Here’s the thing: the Dragons shouldn’t have sacked Shane Flanagan, and certainly not so unceremoniously. I didn’t think I’d ever write that. Yet here we are.
Apportioning a lot of the blame to former coach Flanagan says everything and nothing about the value of the “word” of the club. Of course, they’re not the first club to do something like this, nor will they be the last.
In August 2025, St George Illawarra proclaimed the extension of Flanagan’s tenure through to the end of the 2028 season. Eight months later, Dragons chairman Andrew Lancaster announced it was all over.
What’s invariably lost in such matters is that it’s not as if the archetypal “sacked coach” now gets a payout akin to an unexpected Lotto victory, unless the contract specifically states that is the only path available to the employer terminating for convenience.
And head coach contracts often don’t require a full payout. Indeed, professional sport coaching contracts represent a Faustian bargain: a coach must surrender rights and certainty for opportunity.
And almost all coaching employment situations end through employer-led termination.
However, in any event, Flanagan shouldn’t have been shown the door. Not because he’s blameless – no head coach loses 11 premiership matches on the bounce and has a proud record – but because six decades of peer-reviewed evidence, and a forensic examination of comparable cases in the NFL, European football, the AFL and NRL, deliver the same verdict.
The mid-season coaching sacrifice is the most ancient placebo in professional sport. It soothes the patient; it does nothing to excise the malignancy.
The empirical question is this: does sacking a head coach mid-tenure improve a team?
It’s a question that’s occupied sport and labour economists for generations.
The answer, across codes, continents and methodologies is convincingly consistent: not really – and when it does have an influence, it isn’t for long.
Clubs that submit to the ritual tend, on balance, to be no better a year later – and are frequently worse.
The appellate courts of professional sports history have entertained the petition ad infinitum, and the judgment rarely favours the appellant.
The facts are these. The Dragons haven’t played finals football since 2018. They’ve cycled through Steve Price, Paul McGregor, Anthony Griffin, and now Flanagan (as well as a couple of interim appointments), and the NRL ladder has answered with a series of bottom-half performances. They are presently in last place.
That’s seven years outside the finals. If coach dismissal were the remedy, they would have been healed.
The starting point is Oscar Grusky’s 1963 study of Major League Baseball published in the American Journal of Sociology, titled Managerial Succession and Organizational Effectiveness. Grusky’s empirical study concluded that clubs performing worst sacked managers most often, and that those sackings produced not recovery but rather a vortex of further disruption.
The following year, William Gamson and Norman Scotch put a name to what Grusky had described: “ritual scapegoating”.
A slumping team, they argued, dismisses its coach not to win more games but to perform a symbolic public act of atonement. Their elegant phrase “slump-ending rituals” puts it best.
The sophisticated economics came much later, and pointed the same way.
A board that couldn’t see in August what had become obvious by April has either misread its own roster, its own coach, or both.
Allard Bruinshoofd and Bas ter Weel, writing in the European Journal of Operational Research in 2003 on whether managerial sackings in Dutch football led to discernible performance improvements, pioneered a method that now bears their names.
Bruinshoofd and ter Weel determined to match every dismissed manager against a control team suffering a statistically identical slump but retaining its coach to compare the recoveries.
The Dutch data gave the definitive answer: the control teams recovered faster. Ter Weel’s 2011 follow-up in De Economist considered 184 managerial departures across 19 Dutch clubs from 1986 to 2004 and found that no statistically significant performance improvement was attributable to forced managerial turnover.
Another important study in the Journal of Economics and Business, published the previous year, examined more than 700 English Football League mid-season changes. The core conclusion was that teams spearing managers underperformed in the subsequent three months.
Different studies concentrated on the NFL and NCAA basketball are more definitive, finding that teams that sack coaches do worse.
Exceptional performances – good or bad – tend, mechanically, to regress toward the mean.
Head coaches get sacked because their team is having an unusually bad run; the unusually bad run, by its very nature of exception, ends. Things level out.
The NFL, a league that spends more on coaching than any other competition on Earth, has conducted the largest natural experiment in this field. The results are instructive.
Of eight recent high-profile mid-season NFL firings, only two produced clear improvement: Denver landing Sean Payton and the Los Angeles Chargers signing Jim Harbaugh. Both situations required hiring an outlier coach at the cost of draft capital and roster upheaval.
The Carolina Panthers have used six head coaches since 2018 and won 36 games in seven seasons. The Raiders have cycled through four coaches since Jon Gruden resigned in 2021. In fact, between 2000 and 2020, some 138 permanent head coach hires were made by NFL franchises. According to the numbers, any immediate performance improvement is a short-term sugar hit, if anything.
Examples in the AFL are starker. Damien Hardwick was within a whisker of being sacked after Richmond finished 13th in 2016. The club held its nerve. Three premierships followed in four years.
Simon Goodwin was nearly dismissed after Melbourne finished 17th in 2019. In 2021, he delivered the club’s first flag since 1964. Chris Fagan inherited a Brisbane wooden-spoon roster in 2017 and was given eight seasons to build what became back-to-back premierships in 2024 and 2025.
Compare that to the panickers. North Melbourne have had five senior coaches since 2019 and finished 12th, 17th, 18th, 18th, 17th, 17th and 16th. Essendon have had nine senior coaches since 2008 and have not won a final since 2004.
Which brings us back to the Red V. Flanagan’s predicament isn’t solely, or even primarily, his own doing. Star halfback Ben Hunt was lost to the Broncos. Queensland representative Jaydn Su’A is leaving. Young talent Loko Pasifiki Tonga requested a release, but might stay. The marquee signings, Damien Cook, Clint Gutherson, and Valentine Holmes, are in the latter stages of their careers.
None of which is to suggest Flanagan is a spectacular coach. He isn’t. In his two completed seasons cloaked in red, the Dragons finished 11th and third last. Zero from seven to open 2026 is, on any rational view, a catastrophe.
But the Dragons have, on the evidence of the past eight years, made the same mistake three times and expected, on the fourth iteration, a different result. The better analysis is what the club failed to do – to put Flanagan in a position where it could be anticipated that he would be the harbinger of success.
The head coach in a modern professional sporting team is the sacrificial victim; the central figure onto whom communal anxiety is projected and through whose expulsion the community imagines itself cleansed.
The expulsion is genuine, but the cleansing is an illusion.
There’s a final, quieter point. An employment contract signed in good faith in August and torn up nine months later tells a story about the people who signed it as surely as it tells a story about the person being moved on.
A board that couldn’t see in August what had, by its own account, become obvious by April has either misread its own roster, its own coach, or both.
In this case, it appears the Dragons’ performance problem is cultural and structural. Cultural and structural problems aren’t solved by sacking one person.
They are solved by looking in the mirror, which is the one thing no board in world sport has ever done, first thing on a Monday morning.
Darren Kane is a sports columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
