It’s hard to come up with a metric for how a “good” coach or a “bad” coach can affect an MLS team, but Chase Hoffman has made the attempt.
In his work on the Thomas Rongen Line earlier this year — looking at the minimum points per match it takes to consistently make the generously-set MLS playoffs — Hoffman (a friend of the site and our podcast offshoot, Emergency Podcast) surmised that a coach will swing a season four points either way.
That +/- 4 is, according to Hoffman, based on the standard deviation looking at PPGs with MLS coaches with at least 100 matches coached and how their teams finish in the table. The math on it, if you’re so inclined, is 0.1186430521 x 34 matches, or 4.033863772.
Obviously, it’s a challenging element to put into a stat, but given what else impacts a team, I’m willing to grant it for this exercise.
