Age of first-time head coaches

A friend and I were talking about the hire of Fangio, and one concerned he expressed, was that Fangio was old and had never been selected as a head coach in his 40-year career. There’s no denying that Fangio is old. Next year, Fangio will be the 5th oldest coach next year, trailing only Mike Zimmer (63), Bill Belichick (67), Pete Carroll (68) and Bruce Arians (67).

This prompted me to do a little research and see how this compared to previous first-time head coaches. I used PFR and looked at the 80 head coaches who started their coaching career in 2001 or after. I ignored coaches who I knew were only Interim Head Coaches, although I could have missed some. The data PFR compiles isn’t great, and I had to manually enter everyone’s birth year, so I was a little limited by what analysis I could do. Note that throughout this article, I’m referring to a coach’s age on December 31st of that year, or essentially their age at the end of the season (it made collecting data much).

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