Failure Lubricates the Coaching Carousel

Bottom feeders feast on the corpse of the Lions, Mark Davis slips and calls Tom Brady "Dad," and Jerrah interviews whoever is nearby so he can go back to napping in his chair.

Jan 22, 2025

Thank heavens the Detroit Lions lost last weekend. If they had kept winning, the NFL coaching carousel would have kept spinning and spinning, like bald tires in a snowdrift, perhaps until after the Super Bowl.

The Lions loss freed reluctant debutante Ben Johnson to finally select a suitor, which then forced all the other coach-needy teams to stop daydreaming and turn to their second options.

The loss also made Johnson’s spot in Dan Campbell’s shadow a lot less comfortable, forcing him to stop playing wingman and make a choice. Sticking around for one year to chase a Super Bowl ring looked like prudence and loyalty. Hanging around for two years would make Johnson look like a beta male in a league that was using “alpha male” unironically long before the other weirdos adopted it. Also, turning the Washington Commanders down during the 2024 hiring cycle no longer looks very shrewd.

Johnson chose the Chicago Bears. It was the best possible pairing for both parties. The Bears hired the most ballyhooed offensive mastermind on the market to nurture Caleb Williams. Johnson gets Williams and a job with one of the few franchises on the market functional enough to conduct a traditional, grown-up head-coaching search.

Jets Day Afternoon

The Lions loss also cleared defensive consolation prize Aaron Glenn’s schedule so he could pursue advancement. Or, if that was unavailable, the New York Jets’ coaching vacancy.

Glenn met with the Jets on Tuesday the way papal conclaves met in medieval times. I imagine nearby residents locking the gates and tossing the contents of chamber pots over the walls to force those inside to make a decision. Glenn interviewed the Jets — it’s obvious who held the leverage in this hostage crisis — all through the day and way past this column’s initial deadline. By Wednesday morning, there was still no white smoke billowing from the chimneys at Florham Park.

Finally, Josina Anderson reported that Glenn planned to sign with the Jets late on Wednesday morning. I am publishing this without any final corroboration of that report. Life is too short and precious to waste two days waiting for the Jets.

The Jets should be commended (seriously) for their long history of hiring coaches of color: Herm Edwards, Todd Bowles, Robert Saleh, and soon Glenn. None of those coaches succeeded in any meaningful way, but all ended up looking slightly less ridiculous than Rex Ryan, Eric Mangini or Adam Gase, which is progress of a sort. Bowles now reaches the playoffs with the Buccaneers each year – and won a Super Bowl as their defensive coordinator – while Saleh just finished a second interview with the Jaguars. Glenn knows a stepping stone when he sees one.

Both the Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn hires get the Too Deep Zone Seal of Approval; in the Jets case, any adult in the room is better than Ryan and/or some fraternity pledges. I cannot help but wonder if either team would have waited through February if the Lions had kept winning. Would Joe Brady be the Bears head coach if the Ravens had successfully executed a two-point conversion, ever, in the franchise’s entire history? Would the Jets now be settling for Vance Joseph or siccing Brian Flores on Aaron Rodgers? (Now THAT would be Hard Knocks.) Is Kliff Kingsbury coordinating his way out of a second chance as a head coach?

Perhaps both the Bears and Jets got lucky that Mister Right also happened to be Mister Right Now.

There’s a Thin Line Between Waiting and Snoozing

According to the oddsmakers, incumbent offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer started the week as the favorite to become the next Dallas Cowboys coach, with a -250 moneyline. Kellen Moore and Kliff Kingsbury are at +250, Coach Prime is down to +750, and Jerry Jones just needing to lie down for a while and worry about all this later stands at -2000000000.

(The odds were posted before the Ben Johnson hire and have surely changed, but I don’t care.)

The source of the Schotten-speculation was initially radio host Shan Shariff, who is something of an arch-frenemy to Jerrah. By Tuesday, the Cowboys were officially planning to interview Schottenheimer, per more credible reports. Maybe Shariff talked Jerrah into it as revenge for their on-air tiff.

So far, the Cowboys have interviewed their former backup quarterback and coordinator Kellen Moore, as well as Saleh and Leslie Frazier. (Rooney Rule Achievement Badge Earned.) Coach Prime is apparently keeping his Chinook helicopter in Boulder until he is ready to follow Shedeur, while Jason Witten is just hanging around like one of those favorite nephews angling for a bigger birthday present.

Jerrah slumbered through the Lions bye week, apparently assuming that Mike McCarthy would end up back on his porch by suppertime like a hungry mutt. There are reports that the Cowboys didn’t see McCarthy’s departure coming, though they didn’t bother seriously discussing his contract, either. There has been a lot of that sort of thing going on in Dallas lately. Letting McCarthy walk while retaining Schottenheimer is like promoting Dwight Schrute to replace Michael Scott; special teams coordinator John Fassel, who was just hired by the Tennessee Titans, is the Jim Halpert in this scenario. The bottom line is that the Cowboys look way too much like Dunder Mifflin these days.

Handicappers, who are always one step ahead of the media and the public, have gotten wise to the fact that the Cowboys are keeping things as simple as possible for Jerrah. The smart money, in other words, is no longer on Jerrah the Cantankerous Scoundrel Who Does Things His Way, but on Jerrah Who Should Really Add Stephen’s Name to the Checking Account. The former may well have lured Coach Prime into JerryWorld, for better or worse. The latter is now making Woody Johnson look decisive and clear-headed by comparison.

Inbred Monarchy is The Patriots Way

At least Jerrah’s dithering can be interpreted as prudence. Robert Kraft is in a mad rush to demonstrate just how devoid of ideas the New England Patriots have become.

The Patriots hired Josh McDaniels as Mike Vrabel’s offensive coordinator in a feat of organizational contortionism: a football franchise plunging ever deeper into its own rectum until it vanishes in a non-Euclidean blip. McDaniels has been a complete failure every time he has strayed from Foxboro and all the scaffolding for his success with the Patriots is now long gone. Kraft is not even mythologizing the dynasty era anymore: he’s hoping to return the franchise to the faded glory of 2021, when McDaniels made Mac Jones look respectable through about six weeks of lopsided, defense-fueled victories over last-place opponents before turning into the cutest widdle Brady cosplayer in December.

At least some Patriots fans are slurping up this gloopy Vrabel/McDaniels chowder, because some Patriots fans are prone to magical thinking after a full generation of praying to these guys as patron saints. The rest of us are waiting for when Vrabel and McDaniels realize that they cannot achieve Bradyhood by growling at guys named Sidy Sow and start screaming at each other instead.

Saints? That sounds like a transition.

Rizzi Me This

You knew the coaching carousel had been spinning too long when teams began interviewing The Rizzler.

No, not the Batman villain. And no, not the viral sensation with his own Wikipedia entry. I mean Darren Rizzi, a longtime special teams coordinator who also has his own Wikipedia entry despite having far less cultural impact.

Rizzi took over as the Saints interim head coach after Dennis Allen essentially surrendered in midseason. The Saints interviewed Rizzi for the permanent job as a courtesy; only the Raiders are foolish enough to do such things as a non-courtesy. The Jets interviewed Rizzi as well, perhaps figuring an Italian guy from New Jersey would give them a little Tommy DeVito-like charm, or at least Danny DeVito-like charm.

(The Rizzler also appears to be an Italian lad from New Jersey. Am I the only one who didn’t get his own Wikipedia entry?)

Rizzi and Allen now appear to be joining Ben Johnson’s Bears staff as special teams and defensive coordinators: the second/fourth-fiddle roles they were born to play. The Saints, meanwhile, had their hearts/budget set on Glenn, who was an assistant coach for them under Sean Payton. Mickey Loomis and Gayle Benson are now plunging deeper into their Rolodexes: Mike Kafka and Anthony Weaver are both scheduled for second interviews for the Saints head coaching job.

I like Kafka. He propped Brian Daboll and Daniel Jones up during the Giants’ semi-charmed 2022 season. Daboll realized this, and also realized that many observers realized this, so he placed Kafka on super-secret probation. Kafka currently holds an Assistant Head Coach title, so he cannot interview for anything but head-coaching jobs elsewhere without the Giants’ permission (no escaping to replace Johnson in Detroit, for example), but Daboll yanked Kafka’s play-calling duties away in 2024 as a blame-deflection tactic for 2023. And look how well that turned out!

Weaver, a former Texans and Ravens assistant who spent 2024 as the Dolphins defensive coordinator, is the arithmetic mean between Mike Vrabel and Mike Macdonald. That makes him (whips out TI-83, replaces 15-year old AAA batteries, punches buttons) another Dennis Allen.

What does that mean for Klint Kubiak, the Saints offensive coordinator who briefly looked like the next Bill Walsh before we realized just how badly the Panthers and Cowboys stunk? Kubiak is one of the candidates to replace Ryan Grubb as the Seattle Seahawks’ offensive coordinator. The Seahawks keep searching for their very own Kyle Shanahan but keep ending up with their very own Brian Schottenheimers.

The Kafka and Weaver interviews were delayed by snowfall in New Orleans, which caused travel delays and general snow-in-the-Deep-South confusion, though not the realization that interviewing someone named Kafka to lead a team that has been suffering an existential crisis for three years just might be a bad omen. (The snowfall apparently kept Glenn from going straight from New Jersey to New Orleans. Fate may not favor the Jets, but sometimes she feels sorry for them.)

Cozy Non-Mysteries

So here is where we stand:

The Jets turned a simple hiring of one of their former players into a 36-hour Wagnerian saga as reimagined by Adam Sandler. Nothing surprising about that.
The Patriots are keeping things so incestuous that their 2025 highlight reel might be titled Vrabels in the Attic. Nothing surprising about that.
Jerrah wants to be surrounded by familiar, obedient faces: unsurprising.
The bottom feeders began feasting on the Lions’ corpse before it even sunk to the sea bottom: that’s what they do.
The Jaguars and Saints are run by two different flavors of autocratic general managers seeking malleable functionaries. Their final selections will be uninspired and, yes, unsurprising.

The coaching carousel, like a regular carousel, moves predictably and never really goes anywhere.

The only remaining source of spontaneity/creativity/hilarity among teams in need of head coaches is the Las Vegas Raiders, who talked themselves and their fanbase into believing that Johnson was a done deal last week for unfathomable reasons. (After last season’s Commanders-at-the-altar situation, no team should consider Johnson fully committed until he picks out his office furniture.)

The Raiders have conducted a downright diligent coaching search by their standards, interviewing Saleh, Todd Monken, Vance Joseph, Ron Rivera and even Steve Spagnuolo, among others. Yes, that list is rather long on defensive coordinators who failed hard (or, in Rivera’s case, ate way too many lunches off his success) as head coaches. But at least Mark Davis has a type.

Davis has another type, of course: huge-name coaching retreads. And Pete Carroll scratches both of Davis’ itches. Tashan Reed and Vic Tafur of The Athletic reported on Monday that the Raiders have already interviewed Carroll, who coached the Seahawks to a win in Super Bowl XLVIII, then spent a decade deftly riding the vibe wave straight into the surf shop.

Tom Brady now guides Davis’ hand, bringing some bitter-divorcee-seeking-new-hobbies energy to Davis’ semi-annual search for a dominant personality to tell him what to do. Or, more accurately, Brady IS that dominant personality, which would make Carroll a third wheel. Or even a fourth wheel: Maxx Crosby sure sounds sore that no one is letting him play the Aaron Rodgers-esque puppet master anymore. It’s all very complicated and Freudian. The Raiders power struggle would be compelling if it weren’t obvious that Brady can only lose it by wandering off to become a race-car driver or something.

And to think that Ben Johnson wanted no part of this. To say nothing of Coach Prime.

The Lions in Winter

The Lions are this week’s biggest losers, not just of a playoff game but of much of their coaching staff. Offensive line coach Hank Fraley is interviewing for the Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator job and will get other interviews if the Seahawks choose Kubiak instead. Passing-game coordinator Tanner Engstrand appears to be Ben Johnson’s heir apparent in Detroit, but Johnson and Campbell will arm-wrestle over key assistants like quarterbacks coach Mark Brunell. Glenn will similarly siphon off defensive coaching talent.

Having seen first-hand in Philly what coaching braindrain did to both Doug Pederson and (for one year) Nick Sirianni, I can assure you that Campbell must do much more than promote quality-control assistants and regale them with Braveheart speeches.

Campbell is one of the few NFL coaches self-confident enough to hire, say, Pederson and Rivera as his assistants without feeling threatened, thereby injecting both new voices and tons of experience into his staff. But the NFL coaching cycle just doesn’t work that way. Success is fleeting, but it begets further success. And failure? Well, that’s what makes the wheel go ‘round.