The first is that Pederson is okay, but not great. The Eagles had a winning record under him and had one championship. However, things ended pretty badly for him there:
He made some pretty bad decisions during the Eagles tailspin into mediocrity following their SB win. And then things soured between him and the front office:
That isn’t necessarily something that people want to deal with from a head coach. Maybe he has had time to get things straight and will get back to his winning ways, maybe getting fired was a wake-up call. Maybe the bad things that happened at the end of his time in Philidelphia weren’t his fault. But it made him not much of an inspired pick.
The other issue is that you are still stuck with Trent Baalke as GM.
If they had kicked out Baalke to get Leftwich that might have been a win-win. But now they still have the same-old, same-old. I don’t expect things to improve in Jacksonville this year.
But probably not “the” guy. He wasn’t even the Jags first pick this year. Take out the Super Bowl season, and he’s got exactly a 50% record as a head coach.
He’s safe, conventional and fits the typical mold. And that sort of thing I do disagree with. They’re going with safe instead of good. Basically, there’s not a lot wrong with him but there’s not a lot right with him, either.
But at least Trevor Lawrence won’t have a completely wasted season. So, the Jags are almost guaranteed to do better next year by virtue of having a competent coach but that’s still a far cry from being consistently competitive.
I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude about Harbaugh. I didn’t care for him when he was coaching the 49ers, as he always came off as an abrasive @$#.
But what I’ve heard is that he strolled into Minnesota absolutely certain that they were going to just offer him the job, and he was magnanimous enough to grace them with an acceptance if they made a good enough offer. On the contrary, the Vikings were treating it as a real interview and weren’t decided, and his entitlement probably didn’t do him any favors.
I realize that this is part of the story:
The reason had nothing to do with money or a contract because the Vikings did not offer Harbaugh the job, sources said. There do not appear to be any hard feelings on either side — just a realization that this was not the right fit.
But who is going to say otherwise? “This isn’t a right fit” is a boilerplate statement when a deal doesn’t go through and doesn’t really say anything. It’s a good, neutral explanation. Nobody’s going to say, “We thought he was a jerk and don’t want to work with a guy like that.”
I’ve heard speculation that he wanted more control, which isn’t really a jerkish thing to suggest in my opinion. He has coached in college and the NFL. In college a head coach is basically everything; coach, GM, recruiter. In the NFL you have to work with other people unless you have a deal like Belichick does, or O’Brien did with the Texans, where you have final say on everything. He left San Francisco after clashing with the front office, and went back to college, so I could understand if he wanted more power like a college HC if he was going back to the NFL.
But at the same time, I like to imagine the Vikings people wondering who this guy thought he was and being turned off by his attitude. Because I don’t like him.
As a kid rooting for the Miami Dolphins in the early 1990s, I remember that Doug Pederson was their third string QB, subbing behind Dan Marino (and some other backup, like Scott Mitchell), while being coached by Don Shula.
That doesn’t get a lot of mention, but one reason a team like the Jags might consider him a good fit is that they have a young QB who could benefit from some tutoring.
I agree with this. If I owned the Jags, Leftwich (one of the team’s best former QB, and a coach who has been working with Tom Brady) is the clear and obvious priority to be my head coach, and that would override any loyalty to a GM who hasn’t given me any particular reason to stick with him.
I’d be more concerned about whether Trevor Lawrence (my star QB) has a good rapport with the coach.
He also spent several seasons as a backup with the Packers, in two stints (behind Brett Favre, with Mike Holmgren and Mike Sherman as his coaches) and with the Eagles (behind Donovan McNabb, with Andy Reid as his coach). I agree, he had a lot of exposure to a lot of really good offensive minds (and quality coaches) during his playing career.
Blockquote
We thought he was a jerk and don’t want to work with a guy like that
That’s probably the answer here.
Zimmer wasn’t fired primarily for being a jerk, but in the last couple of years things started going south in his relations with the team and upper management. ZImmer never wanted Cousins, but was overruled by Spielman, and in turn was a big factor inn bringing both of them down.
The Vikings evidently learned nothing from the Herschel Walker fiasco in that if you have a chance to statistically upgrade your talent, you still don’t do it if you vastly overspend and if the talent isn’t a good fit for your style of team. Keenum didn’t have Cousins’s arm, but at least he could scramble when about to be creamed when our offense line broke down as usual.
The last season things just got worse as far as his relation with the team, so the Vikings weren’t going to hire a replacement that was already known for having issues with the last NFL team he was on.
In the 2017 season I was pulling for the Vikings. I loved seeing Keenum stepping up in the playoffs and I wanted to see him in the Super Bowl that year. When the Eagles crushed them I was really bummed out. I thought it would be a really cool underdog story if they’d made it.
(Also I never liked Bradford and liked seeing Keenum take over from him.)
The Dolphins have named Mike McDaniel, the offensive coordinator for the 49ers, as their new head coach. He’s a young guy, who has never been a head coach before. He’s also sort of an easy going nerdy type, not an imposing traditional head coach. He might be a genius, or it could blow up in the team’s face. It’s nice to see a new person elevated to the ranks of head coach, instead of another retread, and as a Dolphin fan my hope springs eternal. But I do wonder if Miami is seen as a bit of a toxic place right now, give the Flores lawsuit. Did Miami have to settle?
Is it possible that, after all the furor about Blacks being denied head coaching opportunities, the only Black head coach hired this cycle will be a guy who flopped in Tampa and Champaign Illinois?
Although it looks like Eric Bieniemy might be the guy in New Orleans.
So, another caretaker retread for the Texans that they’ll get rid of in 1-2 years. Great.
But at a minimum, he’s almost certain to be better than Josh McCown. Even considering the low regard with which I hold Cal McNair and Jack Easterby, I’m still scratching my head over that one. He had few highlights in his journeyman QB career and his coaching career consists of assistant high school coaching gigs. “Who is Josh McCown?” is basically the Jeopardy answer to “A mediocre QB option teams opted to sign time and again, despite the availability of Kaepernick”
Methinks you underestimate Cal McNair’s utter stupidity and unrealistically high self-regard. One of the perks of being an owner is feeling entitled to ignore what anybody, even other owners, say if you don’t like it.
Lovie Smith was already the DC and assistant head coach. Bumping him up to head coach has the feel of a Plan G after Plans A-F failed due to a variety of factors, including incompetence on the part of Texans’ leadership.
One gets the feeling that if they had known this would happen, they would have held onto Culley for another season. They got ahead of themselves thinking they could easily land a coach they already had in mind (probably Flores).
I don’t know what happened in Tampa or Illinois, but Smith looked like a good coach in Chicago. 81-63 overall, made the playoffs 3 times, played in the Super Bowl, finished 10-6 and just missed the playoffs the season he was fired.
Someone more familiar with the Bears got any insight on why they felt like he wasn’t the right guy? Did he “lose the locker room” or was it something else?
The speculation I heard was that they still want McCown to be on the staff, as a lower-level coach. At the moment his coaching experience isn’t any higher than high school. He has zero experience in coaching anywhere in college or the NFL. So perhaps they give him a year or two in their system, then when they try again to make him head coach (maybe midseason when Lovie fails, because you can’t make a crème brûlée out of manure) they can say, “He has experience now!”
I guess that Easterby must really, really like McCown. He runs Houston (into the ground).
