Tag: Belichick

The Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem, Part 2

By Jeffrey Carl

Bloggers To Be Named Later, January 27 2012

Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.

Last week, we introduced the first truly solid, mathematically proven theory that finally takes the guesswork out of determining a NFL team’s success. The Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem simply states:

Inverse Likability Theorem

In Part 1 of this series, the theory’s startling accuracy was demonstrated using the records of NFL coaches in 2011. “But how does it hold up over time?” you ask.

To prove just how deeply I deserve a NFL Nerdy Math Thing award, I will inconvenience myself to show you that the “BILT” shows itself true throughout NFL history as well. Let’s start with some of the all-time NFL standout coaches for one reason or another:

  • Vince Lombardi (.739 career winning percentage, 7 NFL championships): Packers Guard Jerry Kramer once joked, “Lombardi treated us all the same, like dogs.” That seemed funny until after a bad game in 1966 he outright sold RB Paul Hornung to a shady Korean restaurant.
  • Tom Landry (.602 career winning percentage, 2 NFL championships): Stabbed “Dandy” Don Meredith in the kidney for touching his fedora, ending Meredith’s career. Set NFL record for consecutive games never showing human emotions, which stood until Belichick beat it in 2010.
  • Marty Schottenheimer (.595 career winning percentage, 0 NFL championships): Best known for his infuriatingly conservative (“one yard and a cloud of dust”) playcalling style, his shockingly blatant nepotism, and his occasional attempts to hire ninja assassins to kill John Elway in revenge for repeated playoff losses. Earns back a few likability points for coaching the UFL Virginia Destroyers to a championship – unlike the Browns, Chiefs or Redskins.
  • Buddy Ryan (.500 career winning percentage, 0 championships): May or may not have put bounties on opposing players and/or punched assistant coaches on the sideline. Nonetheless gets likability points for being pure bats**t crazy enough to enjoy watching (see also Ryan, Rex).
Steve Spurrier
Coaching them up, Riverdance style!


  • Steve Spurrier (.375 career winning percentage, 0 championships): Okay, so maybe putting all your chips on Danny Wuerffel as your quarterback and resigning your coaching job from the 8thhole of a golf course aren’t Hall of Fame qualifiers. But the Old Ball Coach (“OBC”) never failed to amuse fans or reporters at his comically inept press conferences, and his bold, fashion-forward sense for womens’ golf visors made him a standout in likability. 
  • Joe Bugel (.300 career winning percentage, 0 championships): Absolutely everybody loved “Buges,” a players’ coach and two-time Super Bowl winning assistant with the Redskins who proceeded to win approximately negative 1 zillion games as the head coach of the Cardinals and Raiders.
Madden NFL 13 Quarterback Vision Cone
Seriously, to put this in they removed Madden Cards? Or Madden Challenge points? Or mini-camps that added to player stats? WHHYYYYYYYYY

John Madden (.759 career winning percentage, 1 championship): John Madden was a great coach and better commentator, but he gets +.500 unlikability points for willingly putting his name on the last several “Madden NFL” video games. Anyone who accepts money in return for using their name to pimp this chronically over-rated annual series of $60 roster updates has basically abdicated their rights to enter the Kingdom of Heaven when they die. 

So let’s see where that all nets out:

NFL Coaches
The Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem is scarily accurate.

“Okay,” you may be saying, “but what about the nice guys who were big winners?” Technically, it is true that several seemingly likable people were coaches with Hall of Fame winning percentages. But when you look at them closer, you will find the IBT holds true:

Viet Cong
Joe Gibbs sits next to Jane Fonda, 3rd from left


  • Joe Gibbs: Joe Gibbs is widely viewed as the archetypal “nice guy” coach and all-around decent human being. But he had two distinct phases of his coaching career:
  • Joe Gibbs Part II (.468 career winning percentage, 0 championships): During the kind grandfatherly years of his second turn with the Redskins, Gibbs had the highest-paid coaching staff in football and managed only a 30-34 record with a single playoff win. Note that as with John Madden above, coaching for a d-bag owner does not improve a coach’s winning percentage under the Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem.
  • Joe Gibbs Part I (.648 career winning percentage, 3 championships): During his first tenure as Redskins coach, Gibbs was the dominant coach of his era but was secretly a rabid sympathizer of the Viet Cong, despite the fact that the war had been over for many years.
Dick Vermeil gets choked up watching “Finding Nemo”
  • Dick Vermeil: Vermeil is famous for having changed his style from angry and heartless during his days in Philadelphia to warm, emotional and sentimental during his return to coaching in St. Louis when he won a Super Bowl. But Vermeil also had distinct phases to his hallowed coaching career:
    • Dick Vermeil Part I (.641, 0 champships): During his ultra-Type A years in Philadelphia, Vermeil went to the playoffs four out of six years. He was known for his players hating his guts, and setting the Eagles’ all-time coaching high blood pressure record which was later broken by Andy Reid only with the help of more than 35,000 McNuggets.
    • Dick Vermeil Part II “Electric Boogaloo” (.49, 1 championship): Despite Vermeil’s heartwarming yet off-putting crying jag during the Super Bowl, his winning percentage during his tenure in St. Louis was only .458 in the regular season and he racked up 10+ losses two out of three seasons with the Rams. He would have gotten fired if Kurt Warner hadn’t paid Tonya Harding with a ton of crystal meth to dress up as Houston Texans tackle Travis Johnson and cripple Trent Green. 
"You Can Do It" by Tony Dungy
Of course you can do it if you jump on the other player’s back and drag them down.

Tony Dungy (.651, 1 championship): Dungy is widely known for his avuncular TV style, strong religious faith and commitment to charities promoting involved and caring fathership. But I’m just adding +.600 unlikability to Dungy for “having a weird-shaped head” so that it fits my theory.

Author’s math-y science words note: Many people who are not expert science-y people like me are unaware that a large portion of science is specifically related to assessing the shape of people’s heads and modifying mathematical formulas based on this information. You are now a more educated person. You’re welcome.

So with this additional historical data, how does the Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem hold up?

NFL Coaches
Note the incredible accuracy, like Nostradamus or Tim Tebow.

As the chart above shows, “pretty darn well.”

In the next part of the series, we will apply the Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem to college football and literallyblow your mind. No, really, I mean “literally.” As in if you read it, you will die. If that doesn’t encourage future readership of this blog, I’m really not sure what does.

The Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem, Part 1

By Jeffrey Carl

Bloggers To Be Named Later, January 20 2012

Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.

Bill Belichick
Pretending to make human smile DOES NOT COMPUTE

Statistics are essential to modern sports. Football coaches have situational analysis tables to help them justify “punt it on 4th and inches” calls more frequently.

Baseball has “sabermetrics,” which is an intricate mathematical system for determining results that is calculated by nerdy people who don’t have a big enough group of friends to play “Dungeons & Dragons” with.

Worldwide, soccer has all sorts of crazy crap that they do in metric units like “KiloBeckhams” or “Injury Time per Hectare.”

David Beckham
1 GigaBeckham (938 Imperial MegaBeckhams)

Yet the NFL has always lacked a true benchmark statistic (like WAR in baseball or Remaining Teeth divided by Penalty Minutes in hockey) that can accurately predict a team’s future success.

That is why we are proud to introduce a solid, mathematically proven theory that finally takes the guesswork out of NFL success. The Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem simply states:

Not convinced? We’ll prove this theorem by examining prominent NFL coaches and their unlikability. Let’s start by looking at the 2011 NFL postseason conference championship coaches:

  • Tom Coughlin, New York Giants: Famous for doing things like fining players for not being five minutes early to meetings; losing the confidence of his locker room; and looking like The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns except less healthy.
  • Jim Harbaugh, San Francisco 49ers: Got into a fight with Pete Carroll onfield when he was with Stanford. Got into a fight with Lions coach Jim Schwartz onfield when he was with the Niners. Got into a fight with a crippled nun onfield when she asked for his autograph.
  • Bill Belichick, New England Patriots: Each year, sends Christmas cards to every single reporter covering the NFL that just say “F**k You.” Writes bad checks for Girl Scout Cookies and then poops on the Girl Scouts’ lawns when asked to return them. Once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
  • John Harbaugh, Baltimore Ravens: He actually seems like a pretty decent guy, but he gets a gratuitous +.100 unlikability added for coaching in Baltimore, and +.200 for being Jim Harbaugh’s brother.

Now let’s see where the four remaining playoff coaches stand according to the theorem:

NFL Coaches
Actual math involved
Math is hard
Math is hard, and also hard to draw

The theorem is derived from the inverse of a well-known sports mathematical axiom, Sir Leo Durocher’s proof that “nice guys finish last.” It’s that simple – the bigger an obvious d-bag your team’s coach is, the better their record will be within a certain margin of error.

This is actual math, people! I can say this with absolute certainty since nobody’s going to bother with checking my calculations because math is boring.

But you may be saying, “but how does this theorem hold true for coaches outside the final four NFL playoff teams?” Okay, let’s flesh this out with some other carefully chosen examples based on the coach’s general likability as a person:

NFL Coaches
Spookily accurate once you insert modifiers to fit the theory

At this point, some of you may be saying, “why do Steve Spagnuolo and Tony Sparano get such high ratings for being likable?” Well, “Tony Sparano” sounds a lot like “Tony Soprano,” and saying bad things about him always seemed to get people killed. And the Rams performed so poorly in 2011 largely because Steve Spagnuolo was always being called away for missions as part of the SEAL Team Six that killed Osama bin Laden. But he couldn’t tell anyone about it or he would have had to kill them. True fact.

Navy SEALs
Spagnuolo is 3rd from left, next to Chuck Norris

In summary, the Belichick Inverse Likability Theorem provides us with the definitive mathematical formula for determining NFL team success or failure, replacing such irrational and illogical methods as astrology, or listening to Trent Dilfer. Next week we will apply the theorem to historical coaches to demonstrate further just how right I am.

I am not sure whether the NFL is technically qualified to just hand out Nobel Prizes for Awesome Math-Based Stuff, but I’m pretty sure they are, and if so I expect one.