Coaching Efficiency and Team Performance: An Examination of Texas High School Football

In this research, we contribute to the literature on amateur sports competition by empirically estimating a stochastic production frontier for a sample of Texas high school football programs. Although production estimation is common for professional sports, doing so at the amateur level, particularly for high school sports, is not. Modeling a production frontier in this context allows us to empirically isolate the influence of offensive and defensive inputs on each team’s overall performance, measured as team wins. From the frontier estimation, we then estimate relative efficiency measures for each team, which are used to construct an efficiency-based prediction variable. Through a subsequent salary regression, we find that this prediction measure is among the significant determinants of a head coach’s salary.