Tom Cable: Looking at Our Coach from Another Angle

This is the first of a series of articles to study NFL head coaches. I scanned the data, and my original focus was to study the six African-American coaches. Since the list of coaches was alphabetized, I noticed that Tom Cable's name was listed above Jim Caldwell. The head coaches selected for this study include:

Jim Caldwell, Colts

Tom Cable, Oakland Raiders

Marvin Lewis, Bengals

Raheem Morris, Buccaneers

Mike Singletary, 49ers

Lovie Smith, Bears

Mike Tomlin, Steelers

I added Cable to this study. Granted, a researcher can aggregate the data in many permutations; some are meaningful, and others are just informative. This study is just informative. No predictions are being made. This is solely a descriptive study.

Observe the data:

Note that Lewis, Smith (Lovie), and Tomlin have been head coaches longer than the others in the selected group. In this selected group of head coaches, Morris, Tomlin, and Cable are the three youngest coaches.

Let's take a look at the raw data that has been selected and aggregated.

Observations

1. The average age of the selected group of seven head coaches is 46.14. Our coach is near the average, and he is younger than four African-American head coaches.

2. Marvin Lewis and Lovie Smith have coached seven and six years, respectively.

3. Tom Cable and Mike Singletary have each coached two years.

4. Jim Caldwell and Raheem Morris have coached one year, starting in 2009.

5. It looks like Raheem Morris struggled during his first year as head coach, winning only three games.

6. Jim Caldwell had a fantastic first year as head coach, with a win-loss average of .825. Maintaining this outstanding average is his great challenge.

7. Our coach Tom Cable does not have the maximum win-loss average, but he also does not have the minimum. Let's just say he is somewhere in the middle, and "just right" as Goldilocks would say.

8. Now, you make your observations. Please shy away from making inferences because more data of all types is needed in order to reach valid and reliable conclusions.

This is a start. More is coming soon.

So, is our Oakland Raider coach the best or worst when compared to a selected group of other NFL coaches? The answer: At least our coach is in the ball park, not at the bottom, nor at the top of this particular subset of data.