I have developed my own metric called “Heat Check” to measure the risk of a head coach or general manager getting fired by incorporating some of the external forces (typically) out of their control. For example, an organization’s decision of how much of the available total cap space that they are willing to spend in a season should be expected to affect the head coach’s and the team’s performances. Heat Check ranges from 0-100 and can be thought of a percent chance that the HC or GM gets fired, where HCs and GMs with a 0 should be safe, while those with a 100 should maybe refresh their resumes.

On the right is a chart of the averages for important measures with regards to how well organizations have been run. Reminder: given that each organization has the same resources and opportunities as the rest of the organizations in the league, the long term averages for all of the organizations should be 8 or 8.5 wins (dependent on whether one looks at seasons before the shift to 17 games or after) and around 82 for the various Scores (Coach, GM, ORG).

However, Heat Check can get messy sometimes. The 2023 Seahawks Head Coach, Pete Carroll, was fired with a Heat Check of 0. But I agree with the Heat Check, as the decision seemed to be more of a political one within the organization than one that had to do strictly with performance. On the other hand, 2022 Bears Head Coach Eberflus had a 75.9 Heat Check and was allowed to keep his job. Whether it was a good decision is still not certain, as he improved his Coach Score from 65 to 78 in 2023 but would probably be seen as the weakest part of the Chicago Bears organization going into 2024. In order to simplify the Heat Check metric, I created a classification system: Safe, In Danger, and Hot Seat.

These classifications, however, are not entirely dependent on the Heat Check values and other aspects such as how much of the season the starting Quarterback was healthy could change what the classification ends up being. For example, in 2020, 49ers Head Coach Kyle Shanahan had a Heat Check of 47 with a Coach Score of 78.4, but his classification was still Safe. That is, in part, due to the fact that their starting Quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo, only started 6 games that season. It’s hard to make performance evaluations on a season when your most important player starts fewer than 40% of games.