Saviors

Sports fans, including myself, have a tendency to think of coaches as saviors; so, when I heard that Scott Skiles had been fired on Christmas Eve, I rejoiced to see the removal of a fallen idol, presuming that a new, better one would replace him. One game in—too early to judge, of course—the results won’t necessitate building a new statue near the Jordan one outside the United Center, but I’m still confident that it was the right thing to do.

The Bulls’ slow start is probably mostly attributable to the poor play of nearly everyone on the team, but that includes Skiles himself, who refuses to set either a constant or good rotation, and since it’s a lot easier to replace a coach than a player (or else Ben Wallace would be updating his resume on Monster.com), the move was made.

Skiles isn’t the only coaching savior to find rough roads on the way to canonization: Bobby Petrino left the NFL before his first season even finished (he found it a lot easier when he was coaching Brian Brohm); Billy Gillispie is presiding over a mediocre season in Kentucky (Acie Law IV certainly helped a lot); and so on and so forth. For every great coach, there’s a great player (or several) along with him or her.

But it seems a little too flip to suggest that it’s always the players’ responsibility over the coaches’, as I’m sure we can all think of examples of coaches reviving dormant teams, or coaches providing the extra little spark, or whatever. So they clearly have some effect. But perhaps not a savior-like effect. After all, we can see so many examples of the opposite, so it seems pretty smart to bet against a savior with any given coach.

I was listening to the radio last Sunday, while the Bills were playing the Giants, and the announcer—he was very bad; it took him five minutes to say the score and quarter—bleated out a point about how Dick Jauron was coaching well, seeing as the Bills were ranked 20th in offense and 20th in defense, and that he was “putting his players in a position to make plays.” Now, if we move beyond the simple stupidity of his statement—if he’s putting his players in a position to make plays, why are their statistical rankings, the measurement of whether or not they’re making plays, so bad?—there’s something more interesting here, which is that a team that seems like it should be doing so poorly is in the chase for a playoff spot. It’s a God-in-the-gaps explanation: we have something unexplained, so it must be the coach. Of course, there are a ton of other explanations (luck, special teams, inadequacy of statistics, the league-wide mediocrity in the NFL, and so on), but the first explanation that leapt to the mind of the announcer was to praise the coach.

The reason that the coach is the one who is recognized disproportionately is the same reason CEOs, Presidents and other various moguls are recognized. It’s a question of heuristics. The world is complicated, too complicated to explain. Our methods of describing it will always fall short, whether statistical or literary. There will always be a gap for a God to fill in.

Successful entities are like unsuccessful ones in that our methods for describing them lack completeness. There’s an intangible at work; to invoke a cliché, the sum is more than its parts combined. People always say that as a complement, but in truth, that’s a statement that should be deeply worrying, because it means that our explanatory methods are woefully inadequate. The constant used to balance the equation out is invariably the leader, whose ‘will to win’ or ‘determination’ or what have you is said to pervade the organization and propel it to victory. The most highly public leader, then, is imbued with the qualities we imagine are important to the organization’s success, thus explaining the problem away, for the moment (i.e., as long as the winning/profits/prosperity lasts).

This is not exactly untrue, as I’ve covered above, but it still leaves something to be desired. A leader leads a system of some sort, an institution: whether it’s a team, an army, a corporation, a country, whatever, he is nominally responsible for the daily affairs of a large group of people in theory dedicated to a common purpose.

The leader is merely the most powerful person in the system, but he or she does not have absolute power (even the most totalitarian systems have not figured out omnipotence), but limited power. The network of people is intended to maximize, to project a combined power, which must, to be worthwhile to assemble, be greater in sum than its individual parts. Therefore, the combination of the individual parts must be greater than the worth of the leader. The leader is less important than the people he leads. The leader can only put people “in a position to make plays.” Insofar as he does a good job, the leader’s a good one; insofar as he does a bad one (see: anyone invading Russia), the leader’s a bad leader.

That’s why it’s especially important to realize these days, when we’re seduced by visions of coaches leading players to glory and Presidents restoring prosperity in the United States, that our leaders are only as good as we are.