Welcome to this week's edition of the Better Rivals podcast. My name is Oscar Oparicio. And this week, we are officially in the NFL dead zone, but we thought we'd take a look at an

interesting question posed by someone that is a friend of the pod. What makes a good head coach?

So with me, we have a special guest that is the author of the latest head coach rankings on

Pro Football Focus. That is Eric Eager. He's a data scientist. Host of the PFF forecast with

another friend of the pod, George Shahuri, and he's going to jump on to talk about what makes

a good head coach, and we're going to jump in right now. Well, Eric, it's good to have you on.

We just jump right in. This is going to be fun. Let's talk about the NFL head coaching rankings that you put out. I remember at one point

I talked to George about it and wasn't it considered to be called like the Walsh system for a bit?

You guys are trying to like acronymize it or is this something completely different?

You know, it's so it's so pertinent that you ask. So I'm currently working on the Walsh model.

That's actually our win probability model that we sell to the teams in Sunday

football.

We named it after, obviously, Bill, for how good of a coach he was for the Niners.

But I know I haven't named this one yet.

We named our draft trade algorithm PFF Jimmy after Jimmy Johnson. And we named Walsh, you know, the

win probability after Walsh. I don't know what I'm going to name this yet. Probably not the

Shanahan even though he has many a times during his career finished atop this. Yeah, it's funny. When

you said, you know, the draft capital one is Jimmy. I was like, man, you guys are really hitting Jimmy Garoppolo pretty hard at this point. Just throwing them under the bus for the Tray Lance trade. This is some slander. But no, it's Jimmy Johnson. That makes quite a bit more sense. But so you wrote this article about ranking NFL head coaches. And you put a bunch of stuff into your model that kind of spit out

these players. And so I had a couple questions really about how you went about the process for

defining what inputs you would even consider to define a head coach. Because that part is,

I think the one that's most interesting to me is how do you operationalize the characteristics

and qualities that make a good head coach such that you would put him into a model and then try to see what gets out?

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