New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - Football Outsiders: Ranking the staffs 1-16

The perfect football coach is one who makes himself irrelevant on Sunday.

Great coaching is nearly invisible; it seeps into a team's pores. Great coaches clearly define roles and prepare well-suited players to fill those roles. Players become fundamentally precise and assignment-perfect. When the players are prepared and the gameplan is airtight, a great coach can afford to blow the occasional call or waste a timeout. No one will notice, because the score is 35-3. The perfectly-coached team just seems more talented. In fact, the players' talents were maximized, harnessed and channeled by great coaches.

At Football Outsiders, we have reams of stats to help us evaluate everything that happens on a football field. Coaching is no exception. Thanks to our game charting project, we know how often teams blitz, how often they use play action, how many four-receiver formations they use, and so on. All of that data can be found inPro Football Prospectus 2007 (in stores now!); you'll get a small taste of it in this article.

The stats paint a picture of each staff's preferences, but they only tell us a little about their performance. Blitzes, formations and tendencies are just the tip of a very deep iceberg. In the end, we judge coaches the way every fan does. We look for results: championships, playoff berths, signs of progress for bad franchises and so on. And yes, we sometimes take a staff's reputation into account. Often, those reputations are earned, fair and square.

A coaching staff must win to be considered great. But it doesn't have to win a Super Bowl. Take our No. 1 staff, for example.

"9-tie Saints-Jets (Last Year: Jets 21, Saints 26)

Dungy disciples are in vogue right now. It seems like every top head coaching candidate is either a former Dungy assistant or someone with a Dungy-like management style. Seven years from now, executives around the league will probably clamor to hire Sean Payton or Eric Mangini types.

Dungy's corporate management techniques made "maverick" coaches like Jerry Glanville and Buddy Ryan look like snake-oil salesmen, hastening their extinction. Mangini and Payton, with their guest speakers and offbeat motivational tactics, are moving football coaching even further into Fortune 500 territory. Neither has tried to fung shui the locker room yet, but give them time. These guys think outside the club box.

Both wunderkind coaches augment their state-of-the-art coaching practices with devious on-field strategies. In New Orleans, Payton hides his running backs all over the formation and baffles opponents with a mix of timing passes, delayed handoffs and trickery. In New York, Mangini runs a Belichick-inspired kitchen sink defense (the Jets were second in the league in seven-man blitzes but first in the league in three-man rushes — figure that one out) while offensive coordinator Kurt Schottenheimer executes deceptively simple game plans built around running and play action.

Both Mangini and Payton are comers, but one great year doesn't vault you to the top of this list. We have a feeling that one or both of these guys will reach the top five in a year or two."

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