Sal Paradise wrote:
So it begs the question - what is the point of a coach? If you have a good enough set of players with the correct skill set and attitude the coach has very limited influence. A good coach must add some value and the very least he can add is: a team as fit as appropriate and with the correct attitude. Murray's teams both had those qualities. Murray had a few plodders too: Cummins, Hay, Lawford, Kemp, Sheridan etc
Murray improved players and instilled a good team ethic. I dispute some of your player analysis though. Cummins was still a decent winger under Murray, and Hay was a destructive wide-running second-row and got selected for England/GB. Kemp was more of a Dean Bell era player and had left before our 1999 CC cup win (I thought he had everything apart from pace!). Sheridan was a solid scrum-half, and instrumental in the cup semi-final win against the Bulls. The deficiencies of Hay and Sheridan weren't really exposed until Daryl Powell was instilled as coach a few years later. Dean Lawford I'll give you, but he was hardly a regular member of the starting 13.
Dean Lance gets a lot of stick on here, but despite losing runs at the beginning and end of his tenure he did oversee a record winning run of something like 13 consecutive games, and take us to a CC final.
Daryl Powell is an interesting one. His Leeds record isn't great, but he is credited with laying the foundations for the 'Golden Generation' to come through. He's obviously a better coach now but he just couldn't beat the Bulls in 2003, despite 5 attempts. Tony Smith took this team (plus Bai and Lauitiiti) to real success, but he wasn't good at maintaining that success over four seasons until after his departure had been announced in 2007.
Both Brian McClennan and McDermott seemed to focus on getting an established group of top players to perform when it mattered. But even then the flow of quality younger players who made it started to dry up. Eventually the Golden Generation started to retire or leave, they were not replaced like-for-like with quality, and we are where we are - Leeds are having to revert to the old policy of big money signings to turn things around.
So to answer your question, at Leeds at least the role of the coach seems to be to a) blood and nurture young players, b) make quality signings, and c) get seasoned professionals to play their best when it matters. Only occasionally did a coach significantly improve average players - and even then the effects were limited, as Murray's team finished a lowly 5th (or so?) in his final season at Leeds.
