Retaining Jim Schwartz would be rare exercise of patience in NFL

In the National Football League, patience is uncommon. With so much money on the line and so much pressure from fans to win, most coaches don't have a very long shelf life. Owners rarely give coaches more than a few years to turn a team around, and they don't hesitate to make a change at the first sign of trouble. You can be on top of the world one year and out of a job the next.

With all of the talk about how Jim Schwartz very well may find himself in this situation, I started to wonder this past weekend about just how rare it is for a head coach to actually make it to a fifth season with the same team. Further, I started to wonder about just how rare it is for a head coach with a decidedly losing record to see a fifth season with the same team.

With this in mind, I decided to go back and look at every head coach in the NFL who started a new tenure since 1990. (If somebody came into 1990 as a head coach, that tenure wasn't considered. I had to establish a cut line or I would have had to go back to the 1970s.) While the game is always changing, I figured 1990 was a good spot to begin this study about how many coaches actually make it to a fifth season. Also, I figured it would provide enough data to show just how rare it is for coaches with a losing record to make it to year No. 5.

Immediately, I discovered that, unsurprisingly, a whole lot of coaches don't make it beyond four years with their team. Actually, many don't even make it that long. Especially in the last decade, patience has become rare for coaches trying to turn around a losing team, and intolerance of any kind of losing has taken over the NFL. Again, this isn't surprising one bit, but it's pretty remarkable that there have only been 45 coaching tenures of more than four seasons going back to 1990.

After sorting all of the coaching tenures of more than four seasons, I recorded the record each coach had in his first four years, along with how many Super Bowls his team appeared in, how many playoff appearances his team made and how many titles he won in his first four years. Also, I took a look at what happened after the first four seasons of each coach's tenure. This is what I found (with what Schwartz has done through almost four complete seasons included for reference):

As you can see by the above table, which is sorted by fewest to most wins in a coach's first four seasons, only one coach with more losses than Schwartz saw a fifth season. That was David Shula, who made it to a fifth season with the Bengals despite going 5-11, 3-13, 3-13 and 7-9 in his first four seasons. He was fired in 1996 after starting 1-6.

To provide a better comparison, perhaps we should look at Vince Tobin. He went 7-9 and 4-12 in his first two seasons in Arizona before leading the Cardinals to the playoffs with a 9-7 record in his third season. In year No. 4, Tobin's Cardinals took a step back with a 6-10 record, and he was fired after a 2-5 start in his fifth season.

Amazingly, of all the coaches who made it to a fifth season despite tallying fewer than 30 wins in their first four seasons with a team, only Norv Turner survived to see a sixth season. The rest were either fired midway through their fifth season or at the conclusion of their fifth season. The Redskins, which are now known for having little patience with head coaches, didn't fire Turner until his seventh season. Interestingly, they fired him when the Redskins were 7-6.

So what does this all mean for Schwartz and the Lions? If he isn't fired, he will have the second-fewest wins of any head coach going into his fifth season with a team since 1990. In other words, based strictly on his record, the Lions would be exercising patience not often seen in today's NFL by bringing Schwartz back. While he did take the Lions to the playoffs last season, he has racked up a lot of losses in four seasons as head coach.

With all that said, there are some caveats. For starters, it's important to remember that Schwartz entered a very unique situation when he took over the Lions in 2009. They were coming off of the worst season (0-16) in NFL history, so it's not like there was an expectation for a lot of wins early in his tenure. What's more, Schwartz was without Matthew Stafford for large chunks of his first two seasons because of injuries. That also greatly contributed to Schwartz's ugly 8-24 record through two seasons. Even if the Lions had gone 14-2 this season, Schwartz still would have only hit .500 for his career record as a head coach.

While there are a lot of similarities between certain coaching tenures, none are exactly the same. In each situation, there are different circumstances, as evidenced by Schwartz taking over a team that went 0-16. That had never happened before, and the circumstances have changed again with the Lions following up that dramatic turnaround with a down season this year.

What I'm trying to say is that numbers don't tell the whole story, and I don't mean that as someone who favors a fifth year for Schwartz or as someone who thinks he should be fired. I'll save my thoughts on that for another time. For now, my main point is simply that it's not often you see a coach get to a fifth season with a record like Schwartz's. Whether the Lions choose to look to 2011 as a reason to keep Schwartz around or look to 2012 as a reason to fire him remains to be seen. All we know right now is that if you go by the numbers, it would be a rare move for patience if the Lions do opt to go into a fifth year of the Schwartz era in Detroit.

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