbaugh taking over is pretty clear. Sure, Singletary was terrible, but who takes over a team and jumps from 6 wins to 13 wins?

- A few NFL people seem to have downgraded Harbaugh because of his personality and temperament, but once again, where's the proof that this is something detrimental to a team? This seems more about their feelings towards Harbaugh rather than what they believe makes a good coach, but maybe I'm wrong.

- The third paragraph is just full of crazy. A coach that's 36-11 can get "out-schemed" any day? I mean, some of those losses weren't pretty but I'd think someone winning 76% of their games has a good scheme.

The fourth paragraph best sums up how I feel about this whole thing. A lot of people in the NFL probably don't like Harbaugh, but I think that you have to be objective and separate feelings from tangible evidence. I think that if you did some sort of coaches draft where these NFL people are taking a coach just for the next 3 years or so (to take career and tenure out of the equation), Harbaugh wouldn't go lower than 4th.

The one issue I always have with ranking/grading/analyzing coaches is trying to separate personnel and coaching. I don't know enough about the insides of the Seahawks to assign credit for building the best team in the NFL. Many, including those cited in this piece, don't seem to have a problem with giving a ton of credit to Carroll. I don't know exactly how much turnover there was between 2009 and 2010 for the Seahawks, but they won 2 more games when Carroll took over. It's not really fair to just look at it in a vacuum like that, but how do you isolate the job a coach did and the job a front office did? Just like when they coached in college, Harbaugh did a lot more with less while Carroll had 5-star recruits walking onto campus without a recruiting pitch. Obviously a huge part of coaching in college is recruiting, but once again I'm just trying to separate actual coaching from the results and personnel. Does John Schneider get credit for finding a gem of a player and person in Richard Sherman in the 5th round? Does Carroll and his staff get credit for getting a very raw player and turning him into one of the best CB's in the league? I guess this is why it's easier just to look at the GM and coach as whole, but this was a ranking of the coaches only.

Looking at a few of the other rankings, I was surprised by seeing Ron Rivera so low at 23rd. I'm not really sure how good of a coach he is overall but I thought the perception of him was a lot better than that. Gus Bradley is already at 19th and got several 'Tier 2' votes despite just having one season of 4-12 football under his belt. I like what the Jaguars are doing (it feels weird to say this) but it's odd to see where these NFL people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt and where they're not. It'll be interesting to see how Roman or Fangio are viewed as head coaches if they ever get one of those jobs.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Niners Nation's writers or editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of Niners Nation's writers or editors.