Inequalities, Preferences and Rankings in US Sports Coach Hiring Networks

Hiring a head coach of a college sports team is vital which will definitely have a great influence on the later development of the team. However, a lot of attention has been focused on each coach’s individual features. A systematic and quantitative analysis of the whole coach hiring market is lacking. In a coach hiring network, the coaches are actually voting with their feet. It is interesting to analyze what factors are affecting the "footprint" left by those head coaches. In this paper, we collect more than 12,000 head coach hiring records in two different popular sports from the NCAA. Using network-based methods, we build the coach hiring network in the NCAA men’s basketball and football. We find that: (1).the coach hiring network is of great inequality in coach production with a Gini coefficient close to 0.60. (2).coaches prefer to work within the same geographical region and the same division to their alma maters’. (3).the coach production rankings we calculated using networkbased methods are generally correlated to the authoritative rankings, but also show disaccord in specific time period. The results provide us a novel view and better understanding of the coach hiring market in the NCAA and shed new light on the coach hiring system.