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David_J_Balan comments on Joint Distributions and the Slow Spread of Good Ideas - Less Wrong
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But there has to be some irrationality in there somewhere. That is, if you place your job at risk by not buying IBM even when it is not the best choice, it has to be either that the person who gets to decide whether or not to fire you has wrong ideas, or that the people that person needs to satisfy have wrong ideas. So in the football example, if it's not the coaches, it has to be someone else, most likely the fans.
It seems like it would be rational to fire someone who diverged from traditional methods and then lost. Even though there's a correlation between running and winning, that doesn't show causation, and the coach might just be barking up the wrong tree. And then he's "someone who bet your money on some crazy idea", who doesn't seem like the sort of person you'd want working for you.
Of course, on Monday morning, we can easily tell that the coach should not be fired for this particular plan.
It's true that it can be rational to fire someone who doesn't buy IBM if the decision not to buy IBM constitutes evidence that worker is of low quality. But I don't think that's the case here. I think that if a football coach got fired for going for it on fourth down more often than most, he would have been fired because of that decision itself, not because going on fourth down represents a signal that he's just generally a bad coach.