Ten things about the NFL coaching chaos that includes the Broncos:
1. I asked a league source to rank the six open head-coaching jobs. Their first response was, “Make it five. The Raiders aren’t firing their guy after last night.” (An amazing win over the Chargers). In order, they ranked it Denver, Miami, Chicago, Minnesota and Jacksonville. Why the Broncos at the top? The city of Denver, the potential to trade for a franchise quarterback and the chance to work with/for general manager George Paton.
2. Chicago (GM Ryan Pace/coach Matt Nagy), Minnesota (GM Rick Spielman/coach Mike Zimmer) and Miami (coach Brian Flores) made their moves early this morning. The Bears’ firings weren’t a surprise considering Pace went 0-for-2 in coaching hires (John Fox and Nagy). The Vikings firing Zimmer wasn’t a surprise (two consecutive years out of the playoffs), but the wide-spread theory was Spielman would slide into a football operations role and assist in the hiring of his replacement. But the Wilf family went the house-cleaning route.
3. There was a hue and cry about the Dolphins firing Flores. Why? They went 5-11, 10-6 and 9-8 under his watch (no playoff appearances) and finished fourth, second and third in the AFC East. Did they make progress? For sure. But he had three offensive coordinators and two defensive coordinators during his tenure and who knows what was going on behind the scenes with the working relationships between Flores and general manager Chris Grier?
4. Dolphins owner Stephen Ross told reporters: “I’ll take all responsibility. I am the owner of the team and if itap not working, itap up to me and this is why we’re making a change.” Flores will get interviews for the above openings, but he will need to answer tough questions about what happened in Miami.
5. Is it a risk hiring a head coach who was just fired? Among the current coaches, only Kansas City’s Andy Reid, who was fired by Philadelphia days before, has had sustained success. Dallas’ Mike McCarthy and Tampa Bay’s Bruce Arians each took a year off after being fired and retiring, respectively. Washington’s Ron Rivera was fired by Carolina mid-season and won the NFC East in his first year with WFT, but is 14-19 in two years. When Adam Gase was fired by Miami and quickly hired by the Jets, it didn’t work. That said, it did work for the Broncos with Fox, who went straight from Carolina to Denver.
6. Dan Quinn may be a better head coach the second time around after working as a coordinator for one year, given time to recalibrate what went wrong in Atlanta (and what worked) and thinking about the staff he would put together instead of doing it on the fly.
7. The league source ranked Minnesota behind Chicago because of the salary cap. The Bears have $40.9 million of cap space and the Vikings are $7.3 million over per Over The Cap. Plus, the Bears have quarterback Justin Fields. Because of Kirk Cousins’ contract ($45 million cap number in 2022), the Vikings need to interview candidates who are fine with Cousins for at least one year.
8. That the Bears and Vikings have general manager openings could benefit the Broncos’ search. If Chicago and Minnesota choose to go the traditional route of hiring the GM, who then hires the coach, the Broncos could get a two-week head start. As is usually the case, the expectation is every team will want to interview the same pool of candidates. Maybe Paton breaks the mold and interviews a college coach or maybe even a position coach.
9. A wild card is what Jacksonville does because owner Shad Khan appears to be a one-man search team. In January 2017, he employed a search committee … and promoted interim coach Doug Marrone. The presence of general manager Trent Baalke is expected to eliminate several candidates even with the presence of quarterback Trevor Lawrence. Baalke’s reputation isn’t great from his time in San Francisco and during his two years in the Jaguars’ front office, the team is 3-29.
10. If I’m Doug Pederson, who is free to interview right away, I canvas the league to see who else is interested besides Jacksonville; he interviewed with the Jaguars last week. Can he convince Minnesota or Chicago to hire him as coach and trust him to lead a general manager search? Does he wait out the Bears’ GM search because he wants to work with Fields?
