GOATS or Scapegoats:Coaching Turnover’s Influence on Season Performance in Sports

This paper examines how coaching turnover reflects broader organizational decision-making, attribution biases, and structural constraints on team performance. It develops a comparative framework across three competing theories of coaching's causal influence: the Coaching Competence model, the Scapegoat (attribution) model, and the Structural Determinism model. Drawing on sports economics and organizational behavior literature, this paper argues that coaching change functions not merely as a personnel decision but as a signaling mechanism through which front offices pursue accountability, stability, and performance objectives. A fuzzy regression discontinuity design applied to coaching dismissals illustrates how each theory navigates trade-offs between perceived accountability, roster talent, and random variation in season outcomes. We conclude that coaching turnover is not a neutral or purely meritocratic mechanism but is shaped by attribution biases and structural confounders, offering a diagnostic lens for understanding how organizations assign responsibility for performance.