I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, possessing any skill with numbers. That I ended up with a degree in Philosophy and not Mechanical Engineering is not an accident.

But the recent scrying of the tea-leaves to discern the fate of one chop-block lovin' coach has piqued a bit of a question in my head that I would love for someone with a bit more sabermetric skill to investigate.

The recent surge of sabermetric evaluation of football at both the pro and college level seems to suggest a very obvious but profound truth - a player is who he is. Dig through enough stats and you can get a pretty solid bead on the athletic ability of a given player and then extrapolate outward from there.

Dr. Saturday (aka SMQ, aka Matt Hinton) has done some interesting work on this in terms of evaluating quarterbacks at the college level. His hypothesis:

The working hypothesis, rather than the conventional wisdom of steady improvement, is that most quarterbacks are who they are from the beginning: initially good passers tend to decline or level off after a strong, mediocre players tend to stay mediocre, and bad debuts are followed with some improvement, but generally level off. The exceptions are the really physically gifted, probably draft-bound players, like Philip Rivers, Vince Young and Pat White, who might (or, in White's case, might not) look bad or mediocre to begin but evolve quickly into much stronger players.

The recent discussion of Tuberville's career in terms of the woeful production of his team this year reminded me of another nifty analysis Hinton did a month ago looking at the career of one Phillip Fulmer at Tennessee. The result is a clear pattern of boom-and-bust and a gradual atrophy in terms of overall quality.

The question that rises in my mind is why wouldn't a coaches career path be deterimined in the same way as we assume an athlete’s would? Clearly there should be some way to evaluate a given coaches level of ability and then, with that in hand, look for patterns in terms of career path and comparison with other coaches of similar skill and ability.

To my knowledge, there isn't any type of metric for this and I'm not sure examining win/loss records is going to be sufficient to provide what I am suggesting. I'd be very curious what OTS or you other numbers-savvy web denizens might be able to come up with.