Nope Saints going with Dennis Allen.
This was my guess last season, but I think Culley nixed it. That’s the thing about HCs. I think they wanted McCown to be QBs coach or OC, but it’s one thing to give him a 2 year contract instead of a standard 4 but altogether another to allow somebody else to dictate who gets a high position on his staff.
Maybe Smith will agree to put McCown on his staff, but I kind of doubt it.
No for two reasons. First is he’s not going to another team and second is he hasn’t been in Houston for 2 seasons. The rule is intended to encourage teams to develop minority coaches, and one season is not considered enough to count as adequate development (also kind of ignoring the fact that he had been a fairly long tenured HC already and there’s not much ‘development’ Houston could really do for him).
Christ on a bike. The owners must want to be sued into oblivion. Talk about retreads.
As I mentioned earlier, Smith’s final 10-6 season with the Bears started 7-1, but they collapsed 3-5 down the stretch with the offense completely falling apart. After four years of not finding an offensive coordinator who could make anything happen with Jay Cutler at QB management decided the problem was Smith. (Of course, Cutler was utterly coach-proof, but the Bears were stuck with him. Smith, not so much.)
Most of Smith’s players were and are loyal. He’s a decent man and a good coach. But it seems pretty clear that he lost his edge a long time ago, and IMO this is a really sad move by Houston when there are lots of young Black coaches with a lot more upside they could have hired.
The Super Bowl year was great, but over the next six years he only had 3 winning seasons and one trip to the playoffs. He cycled through OCs and his defense never really changed. It was fairly obvious that the Bears would always just be “okay” with Lovie, never great.
Almost makes you wonder why they wasted essentially a whole day of both their and Bieniemy’s time. Maintaining the illusion, I guess.
Good thing they brought in Matt Nagy to finally put them over the top! LOL
The organization’s been pathetically run since the decision to fire Smith. (You could argue it goes all the way back to the 2009 Cutler trade.) We’ve had a string of GMs and coaches all acting with the mentality that the team was on the brink of Super Bowl contention.
I hope the new guys recognize it’s time for a near-total tear-down. We’ll see.
Seven years ago, when the Bears fired Marc Trestman, there was a rare statement from the McCaskey family about the team’s direction, in which George McCaskey said that his mom, Virginia, was “pissed off.”
They’re now on their third coach and second GM since then, and things have gotten no better.
Little early to judge the third coach and second GM there.
As a fan, I can only hope Poles will exercise more patience than Pace, whose tendency to trade away first round picks for homeruns (Mack, Fields) and trade away lower picks for guys he just had to have has left the roster thin and draft capital thinner.
Fields may yet prove to be worth the picks, but with so little talent around him we may not know until 2023.
I wasn’t really trying to judge Poles or Eberflus (because, you’re right, they are brand new), so much as to note that the Bears, as an organization, are still flailing at finding the right people to lead the team.
I’ve been absorbed in some other things and have missed most of the drama this past week. But nonetheless I want to toss a couple comments out there.
I’m mildly bullish on the hire. Yes the Jags are a (perpetual) mess and Baalke is probably a anchor around this teams’ prospects, but the Pederson hiring makes a ton of sense. He’s a pretty recent Super Bowl winner, and that wasn’t some cakewalk. He ran a team that made Nick Foles and Carson Wentz legitimate stars. Wentz was getting serious buzz and the MVP favorite and Foles run was nearly unprecedented in the playoffs. This strikes me as a man who can get the franchise’s most important asset in Trevor Lawrence pointed in the right direction. He’s an infinitely better choice than Meyer even when you ignore the toxic personality issues.
And I don’t really know why the wheels came off in Philly, but after the Super Bowl his offensive coaching staff was absolutely ravaged. Reich left for Indy (and has been fairly successful) and DiFilippo bailed for Minnesota. They ended up promoting from within. Not totally shocking that the offense regressed. A few years later they ended up with such a dearth that they didn’t have have a OC, Pederson was doing that and being the OC which isn’t a great situation.
Now, perhaps Pederson was a nightmare to work with so his coaches were eager to jump at any promotion offered. Maybe he’s arrogant or stubborn and that’s why they were stuck promoting from within and never seemed able to inject anyone with new ideas. Or maybe the front office was being cheap or otherwise meddling and making everything twice as hard as it needed to be. We probably won’t know.
The Jags hired a SB winner with a pretty good pedigree at developing a highly drafted QBs with similar traits to Lawrence. He’s also a “traditional” hire and likely a stabilizing influence after the Meyer shit show. For all his flaws, he’s not a guy who’ll be learning on the job like Leftwich would have been. He’s a proven executive which is important when the team is a garbage fire. I might be able to make a case that Pederson is the BEST hire of this offseason.
Nothing against the guy and I respect how he identifies, but wow the optics of hiring a “multiracial” guy who looks like him are rough. I’m a little surprised that the Dolphins in the wake of the Flores news didn’t get more heat for this hire. Perhaps he’s great and fully qualified, but his identifying as multiracial while looking like Jermaine from Flight of the Conchords is kind of cringe under the circumstances.
I wonder if ownership is telling him that he’s stuck with Tua or if they’ll let him cut bait.
McCown is a big time god-squader. It’s completely predictable that these jamokes would fall in love with him. He’s wildly unqualified for even an OC position, just like they were to be executives. That said, I’m kind of expecting him to be a pretty good coach one day is that’s what he wants to do. Him being a middling QB has nothing to do with his ability to coach. What I think matters is that he’s generally beloved by almost every coach and team mate that he had. There’s a reason that in spite of being a pretty subpar QB he constantly was being brought in as a teams 3rd string QB, he’s smart enough to pick up any playbook or terminology, was always prepared and added value in the QB room. He’s made to be a coach I think. The fact he’s been on so many teams under so many coaches also indicates that he’s seen it all and probably has a pretty good idea what does and doesn’t work. He probably shouldn’t be a HC now, but I’d take him as my QB Coach every day and twice on Sunday.
It’s hilarious that the Texans hired Lovie. As a Bears fan and Illinois grad…I’ve seen more of Lovie than any person who’s not his family should. He’s not a good coach. He’s a solid human being and I think his players will give a shit, but he’s not very sharp and he’s not creative. The Texans will be a Fisher-Price team with some of the simplest and most predictable plans. Davis Mills will probably regress badly.
What I’ve heard is that people absolutely love him, he is very smart, and he is dedicated. I agree with you that he might be a great coach someday.
But definitely not today.
I think he should get a foot in the door somewhere and start getting that coaching experience at the NFL level. QB Coach seems like a natural start to me.
The idea that anyone was considering him for a Head Coach position now, though, is insane.
The things is, though, it shouldn’t be what passes as the Houston’s ‘brain trust’ giving him that shot. It should be a coach or school somewhere hiring McCown as an assistant, at least at a East Podunk college out in the sticks or a high school looking for a new coach. Or even an NFL head coach trying things out (but even this smacks of favoritism).
I have little doubt he deserves to start getting some more coaching experience, but there aren’t that many NFL slots, even at lower levels. Does he really deserve one at the relatively high level of QBs coach over other people who actually have put in the work and have the coaching bona fides already? I’ve consistently said no. One of the problems in coaching is favoritism leading to these sorts of hires through connections, and a former player with no real coaching experience being made a high level offensive assistant fits that mold.
That said, if he got a year or two as an offensive assistant at Directional U or even as a head coach at a high school for a couple seasons, I could see the jump to an NFL QBs coach being much less of a stretch.
I’m not commenting specifically on McCown here, about whom I know next to nothing, but in general I don’t have any problem with teams hiring former players as coaches, even if they have little to no coaching experience. I don’t think there’s necessarily any favoritism involved (unlike the blatant nepotism shown by head coaches hiring their family members). Playing in the NFL, particularly if you played for a long time and in a leadership position like QB or MLB, definitely counts as good experience in my book. Everything else aside, I certainly think years playing in the NFL can, in many cases, equal (or trump) years coaching at the college level.
That said, it would obviously be completely ludicrous to hire a former player with no coaching experience as a head coach.
I do.
With a few exceptions, they don’t end up being very good coaches. There was a discussion on this earlier in the thread, in fact. It may not be deliberate favoritism but former players get such anyway by virtue of familiarity with several of the people involved.
In theory, it can work out. In practice, their average quality is pretty low. Maybe McCown is one of the few diamonds in the rough, but hitting the jackpot doesn’t make playing the lottery a good idea in general. But we give the practice a pass with hiring former players because it “makes sense”, statistics and history be damned.
I don’t think I agree. I can think of quite a few former NFL players who have been successful coaches at various levels in the NFL:
- Dan Reeves, Don Shula, and Mike Ditka of course come to mind, all hugely successful
- Mike Vrabel is doing very well as a head coach right now
- Jim Harbaugh did very well in SF
- Eric Bieniemy, Byron Leftwich, Jerod Mayo are all successful coordinators being touted as possible HC candidates right now
I could go on.
Ok, agree to disagree. As I noted, the average level is pretty low for players jumping straight to the NFL.
For every Don Shula, you have a Norm van Brocklin or Otto Graham.
And note several entries on your list don’t even qualify:
Mike Vrabel didn’t jump straight to an NFL position - he was a college assistant for 3 seasons before jumping to the NFL level.
Jim Harbaugh was an assistant for his dad at Western Kentucky for several years before becoming an NFL assistant. And then coached college for almost a decade before another NFL job.
Leftwich didn’t even start as an assistant coach in the NFL. He was an intern.
Bieniemy started as a college assistant before his first NFL gig. And went back to college for a while before joining Andy Reid’s staff.
So, yeah, as I stated, if McCown got some experience as a college assistant or lower level NFL position, sure, that might be ok. That’s the trajectory of successful former player coaches. But jumping straight to an assistant level and being successful? I’ll repeat there’s not a great track record of that.
Yeah, this statement is completely unsupported by reality. There are probably more successful HCs and OC/DCs that come directly from the retired player pool than come from High School (!!!) or Directional School coaching experience. In fact, many current coaches got their first NFL job as a Quality Control or other entry level non-position coach without any lower level experience and rose through the ranks that way.