{"id":71566,"date":"2025-09-13T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=71566"},"modified":"2025-09-13T10:31:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T14:31:20","slug":"qotd-the-peter-principle-in-football-the-military-and-life-in-general","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/09\/13\/qotd-the-peter-principle-in-football-the-military-and-life-in-general\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Peter Principle in football, the military, and life in general"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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).<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 would he make a good general? How about the best patrolman vs. the best detective?<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 physical freaks with fast-firing heads; they don’t want<\/em> desk jobs, I imagine.<\/p>\n

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” \u2014 the guy who was good at answering phones in the call center might or might not be any good at supervising<\/em> the call center, but there’s only one way to find out …<\/p>\n

… 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 \u2014 oh, So-and-So is overrated, and here’s my charts and graphs to prove it \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Friday Etc.”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-02-04.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,26,5,41,13],"tags":[1456,95,572,261,179,1462],"class_list":["post-71566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-football","category-military","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-competence","tag-jobs","tag-leadership","tag-management","tag-nfl","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-iCi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71566"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97839,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71566\/revisions\/97839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}