There needs to be a word for that inflection point where the “player” and “coach” levels don’t just diverge, but actually seem to become opposites. Is that an organizational thing, a cultural thing, or what? It’s all “football”, and you probably don’t want guys who have never taken a snap to suddenly be calling plays from the sidelines, but it seems like rising to the top of one side almost by definition precludes you from doing well on the other side (for every great player who was a terrible coach, there’s a great coach who was a terrible player. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Bill Belichick is the best coach currently in the NFL, and he’s got to be a strong contender for best coach of all time, but his playing career topped out at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT).
Is that true in other jobs where you need a combo of a certain physique, a certain IQ, and a certain attitude? The military, say, or the police? Would the average platoon sergeant be a better lieutenant than the average lieutenant? (I’m seriously asking, even though I know that the average corporal’s opinion of the average butterbar lieutenant and vice versa makes the town-gown split in college look like a friendly rivalry). What about the best NCO — would he make a good general? How about the best patrolman vs. the best detective?
And of course this is complicated by the outliers. SWAT guys generally don’t become police chiefs, Special Forces guys don’t become generals (that McChrystal bastard being an unfortunate exception), and so on, but those are extreme outliers, like quarterbacks — physical freaks with fast-firing heads; they don’t want desk jobs, I imagine.
The reason I’m rambling on about this (other than “I’m jet lagged and I have the flu”) is that our whole society seems to have fucked up its competence sorting mechanism, and that flaw seems to be structural. You don’t want a coach who never played, or a general who never fought, but at the same time there’s fuck-all relationship between “being good at playing / fighting” and “being good at coaching / strategizing” that I can see. The same applies in all bureaucracies, of course, we call it the “Peter Principle” — the guy who was good at answering phones in the call center might or might not be any good at supervising the call center, but there’s only one way to find out …
… or is there? Football is interesting in that there’s only one metric for success, and it’s easy for everyone to see. There’s absolutely zero question that So-and-So was a good player, in the same way that there’s zero question So-and-So was a good coach. You can always find nerds and lawyers to niggle around the edges — oh, So-and-So is overrated, and here’s my charts and graphs to prove it — but we all know what that’s worth. Figuring out a better way to sort talent in a binary system like football would go a long way to help us figure out how to fix our society’s fucked-up competence sorting mechanism.
Severian, “Friday Etc.”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-04.
September 13, 2025
QotD: The Peter Principle in football, the military, and life in general
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The concept this author is groping towards–badly, with all the grace of a drunkard trying to walk home during a bender–is “Management”.
THAT is the competence-sorting mechanism. The author has fallen into the all-too-common trap of believing that being good at doing the thing magically makes you good at managing the thing. This belief stems from the belief that management is parasitic, that it does nothing, and thus no skills are required to be a good manager. This is pure Marxism and the stupidity of this view is trivially obvious to anyone who’s made the shift into management.
A coach isn’t the same as a player, and the skills they have are different. A coach needs to understand player endurance and motivation, they need to understand the larger strategy and when letting the opponent have a small victory is worth it in the long run. Players on the other hand are supposed to do the thing–make the plays. Their focus is on the immediate moment, on physical movement. The two skillsets complement each other but typically do not overlap.
You see this all the time in the trades and in construction. Guys will be damn good at their job and wonder why they’re not promoted to management. The answer is simple: They’re good at their jobs, NOT at the job of managing. It’s no different than a plumber wondering why no one will hire him as a carpenter–it’s because management is a job, requiring a certain skillset, and the dude doesn’t have it.
Comment by Dinwar — September 15, 2025 @ 08:56