Worst NFL Coaching Hires of the 21st Century (Pt.2)

Revenge of the College Football Super-Geniuses and Moneyball Evangelists!

In Part 1 of the Worst NFL Coaching Hires of the 21st Century …

• Greg Schiano turned the end-of-game victory kneel into the Battle of the Somme;

• Rod Marinelli declared himself the “one voice of leadership,” not noticing Matt Millen looking over his shoulder;

• Dave Campo proved that he was more of a muppet of a man than a very manly muppet;

• Nathaniel Hackett mismanaged the clock at the end of this series of bullet points;

And much more!

Now on to Part 2 of a series which is as much about terrible owners, general managers, ideas and hiring procedures as it is about terrible coaches.

10. Jim Zorn, Washington

Zorn was originally hired to be Washington’s offensive coordinator in 2008, even though the team had not yet selected a replacement for head coach Joe Gibbs. That’s right: Dan Snyder was selecting coordinators BEFORE selecting a head coach, so you know we are off to a rollicking start with this one.

Top candidates Jim Mora and Steve Spagnuolo, no doubt sensing a trainwreck in progress, pulled out of consideration after interviews. Gregg Williams, Gibbs’ defensive coordinator, lobbied hard for the job, with the support of some players. Snyder interviewed Williams four times … then outright fired him.

Snyder finally bumbled on the idea of promoting his newly-acquired offensive coordinator to head coach. Zorn, formerly the Seahawks quarterback coach, would be tasked with installing a version of Mike Holmgren’s successful West Coast Offense. Oh yeah: he would have to do it with several holdovers from Gibbs’ staff.

Shockingly, a meddlesome owner Frankensteining together a staff around a novice head coach did not result in success. Washington started the 2008 season 4-1 but finished 8-8, thanks in large part to a stout defense. When the team started the 2009 season 2-4 against a weak slate of opponents (all six teams came into their game against Washington winless), Snyder’s majordomo Vinny Cerrato stripped Zorn of his play-calling duties, giving the job to the recently retired Sherman Lewis, who had been calling Bingo games at a senior center and doing other volunteer work when Washington reached out to him to be a “consultant” two weeks earlier.

Fans who tuned in to Washington games in midseason were treated to images of Zorn, Lewis and offensive coordinator Sherman Smith (yes, two Shermans. Shermen?) in their own little Brady Bunch boxes, talking into headsets which may or may not have been plugged in. Meanwhile, prize free agent acquisition Albert Haynesworth signed a seven-year, $100-million contract and promptly took a nap on the field like a sleepy dragon, illustrating how little control anyone had over anything in Washington.

Zorn was little more than a figurehead when he was fired after the 2010 season. Snyder brought in two-time Super Bowl winner Mike Shanahan to restore order. Shanahan assembled a staff which soon included the young Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur and Mike McDaniel, plus his own son Kyle. Yet Washington STILL could not win anything. Such was the eldritch horror of Dan Snyder.

9. Joe Judge, New York Giants, 2020-21

Per Dan Duggan of The Athletic, the Giants first learned about Judge when they interviewed Patriots coordinators Josh McDaniels and Matt Patricia for their 2018 coaching vacancy. Both Bill Belichick assistants singled out Judge, then the Patriots special teams coordinator, as a colleague they would choose to add to their staff. The Giants hired Pat Shurmur instead, but they remembered the endorsement Judge received from two men who could potentially have made this countdown three times if we did not lump McDaniels’ two disasters into one (see Part 1). When Shurmur only lasted two years, the Giants hired Judge after getting outbid for Matt Rhule and passing on other candidates, including McDaniels again.

Not satisfied with being a mere Belichick knockoff, Judge was more of a McDaniels knockoff. At his first national press availability at the 2020 scouting combine, he refused to acknowledge anyone on the Giants roster as a “starter,” not even Saquon Barkley or Daniel Jones. That set the stage for a strange, suspicious and short tenure in which assistant coaches brawled with players and (allegedly) each other while the team itself appeared to spend more time devising clever punting tactics than trying to score or prevent points. An NFL Network report, later quoted by the New York Post, claimed that Judge and his Patriots pals “exuded an alarming aura of haughtiness” when addressing other coaches, and I now dearly wish I had written that phrase.

After a 29-3 loss to the Bears in the second-to-last game of the 2021 season, Judge launched into an 11-minute rant about how the 4-11 Giants had actually improved their culture under his guidance, despite all appearances. Telling what sounded like a mix of tall tales and self-serving half-truths, he sounded like a drunk explaining to a cab driver why his ex-wife should let him see the kids. The following week, Judge ordered two quarterback sneaks and a punt deep in Giants territory in the second quarter against Washington. Judge, whose job appeared to be safe before his postgame ramble, was fired a few days after the end of the season.

7. Chip Kelly, San Francisco 49ers, 2016

Kelly was a reasonable hire for the Eagles in 2013. He was smarter than your average college wunderkind, and he arrived in Philly with dozens of great ideas. Unfortunately, he also arrived with dozens of terrible ideas, but without the wisdom to tell the difference. The 2014 Eagles reached the playoffs at 10-6, but as Kelly’s organizational power grew, the team went backwards. By the time Kelly was fired after the 2015 season, he had engineered several disastrous trades, defenses had found the many “tells” in his up-tempo offense, and there were rumblings that he could not relate to many players – black players in particular.

The 49ers watched the Eagles fall apart and somehow decided, Yep, this is the guy to replace Jim Tomsula.

Colin Kaepernick began protesting systemic racism and police brutality during the National Anthem during the 49ers preseason in 2016, Kelly’s only season with the team. Contrary to what you may remember, the protests were not much of a locker-room distraction for the 49ers: demonstrations quickly became a league-wide story, and the news cycle spun FAST during that wild election year. Also, the 49ers were too awful for distractions to make any difference. Still, a coach with a reputation for tone-deafness on social issues was not the man for the moment. Kaepernick did a credible job running an offense that no longer fooled anyone, but the 49ers were dreadful on both sides of the ball, finishing 2-14.

"That year of my life was the worst time I've ever had playing football," veteran tackle Joe Staley said of the 49ers 2016 season on Pardon My Take a few years later.

Kelly, who won a power struggle with general manager Howie Roseman in Philly, also battled the ever-embattled Trent Baakle during his year in San Francisco. Kelly and Baalke were fired together, though Kelly reportedly found out from Adam Schefter’s ESPN report the morning of his final game.

Kelly went on to coach UCLA, where he still reportedly struggled to connect with some segments of his locker room. The 49ers replaced Baalke and Kelly with John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan. The jury’s still out, but at presstime that appeared to be a modest upgrade.

6. Steve Spurrier, Washington, 2002-03

Spurrier became a college coaching legend as a charming raconteur who lured prized recruits down to Gainesville to play in a Fun ‘n’ Gun system that showcased their talents better than the stodgy offenses of the 1990s. In the NFL, Spurrier’s rakish personality translated into a head coach who loaded his roster with former Florida Gators and left practices to his (often inexperienced) assistants if there were flurries in the forecast.

Washington signed Spurrier for $25-million over five years to replace Marty Schottenheimer, whose by-the-book style rankled veterans (most notably Deion Sanders) after just one season. Spurrier tried to make starting quarterbacks out of former Gators quarterbacks Shane Matthews and Danny Wuerffel, journeyman backups at the NFL level, with predictable results: Washington went 7-9 in Spurrier’s first year and 5-11 after Spurrier was forced to turn to Patrick Ramsey at quarterback. Players reportedly attended practice when and if they pleased; I’ve heard tales that when the weather got colder, Spurrier did the same.

Spurrier essentially resigned from the franchise by phone from the golf course a few days after the end of the second season. “This is the best thing for everyone concerned,” he told Mark Maske of the Washington Post that day. “I really believe that. They can start fresh with a new coaching staff, and I can start fresh with something else in my life.”

Spurrier returned to college success at South Carolina in 2005. Washington finally started fresh in the 2023 offseason.

5. Hue Jackson, Cleveland Browns, 2016-18

Jackson began his NFL career on Steve Spurrier’s staff in Washington. He was Bobby Petrino’s (read on) offensive coordinator for the Falcons. So he was born into this darkness. Tom Cable (see honorable mentions) named Jackson his Raiders offensive coordinator in 2010. Jackson then:

• Took over as the Raiders head coach when Cable was fired after the 2010 season;

• Assumed personnel control of the Raiders when Al Davis passed away in October of 2011;

• Almost immediately traded a first round pick and change to the Bengals for Carson Palmer; and

• Blew a gasket after an end-of-season loss that knocked the Raiders out of the playoffs, publicly criticizing his players and assistant coaches and suggesting he needed even more personnel power.

Instead of crowning Jackson emperor, Mark Davis hired Reggie McKenzie as general manager. McKenzie promptly fired Jackson. "He's going to gut this place," the media-savvy Jackson warned upon his dismissal. "He wants to bring in his own guys. No job is safe right now."

Most teams would look at Jackson’s whirlwind rise and fall with the Raiders and think, hmmm, perhaps this fellow should not be granted too much power. But the Browns are different. Owner Jimmy Haslam hired baseball Moneyball expert Paul DePodesta to essentially make the team bad on purpose until it amassed a pirate’s treasure of draft picks and cap space. DePodesta and new general manager Sashi Brown somehow decided that Jackson was the perfect head coach for their grand experiment.

Jackson initially thrived in a topsy-turvy realm where losses were viewed as theoretical long-range victories. The Browns went 1-15, which was great. Then they went 0-16, which was even better! But Haslam blinked during that winless 2017 season. He fired Brown in December, perhaps noting that the Eagles were on their way to the Super Bowl after trading draft picks to the Browns to move up and select Carson Wentz in defiance of the sacred tenets of Moneyball. Old-school football guy John Dorsey replaced Brown, veteran offensive coordinator Todd Haley joined Jackson’s staff, and the team drafted Baker Mayfield as their quarterback of a future which was supposed to begin immediately.

Jackson refused to let Mayfield even compete with Tyrod Taylor for the starting job in training camp, claiming that the rookie may need to ride the bench for a full season. HBO Hard Knocks cameras caught Jackson pulling rank on a visibly irritated Haley during a meeting. When Mayfield finally took over at quarterback, Jackson and Haley quarreled over game plans. Jackson finally went to Haslam to complain about Haley in October of 2018. Haslam fired both of them.

In the wake of Brian Flores’ lawsuit against the Dolphins, Jackson later claimed that he was also “incentivized” to lose games when he coached the Browns. He quickly backtracked on those claims, even though the Browns stopped just short of making losing on purpose their mission statement (and garnering praise for it in some circles) in 2016 and 2017.

The Browns front office and coaching staff spent their brief evangelical Moneyball era playing power games that had absolutely nothing to do with football. In that sense, Jackson really was the right man for the job.

4. Freddie Kitchens, Cleveland Browns, 2019

You thought we were done with the Browns? We are NEVER done with the Browns!

When last we checked in on the Dark Moneyball Saga, Hue Jackson and Todd Haley tumbled off a cliff and into the sea while strangling each other. While Gregg Williams (who keeps popping up as a supporting character in this countdown) replaced Jackson as head coach, Baker Mayfield and the Browns offense were left in the hands of a committee of position coaches led by running backs coach Freddie Kitchens, a longtime Cardinals assistant. Kitchens deployed lots of trick plays and wrinkles, helping Mayfield get comfortable while earning the Browns a few late-season wins.

After the 2018 season, the Moneyball faction of the Browns front office wanted to hire current Browns coach Kevin Stefanski (then the Vikings offensive coordinator), but general manager John Dorsey preferred promoting Kitchens, and the Haslems (and Mayfield) sided with Dorsey.

As fate would have it, the lowly assistant who rose to prominence amid turmoil between warring organizational factions was not the man to provide the Browns with stability, leadership and direction. On the field, Kitchens bungled tactical decisions, once defending some bad goal-line play calls by admitting that “some of these situations are new for me.” Mayfield backslid, Odell Beckham floated away to Total Drama Island and Myles Garrett plunked Mason Rudolph upside the head with the quarterback’s own helmet near the end of a Browns-Steelers game after Rudolph reportedly uttered some manner of slur. Off the field, Kitchens responded to rumors that he was not responsible for the previous season’s offensive success by threatening to fire any assistant who leaked information to the media.

The Browns fired Kitchens after a 6-10 season in 2019, hiring Stefanski in his place. Dorsey also got the ax in favor of Andrew Berry as guru-behind-the-curtain Paul DePodesta regained control of the organization with the promise of more of a red-letter denomination of Moneyball.

Which brings us to today, a Golden Age in Browns history where the folks who preached about the value of draft capital and cap space are dealing with the consequences of spending a quarter-billion dollars and three first-round picks on a quarterback who rarely plays. At least they made the playoffs!

4. Matt Patricia, Detroit Lions, 2018-20

Patricia is the archetypal bumbling beta-Belichick, a glorified functionary who learned nothing from his Sith master except how to act paranoid and dismissive.

Patricia replaced Jim Caldwell, whose Lions reached the playoffs twice and went 9-7 in his final year. Caldwell’s Lions were full of veteran professionals like Matthew Stafford and Darius Slay who certainly knew how to do their jobs. To Patricia, however, they were a bunch of losers steeped in a losing culture of losing. Fortunately, Patricia was there to teach them all the things he learned about winning while being dragged along on the coattails of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

Patricia and general manager Bob Quinn, another former Patriots worker bee, set about doing all the traditional things mediocre Belichick hangers-on had been doing since Josh McDaniels took over the Broncos. They larded the roster with former Patriots role players (15 of them by the end). They feuded with veterans, most memorably Slay. Patricia, who dresses like he raided the lost-and-found at a Waffle House, criticized a reporter for dressing poorly and slouching at a press conference. And of course: all Lions failures, during a 6-10 debut season and a 3-12-1 follow up, were because of the “losing culture” which might take years to fumigate.

The Lions fired both Quinn and Patricia after back-to-back blowout losses dropped the team to 4-7 in November of 2020. All of Patricia's “winning culture” rhetoric left a particularly toxic stench , especially against the backdrop of the NFL’s woeful history with minority coaches. Caldwell lost his job despite building a consistent winner; Patricia dismantled what Caldwell built, then blamed him for the results.

3. Bobby Petrino, Atlanta Falcons, 2007

When the Falcons hired Bobby Petrino just months after he signed a 10-year extension with University of Louisville, they should have seen what was coming.

OK, in fairness, no one could have seen what was coming: the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal, which broke in April of 2007, weeks after Petrino was hired. The NFL suspended Vick indefinitely in August, leaving Petrino to rotate among Joey Harrington, Chris Redman and Byron Leftwich at quarterback.

No one would have held a lost season after the Vick scandal against Petrino, who signed a five-year pact with the Falcons. But Petrino, who reportedly rankled veterans throughout the 2007 season, was notorious for his wandering eye. In early December of 2007, Cowboys owner/University of Arkansas alumnus Jerry Jones called Falcons owner Arthur Blank to inform him that Arkansas planned to court Petrino. Blank secured assurances from Petrino, only to receive a resignation by phone one day later, after a 34-14 loss to the Saints, with three games left on the schedule.

At least Blank got a phone call. Players received an infamous letter:

"Atlanta Falcons Players,

"Out of my respect for you, I am letting you know that, with a heavy heart, I resigned today as the Head Coach of the Atlanta Falcons. This decision was not easy, but it was made in the best interest of me and my family. While my desire would have been to finish out what has been a difficult season for us all, circumstances did not allow me to do that. I appreciate your hard work and wish you the best.

Sincerely, Bobby Petrino."

Safety Lawyer Milloy drew a red letter “X” and the word “Coward” over his copy of the letter, which succinctly expressed how players felt.

The married Petrino was fired by Arkansas in 2012 for hiring his paramour to a university job, a scandal which made news when the couple were involved in a motorcycle accident on a country road. That’s the sort of behavior which renders an individual permanently unemployable in coaching and academic circles. Just kidding! Petrino is coaching at Arkansas again. Consequences are for peasants!

2. Adam Gase, Jets

Some head coaches stammer nervously through their introductory press conferences. Some fall back on boring platitudes about being aggressive or establishing the run. Only Adam Gase acted like the teenager dropping LSD for the first time in a 1970s after school special:

Gase coached the Dolphins from 2016 through 2018, going 10-6 in his first year and 13-19 in the next two. He was fired after the 2018 season amidst reports that he was trying to obtain more personnel power. Some then-current and former Dolphins celebrated Gase’s departure rather publicly.

The Jets played the Dolphins twice per year during Gase’s tenure. They had to know what was going on in Miami. But Gase has a very influential ally in Peyton Manning, whom he coached with the Broncos. Manning endorsed Gase. The Jets chose him over eight candidates, including Mike McCarthy. Jets fans howled, especially after Gase acted like The Riddler in that opening presser.

"I'm not trying to win Twitter,” team CEO Christopher Johnson said the day Gase was introduced. “I'm trying to win football games. I think we're going to win some football games here."

Johnson was wrong. Gase picked up where he left off in Miami. He clashed with general manager Mike Macgagnan, who was fired in favor of Joe Douglas. He clashed with veterans like Le’Veon Bell and Jamal Adams. He fired defensive coordinator Gregg Williams (there’s that man again) after a last-second loss. All the while, Gase failed to develop Sam Darnold into Ryan Tannehill, let alone Manning.

The Gase hire represents everything wrong with the NFL’s head coach selection process: copycatting, behind-the-scenes glad-handing, wishful thinking, institutional arrogance and a culture that rewards blame-shifting, Machiavellian backroom politicking and sleep deprivation. A braying delusional paranoiac probably would not succeed as an NFL head coach. He would, however, get at least two opportunities.

1. Urban Meyer, Jacksonville Jaguars, 2021

There was no excuse for hiring a college coaching supergenius out of the broadcast booth in 2021. Look at this countdown: Bobby Petrino, Steve Spurrier, Dennis Erickson, Greg Schiano, Chip Kelly, Jon Gruden, Matt Millen. The Jaguars had so many cautionary tales to choose from. College legend AND television personality is the ultimate double whammy: extreme entitlement, overestimation of one’s own brilliance, acclimation to a relatively comfy life as a campus emperor or a know-it-all in a broadcast studio.

You probably remember many of Meyer’s highlights in Jacksonville:

• Asking assistant coaches who 99 on the Los Angeles Rams was;

• Signing Tim Tebow, out of the NFL for many years, as a tight end;

• Incurring fines for violating offseason practice policies;

• Benching James Robinson after a fumble, sending him back into the game with the Jaguars trailing by 30, then claiming that he wasn’t “in charge of” the running back rotation;

• Kicking a player during warmups;

• And of course skipping a team flight for a little R&R.

D.J. Chark, who broke a finger during one of Meyer’s too-intense practices, summed things up when Meyer was fired after 13 games. "He told us from day one that he was going to maximize our value. And I truly can't tell you one player that maximized their value on the Jags this year,"

Meyer combined the worst impulses and actions of all the campus patricians who entered the NFL before him, and managed to come up with one or two new ones (namely, kicking people), in the course of less than a calendar year. There will never be an NFL coach like him again.

Knowing the league, however, we will see a lot more coaches like the second-through-20th finishers on this countdown in the years to come.