My Google-fu is failing me today. A cow-orker and I were discussing the Super Bowl, and the question came up about which coach has had the most NFL losses. I’ve done a bunch of queries, but have come up empty, so I’m pinning my hopes on the teeming millions to come up with the answer.
A quick look on this page shows Dan Reeves with 165 losses if you just take regular season.
Tom Landry with 178 losses if you include post-season.
What about the NFL head coach with the worst win/loss percentage? A limit case is the poor schmuck who worked one real game & lost it; 0-1 for 0% win rate.
Assuming several such schmucks have existed, I’d guess the worst case is the coach with a 0% win rate over the most games, i.e. an 0-4 record would beat an 0-3 record for worst NFL coach ever.
The link provided above reveals that Hank Kuhlmann had an 0 and 5 record. But if you dig up the story, he was the Phoenix Cardinals running back coach named as an interim replacement for Gene Stallings, whom they dismissed mid-season. Under those circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that he lost the rest of the games. It might be more interesting to limit the question to non-interim coaches.
Using Petey’s link, I made a quick excel spreadsheet to figure this out. Several Results:
Hal Hunter, Hank Kuhlmann, and Dick Modzelewski all lost every game they coached. However, Hunter and Modzelewski only coached one game, and as yabob pointed out, Kuhlmann was an interim coach.
Bill Peterson has an epic record of 1-18, which gives him a 0.053 win percentage. He coached Houston for two seasons, 1972 and 1973, but he only coached parts of each season, not the whole way through, so he still qualifies as an interim coach by some definitions.
Rod Rust had a record of 1-15 in his single year of coaching the New England Patriots of 1990. Holding a 0.063 win percentage, he has the dubious honor of holding the worst overall record for anyone hired explicitly as a head coach, but he only coached one season.
Phil Handler was not an interim coach, and he led the Chicago Cardinals for five seasons - although only three consecutively. He coached the Cards from '43 to '45, and then again in '49 and '51, amassing an overall record of 4-34, a win percentage of 0.105. However, in '49 and '51 he was taking over as an interim coach, and even then he was co-coaching with Buddy Parker in '49 and Cecil Isbell in '51 - if we only look at non-interim coaching, he has an atrocious 1-29 record, blowing the rest of the competition out of the water with a winning percentage of 0.034.
There are some other interesting numbers out there. Worst record of any who have coached more than 40 games? Dick LeBeau, Cincinnati’s coach from 2000-2002, who was 12-33 (a 0.267 win percentage).
Worst record of a coach of more than 50 games? David Shula, who also coached Cincinnati, but in 1992-1996, compiling a 19-52 record (0.268 win percentage).
Worst record of a coach of more than 100 games? Marion Campbell, the coach of the Eagles and Falcons in the '80s, who won just 34 of his 114 games (0.296 win percentage).
Funny. Landry was my immediate guess on reading the OP. Great coach, but you can rack up a lot of losses when you coach a team for a hundred and twelve years …