Black Monday Preview

[Sons Of Shula]

By Don Banks

Like clockwork, there have been seven or eight head coaching changes made in the NFL in each of the past five offseasons. And once again the league’s annual firing/hiring cycle figures to wind up somewhere in that range, give or take an opening or two.

But if there’s an overriding theme emerging to this year’s exercise in bloodletting known as Black Monday—the day after the close of the NFL’s regular season, when heads traditionally roll—it’s that 2016’s pool of potential head coaching candidates isn’t considered to be particularly deep. So, okay, you want to fire your head coach. It's the question of who comes next that is the trickier part of the process for an NFL owner. Making sure you’ve upgraded rather than just changed a name plate on the office door is the key detail that so often gets overlooked.

According to league sources I talked to in recent days, factors that may contribute to the shallow depth of the head coaching candidate ranks include:

• The scarcity of winning teams, and thus winning coaching staffs to be raided, in 2015. Through the first 15 weeks of the season, losing or .500 teams (21) outnumber winning teams (11) almost 2-to-1. News flash: The hot offensive and defensive coordinator prospects are usually hot because their teams are having current success, and there’s not an excess of that unfolding in the league at the moment.

• The NFL is also in a cycle where many of the same teams are returning to the playoffs year after year and their coaching staffs have already been fairly well shopped in terms of head coaching candidates. Seattle, Cincinnati and Baltimore have all lost multiple coordinators to head coaching jobs in recent years, and the staffs of Green Bay, Arizona and Indianapolis have experienced a degree of talent drain as well.

• It was a perhaps unprecedented year in the league for coordinators getting fired during the season, with some of those let go being considered on-their-way-up coaches who were potential future head coaches this time last year. Fired offensive coordinators Pep Hamilton , Joe Lombardi and Bill Lazor all had a winning sheen at one point recently And you can probably add to that list Green Bay’s associate head coach/offense Tom Clements, who just had his play-calling duties removed by head coach Mike McCarthy.

• And lastly, the college ranks aren’t seen as ripe with head coaching candidates, perhaps partly a reflection that Chip Kelly’s struggles in Philadelphia may have scared away some owners from shopping in that market. Unless Alabama’s Nick Saban opts for a return to the NFL—which doesn’t appear likely—there are few names on campus that move the needle.

Some of the bigger headlines made in this year’s hiring cycle instead could be generated by the pursuit of either a current head coach like New Orleans’ Sean Payton or Indianapolis’s Chuck Pagano if they get to the market, or former head coaches such as New England offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, Cincinnati offensive coordinator Hue Jackson, ex-Lions head coach Jim Schwartz, Jacksonville offensive line coach Doug Marrone, offensive coordinator Todd Haley, Seattle offensive line coach Tom Cable, or perhaps even a wild-card choice like ex-Denver and Washington head coach Mike Shanahan.

Article is continued here: Black Monday Preview

 

[Bob512]

It will definitely be interesting to see how all this shakes out..........

 

[Martel13]

The offseason is actually more interesting as a Dolphin fan

 

[Fins1971]

Looks like Kelly is #1, who will be next?

 

[J. David Wannyheimer]

More likely than not:

McCoy (San Diego)
Pagano (Indy)
Caldwell (Detroit)
Coughlin (NYG)
That meathead in San Francisco

Unlikely, but possible:

Pettine (Browns)
Garrett (Cowboys)
Fisher (Rams)

And of course my personal favorite darkhorse, Rex Ryan. The Bills could finish 8-8, and one season of 8-8 usually isn't enough to get someone fired, but Rex Ryan's act is already wearing thin, it seems like. Also, what Todd Bowles did with the Jets perhaps indicates that Rex Ryan isn't the good coach some people thought him to be.

The Banks article is a good one because he raises the best point in all of this: there just aren't enough attractive candidates to go around. I think that in some of these situations (like San Diego), ownership could stand pat simply because there aren't any better options readily available.


I think Tomsula, Coughlin, and Pagano are the goners. The Giants are pretty much leaking it out there to anyone who will listen that it's time to move on, the 49ers are going through serious upheaval at the ownership level and changes are coming fast, and Pagano wants out as much as Irsay wants him out, maybe more.

Caldwell is the worst coach in the NFL now that Joe Philbin is on the street, and he will somehow survive on account of it being the Lions.