Redskins crippled before QBs went down
The best-managed organizations find a balance between stability and fluidity, which enables them to deal with emergencies. Reinvention in midstream is especially critical in the collision sport of the National Football League, in which injuries mean teams are ever in flux.
The best teams excel at what you might call planned change: They’re fluid in their ability to cope with crises, yet stable in their values and method of assessing talent.
It’s hard to think of a team worse-suited to deal with the loss of two quarterbacks to broken legs in the space of two weeks than the Washington Redskins. They have never been well-managed. It’s not as if this plot is a dangler.
You know who the Redskins are and how they will react to the deterioration of their season, and if you don’t, just check the math: They are 6-6, and hurtling fast toward 8-8 or worse. They’re the team that will ignore Colin Kaepernick out of political spite, yet expediently sign Reuben Foster, a domestic abuser who has been arrested three times in a year, a decision commentator Jason Witten called “horrendous judgment,” and which former director of player personnel Louis Riddick labelled simply “asinine.”
Redskins coach Jay Gruden and his players deserve sympathy for freakish bad luck, and they have fought with a real nobility through their injuries, even in Monday’s 28-13 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. But the Redskins have a much more crippling institutional problem than a couple of broken legs. As usual, the wrong people will be under job pressure as result of the current crisis, while team president Bruce Allen suavely evades all accountability for the organization’s larger failures, which now amount to a 58-81-1 record during his nine-year tenure.
An entire category of books and sheaves of analysis have failed to arrive at a consensus on what a great management model should look like. Everyone has a different philosophy. But lousy management is easy to identify, and this is it. A hallmark is constant internal upheaval, which has a lousy effect on performance, no matter what business you’re in.
Neil Paine, an analyst for the forecasting website FiveThirtyEight.com, devised an interesting way to measure the cyclical failure of the NFL’s chronic losers. He calls it a CHAOS score, short for “Cumulative HighActivity Organizational Strife.” In layman’s term, it’s “an overall turmoil tally.” If you’re guessing the Redskins score highly in CHAOS points, you’re right. Over the past 10 years covering Allen’s span with the team, they rank in the bottom fourth of the league.
In the CHAOS system, a team gets point-penalties for change in ownership (two points), general manager (three points), head coach (seven points) and primary quarterback (10 points.) In the
last decade the Redskins have amassed 90 CHAOS points, ninth-worst in the NFL. They’ve been through four head coaches and they’ve made 17 changes at starting quarterback among nine men. It’s an interesting way to quantify what you can sense and see. Small wonder they ranked just 26th in the league in win-loss record between 2007-17, with a mark of 66-93-1. This is not a coaching problem, or a player problem.
In 2009, a public policy analyst named Gregory Hill produced an interesting paper entitled, “The Effect of Frequent Managerial Turnover on Organizational Performance: A Study of Professional
Baseball Managers.” He found that managerial turmoil had a measurable negative statistical effect: Not only did teams win fewer games, they produced fewer runs.
“Too much change leads to a drop in performance, and even the savviest of managers cannot overcome this dilemma,” he wrote.
With no core competency and accountability at the very top of an organization, it creates a cascade.
You think the Redskins players trust the ducking Allen, who has yet to publicly explain why Foster was signed? That bleeds into everything: hiring and orienting
employees, retaining and promoting good people, handling grievances, allocating budgets, maintaining payroll integrity, structuring work responsibilities, motivating staff and diagnosing problems.
All of these core competencies — which culminate in the critical task of scouting and combing through free-agent talent to identify compatible players who will form your talent pool and contingency talent pool — are compromised.
All the wrong people get tenure, and there’s always something a little flimsy underneath, while good people and players are painfully thrown away.