All Smiles and Glory Holes: Coaching Carousel Wrap-Up

Secret liaisons, swapped-out sugar daddies and coaches with "good baggage" reveal the repressed Freudian undercarriage of the NFL's psyche.

The Jacksonville Jaguars fired their head coach at the end of the 2024 regular season but retained Trent Baalke, their overcaffeinated mongoose of a general manager. They interviewed some high-profile coaching candidates, including Liam Coen, but those candidates backed away, as one might instinctively do when face-to-face with an overcaffeinated mongoose.

Jaguars owner Shad Khan slowly put two and two together and fired the mongoose. Then Coen, who had just leapt back into the open arms of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, engaged in the sort of skullduggery that ruined your sister’s marriage. The Jaguars got their man, but nothing good has ever come from a top-secret drive across Florida.

And that rejected rough draft for a Carl Hiaasen novel was not even the stupidest NFL head coaching decision of last Friday.

Jerry Jones forgot to extend his coaches’ contracts the way other senior citizens forget to pay their water bills. Mike McCarthy and the others were gone for a solid week before Jerrah noticed there was no one around to cut the tips off his cigars. Kellen Moore emerged as the leading candidate for the Cowboys job, perhaps because Stephen Jones alertly scrubbed the photos of Deion Sanders and Jason Witten from his father’s AARP-approved picturephone. But Jerrah grew tired of waiting for the Eagles to lose a playoff game and called Brian Schottenheimer, who probably had not yet cleaned out the offensive coordinator’s office and emphatically had zero other job offers on the table.

And lo, after 25 years of coasting on his father’s reputation, Schottenheimer became the head coach of the Team Inertia and Indecision Built. A traditional failson would have flunked his first head coaching gig 10 years ago, but Schottenheimer is something of a reverse savant. Jones actually said that he liked Schottenheimer’s baggage, which is slightly revelatory based on some of Jerrah’s other remarks; more on those in a moment.

Tom Brady, who bought a share of the Raiders organization last year, has drawn a dotted line on the org chart from the base of Mark Davis’ overcooked-linguini spine straight through his own restless ego and then back to the top of football operations.

Brady and Davis talked themselves into believing Ben Johnson was a done deal. But when Johnson chose a franchise that isn’t being run like a failing casino, they rage-quit the traditional coaching search and lured 73-year old Pete Carroll out of not-quite retirement. Ebullient and lovable but a little out-of-touch with the times, Carroll is the perfect Vegas lounge act: Wayne Newton with a whistle.

This year’s coaching carousel is made up almost entirely of stories like these. Yes, the Bears courted and hired Johnson in the traditional way. The Jets tried to do the same thing with Aaron Glenn, but it turned into a 36-hour hostage drama: The Taking of Florham Park 1-2-3. The Patriots opted out of the whole process by calling an old friend to be their head coach, and that old friend called his old friend to come back as offensive coordinator; a functional organization would have turned Josh McDaniels’ bedroom into an office or fitness room for mom, but Joshy’s old trophies and toys were still on the shelves when he returned to Foxboro.

Oh, and the Saints’ coaching search was delayed for a week by snow. Remember when real football men were the sort who walked uphill to and from school as children? Now their Zoom cameras don’t work if the temperature in Dixie falls below freezing.

Look, we have all seen NFL teams make awful hiring decisions. It’s a January tradition. But at least herd mentality rescued NFL owners from their own idiocy: all they had to do is hire a coordinator from a superior team to project some measure of baseline competence. NFL owners now appear incapable of managing a Google calendar, operating a telephone or even clarifying who is really in charge of football operations. NFL organizations used to run on autopilot. Now they run on mood swings, fever dreams and barely-concealed Freudian impulses.

Coen himself sounded unprepared for his Jaguars introductory press conference. His attempt to replicate the signature DUUUUVAL chant fell short of a war cry and landed at Marilyn Monroe cooing “Happy Birthday, Mister President.” Baalke must have heard Coen’s awkward theater-kid stylings and cackled so hard that he spit out the cobra head he was munching on. It’s a wonder Robert Duvall didn’t stagger onto stage and kick the s**t out of Coen for it.

See the comparison for yourself:

It was initially reported that Coen fibbed about his son’s illness to slip off to Jacksonville for a post-Baalke interview. It turns out that Coen’s son indeed had a medical appointment in Jacksonville (source: the already-beleaguered Mrs. Coen), so why not multitask? Heck, Adam Gase left his wife in the delivery room minutes after their child was born to attend a meeting with Peyton Manning, and what a success he turned out to be!

So Coen begins his Jaguars tenure with a superior’s firing, an embarrassing viral meme and a two-team scandal that dragged his wife and child into the public eye. Nowhere to go but up. Are we sure it’s Tony Khan who runs the scripted sports entertainment organization?