Right before the start of the NFL Draft, the Harvard Business Review sent out a tweet that immediately got “ratioed,” generating over 300 comments. It declared that after 38 years of data, quarterback was the most important part of an NFL franchise.
38 years of data suggest the quarterback is the most important piece of an NFL franchise. https://t.co/dqYKQ8eS9p
— Harvard Biz Review (@HarvardBiz) April 25, 2019
Most of the comments were sarcastic in nature, and there were plenty of memes shared. After all, the idea that QB is important in football is not exactly breaking news. Most people, almost assuredly, did not then go and read what the article said.
I decided, though, to check it out. The article was not actually making the claim that QB was only the most important position in football, which everyone acknowledges. It was making the argument that of all the leadership positions in football, in which they included quarterback with the franchise owner, the general manager, and the coach, it was most important to results.
They ran a simple regression analysis of using those four positions as the independent input variables, and using team win-loss percentages as the output. Here is the key takeaway from the Harvard Business Review piece:
Over the course of our sample, combined leadership explained a remarkably high proportion of the success or failure of each team. In total, our four leader variables—quarterback, coach, general manager, and owner—explained 68.2%, or more than two-thirds, of the variance in team performance. It is interesting, if not totally surprising, to see how much influence just four individuals can have in organizations worth billions of dollars. Of that 68.2%, owners carried the least weight (roughly 11.12% of explained variance), followed by general managers (22.43%), then coaches (29.08%), and finally, quarterbacks (37.37%).
That means a quarterback accounts for more than three times the variance in performance that an owner does and appears to be the most critical factor in team success. However, coaches and general managers are still very important: they represent more than half of our model’s explained variance.
I still have questions, though, about how much we really learned here. The sample sizes do not have to be exactly equal from a practical matter, but the order in which this article found each position contributes to the variance is directly in line with the order in which they are likely to be changed within an organization. There are a lot more quarterbacks than coaches who appeared in this sample of 38 seasons, and more coaches than front office decision makers, and then at the end, very few ownership changes. This is particularly true when the methodology says they did not treat a change in owner that remained within the same family as an ownership change.
I would estimate there are at least 400 different quarterbacks (when considering a QB on a different franchise is a different situation) in this sample. Meanwhile, the NFL franchises have averaged fewer than two ownership changes each over the last 38 years. Thirteen of the franchises have had no ownership change since 1981. Thirteen others have had one. That means only six franchises have actually seen multiple ownership changes in that span.
Of the bottom eight franchises in winning percentage over that span, four are inherited franchise situations that have seen no ownership group change. The other four had one. I find it hard to draw any hard inferences about how much ownership matters when franchises like the Lions and Cardinals have been owned by the same families and have been two of the least successful over the course of any of our lifetimes. If the worst franchises don’t ever change ownership, then the variations in their yearly performance will necessarily be caused by other things. That doesn’t mean their results would not be much different with better ownership.
When over a third of your sample has that problem, I’m not sure what we are really, truly finding here other than that owners rarely change, top leadership changes infrequently, coaches change frequently, and quarterbacks even moreso.
