We’re not all the way done yet, but I already think that this is about the weirdest Coaching Carousels that I can remember. Maybe it’s just because I paid close attention to this one, but I really feel like this had like 4 or 5 unprecedented things happen.
Chicago Bears - unexpectedly a pretty normal cycle, with the exception of some truly weird choices for interview requests.
New England Patriots - Hiring Vrabel is probably a pretty traditional move all things considered, but when you factor in the return of McDaniels for the 3rd stint as OC it gets a little wonkier. And the entire attempt to animate the corpse of the Belichick-Brady dynasty for the second time is kind of cringe.
Dallas Cowboys - Jerry Jones basically goes Weekend at Bernies for a week following the end of the season. Leaving McCarthy twisting in the wind and then has shocked Pikachu face when McCarthy bolts. He seems to have no plan at all and there’s speculation that fucking Deion Sanders was his offramp. Ultimately, he settles for a nepo-baby in Brian Schottenheimer who wasn’t really on anyone’s radar for a HC gig. Part of me figures that Jerry recognized the name Schottenheimer from the 90s and hired him out of reflex.
Las Vegas Raiders - Tom Brady becomes a minority owner of the team while also calling NFL games…which is weird on a lot of levels. He also seems to be already calling a lot of the shots there. They fire their GM after one year in spite of him having a pretty amazing draft, ostensibly because they believed it’d help them land Ben Johnson. Which maybe isn’t the craziest move, but you’d better confirm with Johnson that he’ll come before you pull that trigger. They end up hiring out of work and old as hell Pete Carroll which certainly feels like a bit of a panic move.
Jacksonville Jaguars - Perhaps the kookiest story of the bunch. They can Pederson but inexplicably keep Baalke. Everyone clowns them for it. Yet the organization somehow seems convinced that they are a top landing spot for Johnson. They go through all the motions and then they get spurned. They go to their second choice in Liam Coen who basically tells them that he wouldn’t work with Baalke with a gun to his head. He wrangles a raise out of Tampa to come home, but that contract says that he can’t negotiate with the Jags anymore. The Jags finally realize that Baalke is an albatross and can him 3 weeks too late. Coen basically calls in sick to avoid signing the contract with the Bucs while back channeling a deal to coach the Jags and presumably hand pick his GM. Daytime Soaps have fewer twists and turns.
New York Jets - The Motley Crew of guys they interviewed is wild. Rex Ryan? Mike Locksley? Ron Rivera? Brian Greise? And weirdly they couldn’t get Johnson, Coen, McCarthy or any of the other more popular candidates in for a talk. All this under the cloud of the Brick Johnson rumors. They ended up with Aaron Glenn which is a pretty conventional hire at the end of the day, but he’s another former player returning home.
San Francisco 49ers - Not on the level of the other ones, but Robert Saleh going straight back to the position he left is definitely a little strange.
The snowstorm which essentially shut down New Orleans for several days last week slowed down some of their in-person interviews
Their GM is intentionally taking a slow approach, for whatever reason
It also sounds like Mike McCarthy is likely to be on their short list, and though he interviewed with the Bears (as did a ton of other people), McCarthy didn’t seem to be a hot commodity otherwise.
Absolutely possible, though I believe that they would have had an opportunity to at least conduct a Zoom interview with those coordinators before their teams are knocked out of the playoffs.
This article on the schedules for interviewing indicates that the initial “window” for interviews with candidates on playoff teams was during the week before the Divisional Round (i.e., the week of January 15th).
After that window closed (i.e., on January 17th), if a team hasn’t already had an initial interview with a coach whose team is still alive after the divisional round (i.e., one of the four teams in the conference championships), they aren’t allowed to have a first interview with one of those coaches until after the Super Bowl – whether or not that coach’s team is playing in the Super Bowl.
However, if a team had already had an initial interview with a candidate who is in the Super Bowl (during the first window0, they can conduct a second interview during the bye week, which can actually be in-person – but can have no further contact with such a candidate during the week leading up to the Super Bowl.
Somewhat; the answer also varies if it takes them another week, versus if it takes them a month.
I suspect that the longer they take, the harder it’ll be to fill the assistant coach positions, especially if they (or their new HC) are interested in anyone who already has a job with another team.
The work that’ll need to be done to evaluate current players, decide who does and doesn’t fit in the new system, and then use that information to inform what the team will be doing in the draft (which is now exactly three months away), and in free agency, will wind up getting compressed. Other teams are already working on that; teams that got knocked out of the playoffs early (or didn’t make the playoffs at all) have been working on that for weeks.
And, with a new coach, and a new staff (many of whom won’t have previously worked together), a delay means that the coaching staff has less time to work on developing their systems for next season, as well as less time to build a rapport with each other before they begin to work directly with players.
The issues in New Orleans have been building for years and will likely require years to address. They’re looking at $50M they need to cut to get under the salary cap right now, and that’s not something a new coach can address. Actually, once they do figure it out, it almost certainly puts a new coach in a worse roster position.
If the Saints want to get out of that hole, they will need to be patient and give any new coach a couple seasons for understandable reasons, rather than expecting immediate results. In that case, the coming season is already more or less a bust, so that should give them an extra season to work with.
This is absolutely the case. Once you have your HC it takes a while to fill out every other coaching position. If you go through that too fast you might make mistakes and as you say your candidate pool shrinks.
The prevailing opinion here in the Seattle area (whether true or not) is that hiring Ryan Grubb as OC was a mistake, and there is hope that they can do better the second time around with more time to get it right.
Aside from being old, and who cares about that, where was the mistake here? What suggests “panic” here? He was very successful in Seattle and rebuilt a struggling team into a Super Bowl champion (almost twice) and perennial playoff contender for a decade. The culture changes he implemented are still going on after he left. Even if he’s only there a couple of years to get things started for another HC, he could be the best thing the franchise has had for over a generation. That team has had nothing going for a long time.
It may ultimately be the best head coaching hire made this year.
And, as I thought about it more, it probably particularly hurts hiring for the more senior assistant positions (OC, DC, passing game coordinator, etc.) – a lot of times, teams that are building out their coaching staffs will hire up-and-coming position coaches from other teams.
But, at this late juncture in the coaching-search process, the best of those (a) already got a promotion by jumping to another team, or (b) are already a month into their current team’s offseason work, and unlikely to make a jump to the Saints.
So, whoever the Saints choose as head coach, it’s likely that the rest of the coaching staff, at least for this year, is going to be (a) coaches who are currently unemployed (which, obviously, aren’t going to be “in demand” talent), or (b) holdovers from last year’s staff (which may or may not be good fits with the new HC).
The more I think about this, the more it surprises me just how slowly GM Mickey Loomis is taking this. He fired their old coach (Dennis Allen) halfway through the season, and I’m pretty sure that he had little interest in giving the interim coach (Darren Rizzi) the job on a permanent basis. Loomis has had three months to consider options, and he’s still just interviewing candidates, weeks after he was able to begin doing so? I would think that a GM, who’s known he’s going to be hiring a new head coach since November would have already put together his short list, and gotten initial interviews done with his lead candidates the moment that he was able to do so (i.e., three weeks ago).
maybe. We’ll see if he has anything left. There is no doubt that he was transformative in Seattle. But being a head coach in the NFL is an incredibly demanding, time consuming job that requires total commitment on the part of the coach and, at 73, it’s going to be a big ask of him. His stint in Seattle was great overall, but it kind of petered out and there were signs he was maybe losing his fastball at the end there. I always liked him so I hope he can still bring it.
We’ll see. He gives the appearance of someone who hasn’t lost a step; he certainly doesn’t look or sound his age. But could that be just his ability to look energetic, and is it hiding the toll of age that you can’t see behind closed doors? It’s possible, we’ll see.
Things weren’t that bad in Seattle when he left; he’d had a winning season the past two years and in 2023 his division was really tough; the 49ers won the NFC Championship that year and the Rams squeaked by them to slip into the playoffs ahead of Seattle. The year prior, Seattle made the playoffs.
I like the new HC in Seattle quite a bit but getting rid of Carroll was a bit hard to swallow because he wasn’t a failed coach and the team wasn’t floundering. It felt more like they just wanted to try something new than anything else.
But again, I guess we’ll see. Part of his success in Seattle was because of how good the GM was, and he and Pete worked so well together as a team. Without that partnership, he might not do as well.
Parenthetical: John Schneider, the Seahawks’ GM, attended my high school (a very small, Catholic, all-boys high school just outside of Green Bay). I didn’t know him at the time – he is six years younger than me – but when I was a teenager, I was good friends with his older sister.
Yep. He may have been, in some sense, a victim of his own success. Things were so good for so long that when they slipped, even a little, management may have panicked and thought a wholesale change was needed when really only slight tweaks might have been enough.
The continued successes really drive down a team’s draft status. A year or three of less than genius level picks and talent falls off. Coaching helps but skill level deteriorates.