Do football teams learn from changing coaches? A test of the deceleration hypothesis

Change was always considered essential to organizational survival and is becoming more and more important in the times of globalization, deregulation, and competitive pressure. This paper explores leadership changes by explaining factors that influence football teams to replace their coaches by using panel data for 33 US National Football League's (NFL) teams from 1976 to 2008. There is a big variation in the number of times NFL teams replaced their coaches. For example, Oakland Raiders team has changed its coaches 11 times in 32 years while Tom Landry led Dallas Cowboys for 28 years from 1960 to 1988. We find evidence that a higher number of previous coach replacements decrease the likelihood of a subsequent change (while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity) suggesting that organizations learn from changes. Also, football teams are less likely to replace the coach when the team is successful (high win/loss ratio) and more likely to replace older coaches.