Quote:
Originally Posted by the_spike
Why? It happens all the time in most other endeavors. You think David Leadbetter "crushes" at the US Open? Tom Coughlin never even played pro football, let alone "crushed" at the Super Bowl.
This is an awful comparison.
A football coach has the ability to understand the field lay-out from a bird's eye view. He understands what formations will work and which will not. He understands that the left wide-receiver must turn right after 12 steps, not 11, not 13 and he understands the why and when of many components of the game. In simple terms, he is a strategizer, NOT a player. Yeah, he can tell a player to run faster and push him to his physical limits, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the over-all plan. Playing a game of catch doesn't have to be, no, it SHOULDN'T be the coach's forte. He cannot tell a team of circa 2000 Browns to do the same thing as circa 1976 Steelers and expect to make each team the best they can do. This follows into another mistake of your logic: you assume that all teams have an equal balance of talent and that a great coach can turn a bad team into a Super Bowl team. Not going to happen. I see very little connection between the physical attributes of the players and the ability to strategize, when to go for the field goal, when to punt, when to go for it, when to run, or go with the hail mary. The physical attributes are left to the physical sphere (players) and the thinking attributes are left to the thinkers (coach).
A tennis or golf player needs a coach because the perspective of proprioception on theirself is flawed. Yeah, it takes a guy with a computer and film to see that the timing of a hit, or an arc of a swing, is mathematically incorrect. Once again, nothing at all to do with play.
A poker coach must understand concepts of actual play to understand the when and the why. Yes, he can read books and even find out the mathematically correct strategy, but the timing and implementation of these strategies is something that can only be gained from experience and trial and error. There's just too much stuff that must be learned at the table, and if you can't implement that stuff yourself, is probably because you aren't aware of it, thus you can't teach this to a student. Poker is a direct game where your knowledge and ability directly influences your results, and that is the one component that is missing in your other examples.