Eh, this doesn’t prove that he thought Autry was the better coach. Autry had seniority. If you want your staff to be cool with each other, it’s usually a good idea not to leapfrog the senior person (who was doing their job completely satisfactorily) with a junior person. That’s a good way to lose the senior person, which puts you in the spot of having one less person you know you can rely on and can massively screw things up.
Naturally, those concerns go out the window when senior leadership is replacing the dude in charge. That’s when you can leapfrog because the expectation is that staff under the leader would be shaken up anyway.