Do great athletes make great coaches?

Sure Pat Sullivan. An look at O.J. er, wait.......
nevermind.

Do great coaches make great athletes?

No.

have to be able to teach... its all about teaching


and if they can teach, send em to the Orleans Parish public schools system

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Why do you think?

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I think there is no correlation, positive or negative.

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Do great athletes make great coaches?

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Depends. Most good soccer coaches in Europe were great players. Depends on the sport.

Les Miles was a better athlete than Nick Saban or Urban Meyer. Go figure.

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Ditka had a Superbowl as a coach,

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Buddy Ryan.

This question can be answered with accuracy only if we know that all great athletes want to be coaches.

A lot of the great athletes make a tons of money and tend to retire or go on to do other things besides coaching. They might not want to deal with the incessant pressures of coaching at either level.

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A lot of the great athletes make a tons of money and tend to retire or go on to do other things besides coaching. They might not want to deal with the incessant pressures of coaching at either level.

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This is certainly true -especially when you consider QBs, out of the offensive position groups, are probably some of the best suited guys (by experience) to be coaches, but are generally the highest compensated, and have longer careers than RBs or OL. Defensively, LBs and DBs tend to drift into coaching, more so than DL.

However, another part of it is - guys who end up coaching start coaching pretty quickly, which necessarily means their playing career ended soon through injury, choice or lack of competitiveness or some combination.

A simple comparison - Bill Belichick played for Wesleyan, started coaching at 22,was a position coach in the NFL at 25, and a defensive coordinator at 33. Tom Brady played for Michigan, won 3 Superbowls, named All-Pro 5 times. If he suffered a career ending injury in practice tomorrow - he would be over 40 by the time he has the same coaching experience Belichick had at 33.

So, I guess the solution is - great athletes play and guys who go into coaching aren't great athletes to begin with, generally (at least in football).

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IMO its because the marginal players have more love for the game and study it harder than talented players who just go do what coaches say and use their talent to win the games.

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I am sorry but that is unsubstantiated BS. There is this overwhelming love for Rocky because there is this tendency to think that an underdog has more love for the game than the top dog and hard work will eventually overcome any lack of talent.

There are as many marginal players who remain marginal because they refuse to work harder as there are talented folks who fail because they refuse to work harder.


Talented people realize that they have to work hard too and maintain a certain level otherwise they too will fail in this ultra-competitive world and tend to be shunned and shunted pretty quickly.

Peyton Manning is one of the most talented and best QBs in the game - are you saying that his love for the game is any less than that of a 3rd string safety or that he is any less smart than a backup DB!!!!!

There is no substitute for hard work but it is naive (and movie plot like) to assume that in real life only the less talented tend to do the hard work and be smarter because the real talents tend to just slide by.