The Last Show with David Cooper
FULL EPISODE: Don't Tell Me What To Do - January 28, 2026
29 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: Why do coaches get blamed for poor team performance?
and welcome to The Last Show, a program that's probably educational. Whatever you learn tonight, you might be stupider for it. Here are some of the topics we'll cover on the evening's program. Health advice is supposed to help us. So why does being told what to do by the authorities sometimes make us do the opposite?
Well, in 10 minutes time, we'll cover some new research that says if public health authorities are bossy with their messaging, that'll backfire and people won't listen at all. Then after that, halfway through the hour, it's everything you wanted to know about rage bait. It can make you furious. You know, videos on your phone that just make you upset.
Chapter 3: How does forceful language affect health advice compliance?
Not only are they upsetting, they kind of hijack your brain, but there are ways to not fall for it. And we'll teach you those. All right, that's some of the topics we'll hit on the evening show. There will be more. You will learn more. Lots to cover. So for now, we'd better jump in.
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Chapter 4: What is the new university course on resisting rage bait?
When your favorite sports team starts losing consistently, the playbook seems simple. Fire the coach. That'll fix everything, right? But is that good team leadership firing the coach, or is it just a ritual sacrifice? Let's talk about why coaches take the fall when things go wrong, and why, despite how it might feel to you, may not help the players at all.
I am here with someone who's researched this. His name is Brian Sebing, and he's an associate professor of kinesiology, sport, and recreation at the University of Alberta. Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Chapter 5: How should adults deal with workplace bullying?
Why do sports need a fall guy? Why, when a team is performing badly, is there someone we need to just throw under the bus as if that'll somehow make the problem go away?
Well, I think part of the reason is, is that from a sports standpoint, sport becomes a part of our everyday conversation, right? Whether it's a medium like radio, like this, television, internet, things like that. Sports is all part of everybody's conversation.
And with that, a lot of times when they're not performing well, at the end of the day, people start looking at the coach or they may start looking at the general manager. And at the end of the day, Fans may think somebody has to pay the price with their job for the lack of performance.
So a scapegoat is what the coach would be. What pressures is a team trying to relieve when they fire a coach? Like, who are they protecting?
Well, part of it is, is it's not necessarily just protection, but you may have excessive media pressure. Like I said, with the description from above the conversation, especially in that local community. may become excessive enough that the team is going to have to relieve that media pressure.
Because if the coach is not the fall guy, then people start looking at maybe the front office, maybe the owner, things like that. And so what we were finding is that the coach is the easier one to, let's say, let go to sort of relieve that pressure. But there's going to be other things that are going to be involved there too in terms of there could be
Politics within the club, there could be just a lack of an overall strategic plan, expectations that don't match performance, those sorts of things as well.
So the study that we're talking about here, it focused on Brazilian soccer.
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Chapter 6: What are best practices for first psychedelic experiences?
And of course, it could apply to hockey or football or baseball or all these other things. But Brazilian soccer, famous for rapid fire coach changing. Rapid fire firings, I suppose, is one way to put it. What makes this sport in this country such a good case study for how the blame game plays out?
Well, I think you just mentioned it. Even in comparison to other sports leagues around the world, it's not just North America, but if we think about Europe, Asia, and Australia, we see a lot of turnover within the coaching profession.
And so with my co-authors, one of which had good connections within Brazilian football, we felt that this would be a good place to study this phenomenon that occurs all over, but it occurs at such...
higher rate than what we generally observe in other parts of the world that putting those two things together we thought this would be a really good context to study with the hope that at the end of the day what we find there could be generalized to some of these other places much closer to maybe our home but also other places in the world.
Okay, so our favorite team is losing. Coach gets fired.
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Chapter 7: Why is the 2016 throwback photo trend considered annoying?
We might be happy about it. We might blame the coach. This is just my perception as a fan. What is the reality? What happens when a coach gets fired? Does the team magically do better? What's the team's performance? What's going on psychologically inside that team? The perception of the fan to the reality of a coach dismissal. Is there a gap there?
Chapter 8: How to navigate attraction to a coworker while in a relationship?
So there's two things I think we need to think about. First of all, when a coach is fired or resigned or whatever, it creates some instability within the organization, right? And in these cases that we're examining within Brazilian football, the instability is from generally coaches getting let go, right? But even if they resign at the end of the year, there's some level of instability, right?
And one of the reasons that we wanted to study this phenomenon from a scapegoating perspective is that prior to doing this study, I and my co-authors and other academics who have studied this in many different sports leagues, one of the predominant findings that we had in relation to coaching dismissals and organizational performance found that performance didn't improve.
And when we look across different leagues, there was no change in performance. And with that, then we started trying to understand, well, then why are we doing it? And that's what led to this study. So, yeah, you might have an anecdotal example of maybe a coach doing better or a team doing better once a coaching change occurs.
But when we look at it sort of in the aggregate over time, we just don't see performance-changing performance
based upon the changing in the coach. So what would you recommend to the management of a team? Don't default to firing the coach or does that fix kind of just a PR problem, but not the actual problem?
Well, part of it is part of it, I would say, is a PR problem. The other thing that we find, not necessarily in this study, but then in terms of the general literature, is part of it is new coaches need time. Right. And especially in today's society, we want things a lot quicker than what it may take to to occur.
And so I think part of the part of this is showing some of these other mechanisms and and saying, well, why do we do this? And like I said, could be media pressure. It could be internal politics, could be expectations that are way too high.
But at the end of the day, while they may lead to the organization deciding to change its coach, one of the things that we find in the literature is that you still have to give some coach some time, and sometimes that just doesn't happen.
So is the recommendation don't fire the coach, work on the problems in the team rather than just imagine that there's this quick fix? Is that the big takeaway?
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