Vance Joseph wanted to be in Denver badly enough, a decade ago, that he left for Miami. He is not one to hold grudges, as former colleague Marvin Lewis will tell it. But the nuances of the NFL’s hiring process frustrated him in 2015 and have rarely worked in his favor since.
Former Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak wanted Joseph, then the Bengals’ defensive backs coach, to be his defensive coordinator in Denver in 2015. Then-Denver general manager John Elway put in a slip to interview Joseph. Longtime Bengals head coach Lewis wanted Joseph to advance. But someone — as Lewis tells it — wandered upstairs to convince Bengals owner Mike Brown that Joseph was valuable enough to keep, and Lewis tried to convince Brown to no avail, and the Bengals blocked Joseph from leaving.
So a year later, Joseph left Cincinnati “because he was upset,” as Lewis said, to take the Dolphins’ defensive coordinator job. Another year later, Joseph landed the top job in Denver on the heels of Kubiak’s retirement and at the beginning of a transitional era.
The what-if, from Cincinnati’s 2015 blockade, is significant. Lewis was asked: If Joseph had already been immersed in Denver’s building for the two years before he succeeded Kubiak, would things have gone differently?
“It’s probably,” Lewis affirmed, “a really different outcome.”
Instead, the Broncos went 5-11 and 6-10 in two years before firing Joseph, sending him spiraling back down the rungs of an arbitrary NFL coaching ladder that is remarkably difficult to climb back up. The journey, since, has taken him back to Denver as a coordinator, in a remarkably humble move for a fired head coach — “no fear,” as Cowboys DC Christian Parker put it — only for the NFL to pass him up with each passing coaching cycle.
After he put together two straight seasons of top-three defenses in Denver, 10 head-coaching jobs came free this past NFL cycle. Five teams requested to interview Joseph. None of them chose to hire him.
As Joseph has built his resume, peers across the league point directly to him amid a troubling demographic trend across the NFL: it’s empirically difficult for Black coaches to earn a head-coaching job, and even more difficult to earn a second job.
“The success he’s had the last couple years in Denver, having the defense like he’s had, and building the credibility, credentials that he’s had — not to get a shot or another shot, is unbelievable to me,” Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles told reporters at the NFL owners’ meetings in March. “So, something has to be fixed.”
Joseph declined to be interviewed for this story, and had no hand in supporting it. In June, he told reporters it was “OK” he didn’t get a head-coaching job this past cycle.
“My focus now is to get back in position, and that’s winning games for the Broncos and being a great defense again,” Joseph said then. “It’s a process that is different every single year. I can’t be concerned about the outcomes. Just keep pushing forward, winning games and being in position to interview.”
Coaches close to Joseph have told The Post he remains undeterred. Some speak with near-outrage on a hiring system that — since 2018 — has excluded him.
“I’m not an owner, not a general manager,” Seahawks assistant head coach Leslie Frazier told The Post at February’s Super Bowl week in San Francisco. “But how does that happen? I just don’t get it. His resume should speak for itself. Disappointed. I hope that things will change.
“But when there are 10 jobs, and there’s not one Black coach who anyone feels is qualified or capable of leading their team — just makes me scratch my head. Itap just disappointing.”
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There are several plain and possible contributing factors across the NFL for Joseph’s extended and incomplete climb back to a head-coaching chair. Cleveland’s Todd Monken, for one, is the only head coach (60) hired this cycle who is older than Joseph and hasn’t won a Super Bowl as a head coach. Franchises, too, have increasingly shifted in recent years toward targeting young offensive play-callers in the Sean McVay mold, as one prominent NFL coaching agent told The Post. And, of course, Joseph doesn’t have a long string of head-coaching victories as a second-chance hire.
The league’s static progress in head-coaching diversity, though — just three Black head coaches are set to helm NFL teams in 2026 — is hard for many to ignore.
“There’s not many of them anywhere,” said former Browns head coach Hue Jackson. “And the numbers get worse. The numbers are as bad as itap ever been, now.”
There is a stark historical disparity, too, in the time between second chances for Black and white head coaches. According to coaching data collected and analyzed by The Denver Post, there have been nine Black head coaches and 29 white head coaches who coached in the 2000s, were fired from a head-coaching job and rehired by a different organization.
The average number of seasons between top jobs for Black coaches is 4.2, compared to 2.7 for white coaches.
This known disparity in falling back down the ladder, Jackson believes, can influence decisions to even approach head-coaching jobs
“I think a lot of guys that I know — are personally afraid to do it,” said Jackson, who hasn’t been an NFL head coach since a 3-36-1 tenure with the Browns from 2016 to 2018. “Because you have success, and you get this opportunity, and letap say you get it. Where do you go when itap over?”
“I think people have had an opportunity to see firsthand that if you do step out there and take that chance,” he continued later, “this is what could happen to you.”
Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores’s discrimination suit against the NFL, filed in February 2022, has ignited years of debate about the role of race in the league’s hiring practices. So has examination of the league’s long-standing “Rooney Rule,” . But key to this conversation, as several former Black head coaches spoke with The Post about, is the difficulty of Black coaches not only getting hired but also being rehired.
“In this business, they want to know, did you win or did you lose?” former Browns and Chiefs head coach Romeo Crennel told The Post. “And if you win, generally, you get a chance to stay. If you lose, now then – that becomes part of your resume, that you are a losing head coach. And so, when these people start looking for coaches, they aren’t crazy about hiring a black coach thatap a losing coach.
“And so, that makes it tougher for a black coach to get rehired.”
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Joseph began his football career as an option quarterback at the University of Colorado, where he overlapped with current Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy for a year. Both were members of Colorado’s chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, and Bieniemy — who is still close friends with Joseph — said both still live by an old fraternity motto: “Humility With Dignity.”
“He’s an outstanding communicator, and he’s one of the top damn NFL defensive coordinators in this business right now,” Bieniemy told The Post of Joseph in July. “And he deserves a shot.”
Joseph’s head-coaching stint in Denver remains a stain, overseeing two years of sluggish Broncos offenses that fielded four different starting quarterbacks. But those in the building from that era, still, take up for Joseph. The franchise’s fatal flaw in those 2017 and 2018 seasons, as former Broncos defensive coordinator Joe Woods indicated — now the Raiders’ defensive-passing game coordinator — was not aligning expectations with an objective assessment of the roster’s talent.
Kubiak was gone, after a 9-7 slip in 2016 from 2015’s Super Bowl title. Peyton Manning was a year retired, and the Broncos had already whiffed on 2016 first-round QB Paxton Lynch. Pro Bowl staples like Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders were entering the twilight of their careers, and Denver’s vaunted “No-Fly Zone” secondary was losing altitude.
“Probably one of the main things from Denver that (Joseph) learned is that, just from an organizational standpoint, that everybody has to be on the same path in terms of what the outlook is,” Woods said. “When we were there, we were coming off, ‘Hey, we were just in the Super Bowl in ‘15, we’re a couple pieces away.’ But I think really, at that time, we weren’t.”
The 2017 Broncos started 3-1 under Joseph and finished 2-10, starting three different quarterbacks. Veteran Case Keenum wasn’t the answer at quarterback a year later.
And still, former Denver tight end Virgil Green calls Joseph a “football wizard,” and ex-Broncos great Von Miller said Joseph did “the best job he could do” with the tools at his disposal.
“It was a hangover there,” Broncos great Von Miller told The Post this spring. “It had nothing to do with VJ’s coaching, or perspective. We, as far as recruiting, we had a hangover there. We were behind the ball as far as scouting, and getting guys in there that really could change, like, the organization. And we had missed that whole mark for that whole time VJ was there, and then leading up to VJ getting there. So VJ, he really didn’t have much to work with.
“VJ did an incredible job, as far as his managing of the team,” Miller continued. “His managing of the offense, of the defense, our schemes. We won some games that we should not have won, with the team that we had. We had trouble at the quarterback position. We had trouble everywhere. We didn’t have the No-Fly Zone. It was all types of things that were happening, and VJ managed it well.”
And Joseph, as Lewis told The Post, has been able to watch Denver’s roster-building strategy under Sean Payton and understand the need to build around a quarterback.
“You give him Peyton Manning,” Miller said, recounting Joseph’s head-coaching years, “we’re going to the Super Bowl. You give him a Josh Allen, you give him one of these great quarterbacks, we’re going to the Super Bowl.”
In Denver, now, players almost universally praise Joseph’s ability to relay complex, aggressive defensive schemes. His units have produced two straight seasons of franchise sack records, largely due to creative packages that use inside linebackers and nickel blitzes. And he stepped in seamlessly for Payton for two days this camp, when Denver’s head coach flew to Canton, Ohio, for Drew Brees’ Hall of Fame induction.
At one point during Joseph’s brief time in charge, nickel cornerback Ja’Quan McMillian went up to Joseph and told him: “Head coach looks good on you.”
“He’s a leader of men – like, he checks every single box,” All-Pro defensive lineman Zach Allen told The Post at the Pro Bowl in San Francisco in February. “I don’t know what the teams are looking for. But for us, itap good news. So we’ll take it.”
When will another team take Joseph, though? Most everyone in Denver’s building and Joseph’s orbit — and Joseph himself — remain expressively optimistic he’ll get a second chance. But luck in the NFL is fickle, and proven leadership hasn’t worked on its own accord.
Lewis laid out a hypothetical situation in which injuries befall the Broncos’ offense in 2026, the wins stop coming, and Joseph’s overall defensive impact from two previous seasons is lost in the weeds.
“That is my worry,” Lewis said. “That, really, is my worry.”
Joseph will walk into another head-coaching cycle, now, only able to control a handful of factors in front of him. But those who know him ultimately present the image of a man who will control those factors as well as anyone in his profession.
“Was Vance ready?” Kubiak said, asked if Joseph was ready in 2017. “Yeah, Vance is ready. I mean, he’s been ready for a long time.”
