Inequalities, Preferences and Rankings in US Sports Coach Hiring Networks

TL;DR

This study analyzes the NCAA coach hiring network, revealing significant inequalities, regional preferences, and correlations with authoritative rankings, providing new insights into the coach hiring market in college sports.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based analysis of NCAA coach hiring, highlighting inequalities and regional preferences, and compares network rankings with authoritative rankings.

Findings

High inequality in coach production with Gini coefficient ~0.60

Coaches prefer hiring within their region and division

Network-based rankings correlate with authoritative rankings but show discrepancies

Abstract

Hiring a head coach of a college sports team is vital which will definitely have a great influence on the later development of the team. However, a lot of attention has been focused on each coach's individual features. A systematic and quantitative analysis of the whole coach hiring market is lacking. In a coach hiring network, the coaches are actually voting with their feet. It is interesting to analyze what factors are affecting the "footprint" left by those head coaches. In this paper, we collect more than 12,000 head coach hiring records in two different popular sports from the NCAA. Using network-based methods, we build the coach hiring network in the NCAA men's basketball and football. We find that: (1).the coach hiring network is of great inequality in coach production with a Gini coefficient close to 0.60. (2).coaches prefer to work within the same geographical region and the same division to their alma maters'. (3).the coach production rankings we calculated using network-based methods are generally correlated to the authoritative rankings, but also show disaccord in specific time period. The results provide us a novel view and better understanding of the coach hiring market in the NCAA and shed new light on the coach hiring system.