Club Sportico: The Nfl’s Todd Robert Bowl Was Just The Beginning

Last week, Sportico published its ranking of highest-paid NFL coaches. The list included both Harbaughs: brothers Jim and John. There were also two Kevins: O’Connell and Stefanski. But the name repetition on NFL sidelines doesn’t stop there.

Last Sunday’s game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Cleveland Browns was the first game in NFL history with two head coaches named Todd. Incredibly, the Bucs’ Todd Bowles and the Browns’ Todd Monken also share the middle name Robert. It was the Todd Robert Bowl.

The web of shared names among NFL head coaches turns out to be far more complex than anyone could have imagined.

You can read the full essay at Club Sportico. Here’s an excerpt ✍️:

A whopping 25 NFL head coaches share a name—first, middle, or last—with another head coach. There are six Mikes, four Roberts, four Patricks, three Williams, three Johns, etc. And some share multiple names. Below are all the connections mapped out:

Because of this web, NFL head coach name “bowl” games are much more common than you’d think. For example, this season’s kickoff game was a rematch of Super Bowl XL, and also a Mike Bowl, between the Seattle Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald and the New England Patriots’ Mike Vrabel.

In Week 2, each of those Mikes participated in another Mike Bowl when Vrabel coached against the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike McCarthy, while Macdonald coached against the Arizona Cardinals’ Mike LaFleur. At the same time, there was a third Mike Bowl in San Francisco between the 49ers and Dolphins—Kyle Shanahan and Jeff Hafley each have the middle name Michael!

For this week’s Sunday Night Football, we have probably the most exciting bowl game of the season, as the Los Angeles Rams, led by Sean Patrick McVay, take on the Denver Broncos, led by Patrick Sean Payton, in the Sean Patrick Bowl. Two Super Bowl-winning coaches. Two of the five highest-paid coaches. And the most unlikely from a name perspective.

How unlikely? As the data guy, I had to dig deeper.

Middle names are not tracked by the Social Security Administration. According to a YouGov poll, though, middle names are given after relatives far more frequently than first names, so I think we can safely assume that common first names are at least equally common as middle names.

In 1975, the average of McVay’s and Payton’s birth years, 0.5% of male babies were named Patrick and 1.2% were named some variant of Sean. Multiplying those together, and then multiplying by two, we get that about 1 in every 8,333 babies were named Sean Patrick or Patrick Sean. Using that estimate, in a randomly selected group of 32 males from that generation, there’s about a 1 in 140,000 chance that at least two would be named Sean Patrick. For comparison, the Todd Robert Bowl was only 1 in ~29,000.

All in all, there are 12 matchups this year that I’d consider “true bowl games,” where the two head coaches have either the same first name, the same middle name, or the same last name (I’m counting the Sean Patrick Bowl, because Payton is generally referred to as Sean Payton, even though Sean is actually his middle name).

Gven current trends in baby naming, it’s only downhill from here.

Sadly, these names are rapidly becoming less popular. Michael, for instance, which peaked at 4.7% of all baby boys in 1969, is down to just 0.4%. John has undergone a similar trajectory, once accounting for more than 4% of all newly born males, but now just 0.4%. Seans (and Shawns) and Patricks have dipped even further to 0.08% and 0.03% last year, respectively. New Todds are essentially extinct, having dropped outside the top 1,000 names back in 2014.

But it’s not just these particular names that are in decline—it’s all “common” names. Fifty years ago, 41.1% of all baby boys were given a name in the top 25 most popular names. Last year, that was only 14.4%—an astonishing drop. So 2026 is likely the peak of NFL head coach name bowl games.

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