The NFL is a Game of Untalented Older Men Coaching Talented Younger Men

     It's often struck me how seldom you see great players-in any major sport-going on to being great coaches and managers. In the NFL specifically, most of the great NFL coaches were not players much less great players. I find that even if a great coach did play in the NFL, he wasn't a great player.

    "In the NFL, only 19 percent — six of 32 ­â€” of the head coaches who will lead their teams into the 2014 season played in the league.

    "Playing experience has never mattered much in the NFL. It has become less important as head coaches become more like CEOs. They must be able to delegate to assistants because the job entails so much more than it once did."

    "Vince Lombardi, who is widely considered the greatest head coach of all-time, never played in the NFL. Neither did Bill Walsh or Paul Brown."

    "Still, as late as 1984, half of the league’s head coaches -- 14 of 28 -- had played in the NFL. This season only Ron Rivera of Carolina, Doug Marrone of Buffalo, Jason Garrett of Dallas, Jim Harbaugh of San Francisco, Jeff Fisher of St. Louis and Ken Whisenhunt of Tennessee played in the NFL."

    "Numerous factors have contributed to the trend. The game’s economics are one factor. Higher player salaries mean more players don’t have to work in retirement if they are smart with their money."

     http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000383420/printable/report-19-percent-of-nfl-coaches-have-experience-playing-in-league

     On the face of it this seems counterintutitive. How can for instance a QB coach who never played the position himself much if at all above high school tell a great NFL QB what he needs to do to be successful? 

    On the level of intuition you wouldn't think this would be the case. It seems to me in part connected to a wider counter-intuition: the truism that those who can't, teach. 

    Yet, don't you have to know math, for instance, to teach math?

     What I do think is that what it takes to be a great teacher is different than what it takes to be a great student or a great practitioner. 

    In sports, though, I think the gulf between a great coach and a great player is even greater than between a student and a teacher. 

    I can't resist looking at this from a philosophical angle: it seems to me that being a player, say playing the game of football, is 'materialist' but coaching it is 'idealist.'

   Strange as it seems, the coach and the great player are from 2 quite distinct species that requires very different skills. Coaching is really all mental. Their job is to bring the right mentality to physical players, to bring order to the chaos. It's thinking vs. acting.

   Players are actors, coaches are thinkers.

   UPDATE: If anything, the QB is closed to coaching, he sort of does on the field what the coach does from the sideline. Not that many QBs go onto be coaches either.

   UPDATE 2.0: If anything the comparison of a math teacher is a red herring. In economics, at least, most of these guys-Krugman, Nick Rowe, Sumner, Manikiw are classroom teachers; Nick in particular has a real teacher's temperament.

   It's much more likely that an great economics student will go on at some point to be a great economics professor than that a great NFL player will go on to be a great coach or a coach at all.