Tag: black Monday

Black Monday tracker: All the NFL head coaches fired after the 2023 season

Ron Rivera and Arthur Smith were the first coaches to be fired on Black Monday.

The 2023 NFL regular season is over. For 18 teams, that means the 2024 offseason has begun — and for a handful of them, so has the search for a new head coach.

This fall was a brutal one for struggling coaches. Three were set off on an ice floe in the midst of the season, relieved of their duties while games were still going on in an effort to stop their flaws from infecting their teams. They ranged from the revered (Frank Reich) to the reviled (Josh McDaniels) to the impossible to read (Brandon Staley).

That led us to January 8; the day after Week 18 informally known as Black Monday. More coaching shakeups are on the way. Here’s everyone that’s been fired, going from most recent (Ron Rivera and then Arthur Smith, who was relieved of his duties at 12:01 to kick off the day) to the first man out (Reich).

The top NFL coaching candidates (Jim Harbaugh!) of 2024: 11 names to watch as Black Monday 2024 approaches

A look at who could be the next head coaches in the NFL after Black Monday 2024.

The Monday after the end of the NFL regular season is a busy one for franchises not prepping for the postseason: Black Monday, as it’s known, is when some downtrodden teams fire their head coaches and begin the process of hiring someone who will lead the players next.

As of publishing this, Black Monday 2024 is a few days away, which means we’re focused on the names who could be out, but as we’ve done at times during the season, we can look at the coordinators, assistants and college coaches who could be elevated to the top job.

Here’s a look at the names being thrown around:

David Culley was only hired to be the Texans’ fall guy

David Culley outperformed expectations in Houston. It didn’t matter.

David Culley never had a chance.

The first-year head coach was a surprise hire when the Houston Texans tabbed him after more that 40 years as an assistant across the NFL and NCAA. He inherited a roster that had won four games the year prior. It had traded away or released the two greatest players in franchise history over the previous two offseasons. The lone bright spot in his lineup was a quarterback who didn’t want to be there and then couldn’t after more than 20 women accused Deshaun Watson of sexual misconduct in civil court.

Culley still managed to outperform the meager expectations heaped on a team expected only to lower the average ticket prices of whomever it played on the road. He won four games — including victories over the Titans and Chargers — and did just enough to keep Houston from the top overall pick in the 2022 NFL Draft.

That was enough to get him fired after one season.

It’s a crappy and transparent move from a crappy and transparent franchise. The Texans gave their first-year head coach a bare cupboard and a 33-man free agent class whose highest-paid member was a punter:

This year was never about winning; it was about getting 2021 over with and creating distance between the franchise and the disastrous end of the Bill O’Brien era. O’Brien was the one who bled the team’s cap space through poorly-planned contract extensions that helped necessitate the departures of J.J. Watt and DeAndre Hopkins. He was the reason the Texans had just one first round draft pick between 2018 and 2021.

He was the one who left Culley to guide a team where:

  • The primary quarterback, Davis Mills, was a third-round rookie who’d played only 14 games in college.
  • 31-year-old Rex Burkhead led the team in rushing, and 32-year-old Mark Ingram finished second despite being traded seven games into the season.
  • 41 percent of the team’s targets went to guys the playmaker-needy Patriots discarded (Burkhead, Brandin Cooks, Phillip Dorsett, Danny Amendola somehow).
  • The team’s high-priced middle linebacker, Zach Cunningham, stopped caring about any of this and wound up released, only to emerge as a starter for the AFC’s top-seeded Titans.

His reward for getting that group to four wins was never having to coach them again. Instead, Texans general manager Nick Caserio (a former Patriots executive) and executive vice president Jack Easterby (a former Patriots “character coach,” whatever the hell that is) cut him loose with their eyes on hiring former Patriots assistant Brian Flores, whom the Miami Dolphins fired on Black Monday.

It’s somehow both a common sense and desperation move. Culley knew he was a stopgap solution when Houston hired him; that’s why the franchise only guaranteed two of the five years on his contract when he signed. Now he’s free to join another NFL team or drop back into the college ranks, along with the kind of line item on his resume that necessitates a raise. He’s never lost sight of the feeling he made it to the mountaintop in the first place, even if coaching the Texans is the NFL version of the highest peak in Nebraska.

Houston gets its chance to prune the Belichick coaching tree once again while potentially adding a coach Watson reportedly mentioned in his trade requests. If Watson can’t play or still wants out, the franchise gets a chance to pair Mills with a guy who pushed Tua Tagovailoa and Ryan Fitzpatrick to 19 wins the past two seasons.

Whomever takes over in 2022 will have a significant head start on Culley, who’d effectively been lapped by the time he joined the race last winter.  Houston hired him to be the emperor of nothing, but now that the franchise wants to be something, his services are no longer needed. There still isn’t much young, franchise-building talent on the Texans roster, but the next man up will inherit a team in a better place than it was when Culley found it.

In most places that’d be called success. In Houston, it was grounds for a firing.

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Dennis Allen headlines potential Saints losses to 2022 hiring cycle

Which Saints coaches and execs could depart in the 2022 hiring cycle? Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen has to top the list, ass does assistant GM Jeff Ireland:

Few coaching staffs were hit harder last year than the New Orleans Saints, who lost a number of key position coaches to other teams around the league — including their former tight ends coach Dan Campbell, who took secondary coach Aaron Glenn with him to go rebuild the Detroit Lions. Longtime quarterbacks coach Joe Lombardi and defensive assistant Michael Wilhoite both joined Brandon Staley’s first-year Los Angeles Chargers regime.

Now the cycle is beginning again, and the Saints could experience more upheaval. So which of their coaches and executives could be on the move as jobs open up across the NFL? Whether they’re considered for a head coach position or a bigger role as a coordinator or assistant, the Saints have some attractive candidates on their roster. Let’s dig in, starting with the most obvious possible departure:

The New York Giants have opted out of the 2023 NFL Playoffs

By retaining Joe Judge, we know exactly who the 2022 Giants will be.

The New York Giants didn’t want to develop the reputation of a franchise that’s a revolving door for head coaches, so they decided to keep Joe Judge for a third season. In the process, they bolstered their reputation for employing doofuses.

Judge was a questionable hire with a limited background when he took the reins in 2020. In the two seasons since he’s 10-23. His teams have ranked 31st in a 32-team league in both yards gained and points scored each of those years. His defenses have looked respectable only through the fractured lens of the 2020 NFC East. His special teams units, Judge’s area of expertise, have failed to rank in the top 10 in DVOA in either of his two years at the helm.

He is, wildly and unavoidably, bad at this. And he’s the Giants’ head coach for what looks like one more season.

Judge, despite a six-game losing streak to end the season and an offense that scored 9.9 points per game following its Week 10 bye, will get one more chance to prove he isn’t just three raccoons stacked in a sweatsuit on the sideline. This is, by most accounts, a terrible decision.

New York could have dipped into a solid class of available coaching candidates to lead its latest attempt at a rebuild. The Giants could have hired former Super Bowl winner Doug Pederson as a direct shot across the bow of the division rival Eagles. Or they could have leaned on a longstanding tradition of beating the Patriots by hiring a guy who has done it three times in the past 13 months and hired the newly-deposed Brian Flores. They could have opted for a rising assistant coach with a resume beyond “special teams coordinator” and interviewed guys like Brian Daboll or Eric Bieniemy or Byron Leftwich, all of whom could have helped the team figure out if there’s any juice left to be squeezed from Daniel Jones.

But no. Instead New York opted to make a decision rivaled only in sheer stupidity by the Jaguars hiring Urban Meyer and then taking 10 months to fire him. They gave Joe Judge a Year Three.

The Giants are betting Judge can turn things around with a general manager capable of operating at a higher plane than newly-retired, formerly-disastrous Dave Gettleman. It won’t be hard to find someone better:

But Judge’s presence immediately hamstrings that search. It was bad enough the Giants were headed into the 2022 offseason with a massive question mark at quarterback, a woeful offense around him, and one of the league’s worst salary cap situations. Now this new general manager will have to convince veterans to play for the kind of guy who galaxy-brained himself into a third-and-9 quarterback sneak from his own four-yard line.

Judge is the same guy who reportedly lost the support of his locker room as his team imploded upon itself like a matchstick skyscraper. A coach who has only been compelled to make two challenges in his two seasons on the sideline and lost them both. A man whose special teams background forces him to preach from the bible of field position even though both his offense and defense are incapable of doing anything with it. A coach with so little control over his team that his players sparked a brawl on the very first day of in-pads practice last summer.

Fortunately, there’s a very real and very legitimate line of players champing at the opportunity to play for Judge in 2022, even if it means taking a pay cut. Or, at least, that was the scenario eight days earlier when Judge went on an 11-minute postgame rant describing all the players who’ve called him up to tell him how much they miss playing for him and how badly they want to play for Joe Judge again:

You know, standard successful head coach stuff.

Letting Gettleman retire before he could be fired but keeping Judge is a statement about New York’s willingness to enact meaningful change; there is none. The Giants just struggled through the kind of season that got Ben McAdoo fired, then looked at what happened after they fired McAdoo, shrugged, and kicked the can to 2023 instead.

Perhaps this is a covert tanking operation to provide an exit strategy for Jones in 2023, when he’s scheduled to be a free agent. Maybe New York daydreamed through Judge’s “Dad, you have no idea what I’m capable of” speech with visions of selecting Bryce Young first overall in 16 months. Maybe, hidden under layers of awful decisions, there’s a logic to all this.

But the more likely answer is a franchise that’s spun its wheels since Eli Manning lost his postseason magic is simply making the latest bad decision in a long string of them. Judge has done nothing to suggest he can be a successful NFL head coach. The Giants are rolling with him anyway, because if you’re going to hit rock bottom it helps to have a reliable drill bit.

The Miami Dolphins fired Brian Flores because they’ve seen this before

Firing Brian Flores is Miami’s latest attempt to escape NFL purgatory.

Brian Flores won 10 games in 2020 with an injured rookie and journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback. He took a team that plummeted to 1-7 to start 2021 and put it in the Wild Card hunt en route to a 9-8 campaign.

And now he’s out. The Miami Dolphins fired the head coach it hired out from under Bill Belichick in 2019 after three seasons, a 24-25 record, and zero playoff appearances.

It was the most shocking move of a Black Monday that claimed a handful of obvious names — Matt Nagy, Mike Zimmer — before lining Flores up on the chopping block. But while it was surprising to see the young coach go after an 8-1 finish to his season, it wasn’t unfamiliar. The Dolphins have seen this play out before.

Flores was the latest in a line of coaches who’ve been good enough to win games, but not strong enough to make noise in the postseason. They’ve had bad seasons, but not bad enough to spark a true rebuild. Miami, for the bulk of the 2000s, has been stuck in franchise limbo.

It’s been 21 years since the Dolphins last won a playoff game. The coach on the sideline for that game — an overtime win against the Colts led by quarterback Jay Fiedler and his three interceptions — was Dave Wannstadt. Wannstadt is also the last full-time Miami coach to leave town with a winning record. The lineup of coaches that followed him paints a clear picture of guys who were “kinda good, but not good enough.”

There’s a pattern here. The coaches who didn’t fall flat on their face (shoutout Cam Cameron!) hovered around .500 and typically got around three years before the ax fell on them. Even the interim head coaches in this span — notably Dan Campbell and Jim Bates — had records that reflected a typical 7-9 Dolphins season.

There have been a couple constants who’ve seen these seasons unfold over the past decade plus. Chris Grier has been a staffer in Miami since 2000 and the team’s general manager since 2016. He’s staying on in that personnel-building position despite Flores’ departure. He knows the challenge of crafting a roster from a position in the middle of the first round of the draft each year (especially when his recent rookie track record is uninspiring). He knows the Flores hasn’t made the playoffs, but he’s also too good at what he does to keep the Dolphins from bottoming out.

The other overseer is owner Stephen Ross, who acquired his stake in the team in 2008 and has yet to see a playoff win — or even a home playoff game — as the team’s majority shareholder. He’s never seen a season worse than five wins or better than 10. His patience is wearing thin.

“After evaluating where we are as an organization and what we need going forward to improve, I determined that the key dynamics of our football organization weren’t functioning at a level I want it to be and felt that this decision was in the best interest of the Miami Dolphins,” Ross explained in the press release announcing Flores’ ouster. “I believe we have a talented young roster in place and have the opportunity to be much better in 2022.”

Firing Flores probably won’t make this team better, but that may be the point. Monday’s decision to let a respected head coach go was a diagnosis on quarterback Tua Tagovailoa as well. It wasn’t a good one.

Tagovailoa is 13-8 as a starter but generally mediocre when it comes to both counting stats and overall efficiency. If the Dolphins are devising an exit strategy from the QB they drafted fifth overall in 2020, the odds of finding a franchise quarterback following another 8-9 or 10-7 season were extremely slim.

That’s familiar territory for Ross and Grier. The highest draft picks Miami has possessed since 2008 haven’t even been their own.

They’ve twice held the third overall pick under Ross. The first time came via trade with the Raiders to select Dion Jordan. This was a disaster. The second came in 2021 which came thanks to Bill O’Brien’s year-long meltdown in Houston and the Laremy Tunsil trade that preceded it. The Dolphins swapped that out for three 49ers first round picks and then dealt their own 2022 first to the Eagles for a chance to draft Jaylen Waddle. That means this spring’s draft position is worse than expected, but they’ll have two firsts in 2023 when the quarterback market is likely to be significantly better than the 2022 crop.

So maybe the logic behind firing a coach whose resume is solid, if unspectacular, wasn’t to make this team better. It was to make it worse and glean the biggest possible value from the ’23 draft haul. Maybe Ross and Grier have seen this Groundhog Day scenario play out enough times — with coaches like Gase, Philbin, and Sparano and quarterbacks like Chad Henne, Ryan Tannehill, and Ryan Fitzpatrick — that they were willing to declare “good enough” the enemy of great.

Or maybe this team truly believes in Tagovailoa and is ready to make a splashy, big name hire to coach him up to his full potential. Either way, failure in 2022 will be a feature, not a bug, for a team unable to maintain its playoff push in either of the last two years.

It’s a bold strategy that could backfire in a million different ways. But it’s something different for Miami. And we won’t know if this latest venture is a failure or success until sometime around 2024.

Broncos face an interesting deadline for Vic Fangio decision

If the Broncos do not fire Vic Fangio before Tuesday, other teams could get a head start on Denver interviewing head coach candidates.

The NFL created a new rule this year (on a trial basis) that will allow teams to interview head coach candidates from other teams during the final two weeks of the regular season.

Teams can begin making interview requests on Tuesday (Dec. 28), but only if they have fired their coach or if they have notified their coach that he will not return at the end of the season, according to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero.

So if the Denver Broncos would like to get an early start on their head coach interview process, they will need to either fire Vic Fangio by Tuesday or inform him by Tuesday that he will not be brought back at the end of the season.

That creates an interesting deadline for the Broncos because with a playoff berth technically still possible and the defense playing so well, it’s hard to imagine the team firing Fangio before the end of the season. But if Denver does not fire him (or give him an early notification) before that deadline, other teams could get a chance to begin talking to the top candidates before the Broncos do.

Early signs seem to indicate Fangio won’t be fired this week because the coach is currently scheduled to hold his usual Monday press conference later today.

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Chargers request interviews with 3 head coach candidates

These three names are a good start to what should likely be a long, drawn-out process for the Chargers.

The Chargers fired coach Anthony Lynn on Monday morning and the team is off and running with their search to find his replacement.

Los Angeles has requested interviews with potential head coach candidates. And as of Monday afternoon, the team has put in requests for three possible candidates.

ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported earlier in the day that L.A. requested to interview Titans offensive coordinator Arthur Smith.

Hours later, NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport reported that the Bolts requested to interview Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus.

Finally, Sports Illustrated’s Michael Silver reported that the Chargers requested to interview Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley.

Both Smith and Eberflus were mentioned in the list of candidates that Los Angeles might consider.

Staley coached the NFL’s top defense during the regular season, as Los Angeles allowed a league-best 18.5 points, 281.9 yards and 190.7 passing yards per game.

It’s expected that Los Angeles will interview 10-12 candidates. Expect plenty more candidates to pop up in the coming days and weeks.

Shad Khan on hiring Urban Meyer: ‘We have not spoken to anyone about this job’

Jags owner Shad Khan spoke with the media Monday and denied the biggest rumor surrounding the team’s coaching vacancy.

As expected, the Jacksonville Jaguars parted ways with coach Doug Marrone this morning, making them one of six NFL teams with a head coach opening. With the Jags head coaching title now vacant, owner Shad Khan will now have to fill that role in addition to their general manager vacancy, which became open in November when Dave Caldwell was let go.

Someone who has been heavily associated with the Jags’ coaching job is retired Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, who NFL insider Ian Rapoport says has been putting together a staff with the expectation that he will be their guy. However, on Monday morning, Khan denied that he had spoken with Meyer about a job offer or interview.

“On the rumor of Urban Meyer, obviously, I’ve known Urban over the years through Big Ten, and what have you,” Khan said to the media. “But we have not spoken to anyone about this job or even, obviously, interviewed him. I mean, this is something—just made the decision this morning. So, you know there is—and I’ll leave it at that.”

After Sunday’s loss to the Indianapolis Colts, Marrone was asked about his job status and revealed that he spoke with Khan this past weekend about the Meyer rumors. Khan then referred to the rumor as “news to him” and Marrone also revealed that he was set to meet with Khan this morning. Well, the meeting occurred, and Marrone was let go in the process.

As for Meyer, it wouldn’t be shocking if the Jags were really high on him for reasons Khan stated Monday, like the desire for a franchise quarterback and winning culture. As most are aware, both are things that have been heavily associated with Meyer’s career, although he’s never coached on the NFL level.

Ultimately, time will tell whether or not Meyer is the Jags’ top candidate. Regardless, Khan will likely make the process a thorough one as the Jags’ vacancies have been viewed as the most attractive.

Requirements of Chargers’ next head coach described

Change is coming for the Los Angeles Chargers.

The Chargers won’t be so quick to hire someone to fill the head coaching vacancy.

According to NFL Media’s Jim Trotter, Los Angeles is expected to interview 10-12 candidates for their head coach job.

Trotter notes that owner Dean Spanos will be more involved in the hiring process. When Lynn was hired in 2017, he allowed his son, John and general manager Tom Telesco to oversee it while he was dealing with stadium situation.

The composition of the staff will be a vital factor with whoever they are set to hire. When Lynn was onboard, an issue was loyalty to his staff. He saw problems but was slow to make needed changes.

For example, the special teams unit was an ongoing problem dating back to the beginning of the 2020 season and Lynn didn’t make the personnel change of demoting coordinator George Stewart until the end of November.

L.A. will be looking for someone to continue to develop rookie sensation Justin Herbert. Along with that, the initial focus will be on someone who can oversee the team, not just one side of the ball or the other.