All these years
This will be an opinionated post.
I have been told that it takes five years to turn a program around where you can get your system in, move out the athletes who were already there, and bring in your own recruitment class. Assuming it all goes well, your fifth year is when you should know if your plan is working.
I've also heard this year that it only takes a good coach one year to turn it around.
I am not on board with the single year turn around. I believe that you can make significant changes in a program in a single year, but that's what I would consider, "immediate impact." You're new, you've got a new voice, and a new message so it will carry significant weight with the program. But it's the second and third year that I see potential issues as you start to turn things more into what you envision.
Patience seems to be a fine line. I'm watching the headers on Mark Trestman, the Chicago Bears coach, possibly being let go at the end of this season. Two years, and he's possibly out. That happened last year with the Cleveland Browns - only a single season - multiple times with the Raiders, the Cubs, Tampa Bay, and others.
I'm not going to dive into the decision making process that goes on at that level. I don't have the experience.
What I'm going to propose is this: Expectations of many programs are unrealistic.
A catch phrase that has been used multiple times this year at my internship is, "Don't look for a magic bullet." This means that rather than trying multiple concepts, and changing the training radically, jumping the shark, and knee jerk reactions, you slow down, you stay the course that many other successful programs tend to follow, and you work within the realms of what could be called, "regular coaching." You're not copying so much as you're starting from a base that most experts and successful coaches agree that you should start from.
What I've seen and am seeing more of these days is the one and done deal where if something doesn't work instantly, it's tossed like the baby in the bath water, and there's a brand new start. It's a brand new system, or brand new ideas, or concepts, on top of the brand new system/concepts from the year before, and from the "tried and true" system and concepts from the year before that.
There isn't any patience exercised to find out if the new, but not brand new system even works. Clearly you thought the concepts would work with your current team - otherwise, why did you hire that person - but after a single year, you're done?
It's day trading coaches. It's day trading concepts, and ideas. Buy, sell, trade, dump. It's trying to find the magic bullet, or a universal key.
You can clearly come up with as many analogies as you want, but the concept remains the same. It's utter chaos, there's no way to know if a system works or not, and I believe that too many solid coaches are labeled as "failures" because of poor management rather than poor systems.
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