Photo: John Byrum/Icon Sportswire

When you win 15 games in the regular season, as the Chiefs did in 2024, you need a lot of things to go right. But things going right has been a trademark of the Andy Reid regime, Patrick Mahomes or no Patrick Mahomes (we’ll explain in a second).

SIS has created an expected wins stat that measures how many games a team should have won based on the comprehensive suite of things that we measure from every play of every game. It utilizes a summed version of each player on a roster’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR, which emanates from our player value stat, Total Points).

To restate, this is not a projection of future wins—this is using the players’ performance on the field as a measure of the team’s quality and converting that to an expected wins number.

By those measures, these Chiefs were expected to win 9.8 games this season. They won 15. That’s a 5.2-win gap between actual and expected wins, which we’ll call Wins Over Expected (and somewhat-contradictorily shorten to WOE). That’s the biggest differential between actual and expected wins of any team back to 2016, the first year we started tracking football.

The next-best is the 4.4 Wins Over Expected by Reid’s Chiefs in 2016, the year before Mahomes joined the team. Reid has three of the top six seasons in that time.

Admittedly there are some limitations when using this stat to evaluate coaches. It can’t capture everything a head coach does. It can help show how influential timeouts, challenges, substitutions, playcalls, etc. can be, but it does not incorporate the coach’s influence in practices, drafting, free agency acquisitions, etc.

Top Coaching Seasons

Here are the seasons in which a team most surpassed its expected win total.

Top Individual Seasons since 2016

As noted, Reid, who often polls as one of the NFL’s best coaches, has three of the top six seasons in that time (two with Mahomes). Kevin O’Connell led the Vikings to a very surprising finish in 2022 and received heaps of praise for his immediate impact during his first season as a head coach.

The coach that is not thought of in the same breath as Reid and O’Connell is Bill O’Brien. Off-the-field issues are not a part of the metric, but during his first six seasons as the Texans head coach he finished at least two games above .500 every year except one. Additionally, our metric suggests that the Texans lacked a lot of high-end valuable players and were expected to finish at or under .500 every year, making what they did under O’Brien all the more impressive.

Worst Coaching Seasons

The bottom of the list is interesting for different reasons.

Worst Individual Seasons since 2016

One of the first things that stands out is that almost all of these teams were supposed to be good or even exceptional based on player performance (except the Browns). Of the top coaches, there were a mix of teams that were supposed to miss the playoffs as well as playoff teams.

Sean McDermott is the only coach on this list still with his team. On the other side, Jason Garrett was fired after the 2019 season, Mike McCoy was fired after the 2016 season, and Hue Jackson was fired midway through the following 2018 season.

This data set is certainly interesting to look at, but coaches and teams have ups and downs. Sean Payton followed up a 2016 season in which the Saints were four wins below expectations with four straight playoff berths, and Ron Rivera made the playoffs the year after his Panthers were four wins below expectations as well. To look at coaches, it makes sense to look at their career in cumulative terms.

Most and Fewest Total Wins Over Expected since 2016

As noted earlier, O’Brien and O’Connell had multiple seasons where they greatly exceeded expectations, so it is not a surprise to see them at the top of the list of coaches with the most excess wins. Mike Tomlin and Pete Carroll are both Super-Bowl-winning head coaches with sustained success.

New Patriots coach Mike Vrabel being No. 1 may be a little bit of a surprise, but he overperformed his team’s expected wins in five of his six seasons as the Titans head coach. The only season the team underperformed was his last. If you hear anyone say that Vrabel gets the most out of his players, think back to his presence atop the list here.

Reid actually didn’t make this list, as despite those three great seasons for exceeding expectations, the sum of his other six dropped him below the top five. He’s 7th at + 7.3.

The bottom coaches are a wild mix. Doug Marrone and Hue Jackson are not surprises as they both had a lot of losses in a short amount of time and were quickly shown the door. Anthony Lynn had ups and downs, but his team underperformed in his final two seasons. The other two coaches are very interesting as they both won the Super Bowl. Bruce Arians lost a lot of wins due to some really high expectations for his teams. Even the 2021 Buccaneers, who were expected to win 13.8 games, technically underperformed with 13 wins. Also, the 2020 Buccaneers were expected to win 14.7 games, and won only 11 during the regular season, the biggest ding on Arians’ ledger.

Doug Pederson has eight seasons of coaching in the dataset and is split with four seasons with positive Wins Over Expected and four seasons with negative Wins Over Expected. While the total number of seasons on each side of the ledger is equal, the impact is not. Pederson’s highest WOE was with the 2018 Eagles, who finished 1.2 Wins Over Expected. On the other side, in all four of Pederson’s negative seasons his team finished at least -1.8 Wins Over Expected, the worst being the 2024 Jaguars at -3.3 WOE.

One interesting coach who was JUST off the bottom is Kyle Shanahan, who has -6.3 Wins Over Expected. Shanahan is often thought of as one of the greatest coaches in the NFL currently, but, according to the metric, he often underperforms. His teams are often loaded with top-end skill position players, and despite how highly one would rank Brock Purdy in terms of NFL quarterbacks, he is not a negative asset to his teams.

Shanahan has eight seasons in the dataset as well, but amazingly, only two are above zero. As is the case with some other coaches, the expected wins for some of his teams were really high. His worst season was with the 2023 49ers, whose expected wins were 14.6, and they won “only” 12 games (-2.6 WOE), but his next three worst seasons had lower expectations. The 2020 and 2024 49ers were expected to win roughly eight games, they only won six each year, and the 2018 49ers were expected to win five when they only won four.

One issue with that current list is it does not account for time. Bad coaches are usually fired and good coaches are usually with a team for longer. The final list helps control for that by averaging the Total Wins Over Expected across three seasons. So for everyone with at least 16 games coached, this is what we’d expect from them in 3×17 = 51 games. 

Most and Fewest Total Wins Expected per Three Seasons since 2016

O’Brien makes the list again with two highly-thought-of young coaches, O’Connell and DeMeco Ryans, joining him on the list. Dave Canales has only one season under his belt so there is still plenty to figure out, but he did earn 2.5 WOE from this past season with the Panthers. Also included in the top-five is Brian Flores who earned positive WOE in each of his three seasons as the Dolphins head coach.

Most of the bottom coaches do not have a robust dataset since 2016 for the reason mentioned earlier: head coaches with bad results tend to get fired quickly. Mike McCoy and Lovie Smith have only one season in the dataset and both performed well under expected. Titans head coach Brian Callahan also has one season, but it was only his first so there may be time to turn things around, especially if they hit on their 2025 NFL Draft picks. John Fox and Hue Jackson both have three seasons, although Jackson did not finish his third, but both were shown the door.

It is not easy to try and determine what makes a good NFL head coach. There are so many intangibles that make it difficult to separate out the raw data coupled with an uneven player talent pool. But nonetheless, we try with Wins Over Expected to measure some of it in aggregate.

Reid has turned productive Wins over Expected seasons into Super Bowl trophies, which is why, even if the metric makes it seem close, people do not think about Andy Reid in the same manner as Bill O’Brien.