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Impact of New Head Coaches and New Offensive Coordinators

Draft Recommendation: Do not get too excited by new head coaches, teams that bring back the same HC and OC are generally better bets for fantasy football.

One of the factors that is often undervalued in fantasy football is the impact of head coaches and offensive coordinators. They are very hard to evaluate because although some offensive coordinators are more run or pass oriented, they will generally adjust to the players they have. Every year there are a number of head coaches and offensive coordinators that are replaced and those offenses are usually the hardest to analyze for fantasy football players. In this analysis we will look for general trends to try and determine whether new head coaches and offensive coordinators have a positive or negative impact on their new team.

Since 2004, there have been 94 teams that started the season with the same head coach and same offensive coordinator as the previous year, 35 teams that started the season with only a new offensive coordinator and 31 teams that replaced both. We noticed that teams with new head coaches will generally use a much more run oriented offense in the following year. Despite attempting less passes, they have on average 4.9% more passing fantasy points and 6.3% more running fantasy points than in the previous year. Our numbers show that they improve much more than teams that bring back the same head coach and same offensive coordinator. However, teams that hire new head coaches are generally teams that had poorer offenses in the previous year and have much more room for improvement.

For that reason, we decided to look at teams that had less than 225 passing fantasy points and those that had more than 225 passing fantasy points separately. We also looked at teams that had less than 250 running fantasy points and those that had more than 250 fantasy points separately.

Based on this analysis, we determined that teams that bring back the same head coach and same offensive coordinator have an advantage in two situations:

-They had less than 225 passing fantasy points in the previous year (about 5% better than those with new head coaches)
-They had more than 250 running fantasy points in the previous year (about 10% better than those with new head coaches).

Last season, there were 15 teams that had less than 225 passing fantasy points and if history holds true, the Falcons, Bears, Vikings, Jaguars, Panthers, Redskins, Bills, Ravens, Titans and Bengals should show more improvement than the Lions, Seahawks, Rams, Raiders and Browns in the passing game.  In terms of the running game, teams like the Jets and Broncos who were amongst the best last year could struggle this year with a new head coach. In conclusion, at times there might be a lot of hype about new head coaches but when it comes to fantasy football, you will want to be careful when drafting players from those teams.

See the complete analysis