Through our recent coaching changes – Davie to Ty to Weis to Kelly – there have been fan favorites of sorts that I thought would suddenly get more PT once the new coach came in – or that the reason they weren’t playing more was due to some sort of short sightedness of the prior coach.
In each regime change, very few (if any) players have come out of the woodwork. I have now come to believe that coaches, almost always, will play the person they think will win games… as their incentive as coaches is to win, so they have no reason to keep an ace in the hole.
I’d go so far as to say this is one of my personal rules of football fandom – if a guy isn’t playing it’s because the other guy is likely better. This rule takes some fun out of being fan – as it is always great to speculate that the next guy is really better than the first… and if that you had the next guy your team would be better. But the reality is, this rule is more often true than not.
That said, I have noticed a few exceptions to this rule, or where a ‘better’ player is on the bench. These exceptions are:
1. Consistency
2. Character flaws (on the player’s part)
3. Seniority (specifically, lack thereof)
Put differently, for a coach to not play the best player, they either don’t like the best player, want to respect a more senior player, or don’t know when they’ll get Jekyll or Hyde.
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