The Portable Coach: Which NFL Coaching Effects Transfer Across Rosters, and How Confidently

NFL front offices hire and fire coaches as though coaching effects are large, transferable, and known. We show they are none of those things uniformly: coaching authority is role-specific, resolution-specific, and only partly portable across rosters — and exactly one locus is forecastable precisely enough to price. We apply a single partition (the head-coach / offensive-coordinator / defensive-coordinator staff triple at each team-season) at four resolutions under one signal-to-noise discipline (B = 1000 permutation null, cross-season holdout, propensity-matched event design) to nflverse play-by-play 2002–2024.

Offense is two-locus: head coaches author macro philosophy (mid-season-firing pass-rate ratio 1.36×, p = 0.002) while offensive coordinators author schematic fine-grain (off-season red-zone shotgun-rate ratio 1.34×, p = 0.0002). The decision-relevant quantity is the predictive-validation slope — how much of a coordinator's prior-tenure profile reappears at a new team. The offensive-coordinator slope is 0.469 (95% CI [0.32, 0.62]), robust and broad across six distinct concepts; the head-coach slope is 0.279 (95% CI [−0.01, 0.56]), bracketing zero — head-coach portability is real but lives in which coach, not a population constant. The same framework applied to the NBA surfaces a different surviving locus (head-coach perimeter defense), showing the method transfers even where the sport-specific finding does not.

This is the Sloan-format successor to the earlier deposition “The Coach Locus is Offensive and Two-Tiered” (Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.20416332). Same underlying NFL coaching work, expanded with the predictive-validation portability analysis and the front-office framing.

The coaching-transfer framework here runs underneath the live Resolve NFL projections — the coach-change adjustment layer prices coordinator moves by the portability slopes characterized in this paper, and also feeds the dynasty value layer in Resolve FFB.