Coaches in Peril!: Your Charcoal-Gray Monday Open Thread

It’s the Monday after the regular season closes- traditionally the day that the NFL Villagers lead a group of trussed-up coaches to the mouth of the volcano and sacrifice them to Has’Lam, God of Doing Something for the Sake of Doing Something.

This year continues the trend of Relatively Boring Bloodletting.  Most of the truly deserving coaches have already been fired midseason- O’Brien, Patricia and Dan Quinn.  This follows the accelerating Modern Trend: of 138 permanent HC firings since 2000, just under a quarter were midseason, with 12 in the last 5 years alone.

Add to that a trend toward Lane Kiffining* a departing coach 10 minutes after the final whistle, and most of the blood is already drying on the knives come Black Monday. Adam Gase got the justly-deserved backside bootprint yesterday, for example.

*Lane Kiffin, if you recall, was pulled off the USC team bus before they flew out after a loss and fired on the runway. This is distinct from the Gus Bradley, where you fire a guy on the runway then put him on the plane anyway, just to maximize the awkwardness.

The day draws to a close, so let’s see the season’s bodycount:

BILL O’BRIEN: I gotta hand it to Bill O’Brien. Ol’ Pit Face was the de facto GM for 2019, and somehow convinced Cal McNair and his mother that what was missing from the team’s success was MOAR POWER!  They officially handed him the keys, and he promptly drove the car right into the bayou.  Or ship channel, or whatever the fuck they have in that benighted city.  

Indeed, his GM failures are probably what cost him his job.  He coached an imaginary team to four winning records in his first five season, often in spite of himself and his staffing decisions.  They made the playoffs regularly (thanks in part to a historically soft AFC South for most of his tenure) and although they were usually a bankable one-and-done proposition, it’s the kind of success that their nearest expansion siblings (the Cleveland Browns) would kill for.  But O’Brien was a consistent resident of the Hot Seat for the last several years of his tenure, largely because he Couldn’t Get Them Over the Top (a.k.a. Caldwell’s Syndrome) and his quarterbacks were 1. shite, or 2. destined to die horribly on the field in front of a national TV audience.  He decided to go All In on his potential final year in 2019 by trading a metric fuckton of draft picks for Laremy Tunsil, apparently forgetting that an offensive line needs five functional players instead of one pretty good one and four corpses.  But this is a common approach for a GM who knows its Win Soon or Let Someone Else Deal With the Mess, and therefore Defensible NFL Logic.  But he traded Jadeveon Clowney for beans (not the magic kind), which made no sense from that perspective.  Then this year he traded Hopkins for less than beans, on the ostensible basis that Hopkins wanted a bigger long-term contract.  Which would have been stupid-but-at-least-you-can-see-some-logic if he had gotten back a bounty of future picks to pick up the slack during that 2021-23 period.  Instead, he got a second rounder and an oft-injured veteran running back- a class that has the shelf life of a bruised yellow banana and are replaced almost as easily.  He then turned that second-rounder into Brandin Cooks, a talented wideout that inexplicably no one actually wants on their team.  At that point, the question was no longer whether O’Brien was taking a Win Now or Win Later approach, but whether the pit in his chin had interfered with the blood vessels leading to his prefrontal cortex.  In reality, I think he succumbed to the more common I’m a Genius, I’ll Show Them All! flaw found in football coaches and supervillians.  His Grand Experiment was shown to be an utter, humiliating failure after 4 games, even with Will Fuller and Bradley Roby juicing.   

ADAM GASE: Much has been written about Gase, and many questions asked.  Why did he get the job immediately after failing in Miami? Why did they make him general manager without a single game coached?  Why does he look like Stephen Miller fucked a spooked horse?  All good questions. LOFTY questions. 

Gase answered none of them.  Immediately alienating Le’Veon Bell, the big offseason acquisition that was supposed to relieve pressure on Sam Darnold, was a Bold Strategy.  Alienating Jamal Adams, franchise cornerstone and sole Pro Bowl talent, before the first trade deadline was An Interesting Hill to Die On.  Adams was gone (admittedly for a decent haul) before 2020, and Bell was released midseason for a ridiculous amount of dead cap money after juuuuust long enough into the season to ensure the locker room was well and truly lost.  Darnold made none of the progress that Reputed QB Whisperer Gase was brought in to inspire, although whether that was the fault of Coach Gase or GM Gase is difficult to parse.  In the end, it was a Wonderfully Jets situation all around.

MATT PATRICIA: They tried to be Patriots West without Tom Brady.  Turns out that without Tom Brady, the Patriots aren’t even the Patriots.  If you replay Patricia’s press conferences from before the season, you can literally see him blinking out “P-L-E-A-S-E-G-O-D-J-U-S-T-F-I-R-E-M-E” in morse code, like some sort of North Korean hostage.  Go on. Watch it and see if I’m joking.

Patricia was a New England Failson who owed his promotion not to the Peter Principle (you have to have succeeded at your lower job for that one) but to some sort of Haaavahad Alumni-style system of Success Osmosis: if you were associated with the Patriot Way, some of it must have rubbed off on you. He was Belichick’s sock puppet of a DC, as Lil’ Stevie is now.  

I detailed Patricia’s shortcomings at the beginning of the year, and frankly his final demise was kind of anticlimactic.  No Captain Queeg hunt for the strawberry thief, no ramming the franchise into an iceberg (see O’Brien, supra), no inexplicable playcalls—just a slow plod toward the inevitable, trying to string it out as long as possible in case a deus ex machina saved his and GM Bob Quinn’s collective bacon.  No bacon was saved, and the axe fell after Detroit took its traditional Thanksgiving Bed Shit and rolled around in it.

DAN QUINN: 28-3.  It was Shanahan’s fault, but 1. your defense collapsed, and 2. it’s on you as head coach to take away Shanny’s playsheet when it becomes obvious he’s gone rogue.  Fuck you, Dan Quinn. 

DOUG MARRONE: How to eulogize Doug Marrone, a man so vanilla that they had to bring in a second head coach (Tom Coughlin) to give the team a backbone.  Unfortunately, the same lack of backbone that made Coughlin necessary also let him run wild- losing an NFLPA grievance about fining a player $700k for missing “voluntary” activities, racking up 25% of league-wide player grievances and forcing the Union to actively advise its members not to sign in Jacksonville.  Jalen Ramsey forced his way out midseason, and even the firing of Coughlin wasn’t enough to get the stench off the team. With Cassius Marsh and the corpse of Tyler Eifert their only notable signings, it became clear they were in rebuilding mode. Foles: gone. AJ Bouye: gone.  Pro Bowler Calais Campbell: gone.  Marrone’s job was to see if Gardner Minshew was actually a diamond in the rough or just another mustachioed fraud, and I guess he succeeded.  He also succeeded at riding the bomb all the way into the ground, unlike Gase; his 1-15 record ensures that his successor will have the pick of the QB litter in what appears to be an extremely strong-at-the-top draft.  So that’s nice.

ANTHONY LYNN: I’ve said it before and I repeat it now- Lynn got a raw fucking deal.  In 2017, he took over a craptastic team for its first year in a city that didn’t want it.  For three years he was strapped to a fading diva QB by an ownership family that makes the Borgias look respectable, playing 16 away games a season AND STILL MANAGED WINNING RECORDS IN TWO OF THEM.  Rivers goes, Lynn gets to start over with His Guy from Buffalo, Tyrod Taylor, plus a promising rookie in Justin Herbert.  BUT NO.  Spanos’ skinflintishness apparently extends to skimping on medical professionals as well.  “Qualifications” and “legitimate medical degrees” cost MONEY, so they hired a cross-eyed taxidermist with four thumbs as team trainer.  “Dr.” Taxidermist proceeds to PUNCTURE TAYLOR’S LUNG while attempting to give him a painkiller injection, presumably while in the depths of an ether binge.  Suddenly the future is now for Herbert, who was widely considered a somewhat developmental prospect during the draft.  All he does is go out and nearly beat the Chefs.  Lynn keeps the ship afloat with a series of near-miss losses, wins his last 4 and locks Herbert in as a top-two for the Rookie of the Year.   Yes, several of those losses were self-inflicted by play-calling and time management problems, either directly by Lynn or by his subordinates.  But FFS, the shitkickers who make up the rest of this list lit their franchises on fire—the best of them (Marrone) deserves credit only for pissing on the ashes thoroughly enough that the next guy at least has a puncher’s chance.  Lynn deserved another year, and he certainly deserves to be placed on the NFL Retread Carousel that got Norv Turner three shots.  Can’t wait for Lynn, Robert Saleh and Eric Bieniemy to get beat out for a gig by Stevie Belichick, because Nepotism.  Fuckwads….  

NEAR MISSES: Matt Nagy.  By backing into the last spot in the newly-expanded playoffs, Nagy probably saved his job.  The Bears got fat off the some of the worst teams in the NFL, beating one (1) team with a winning record.  If they get bitchslapped by the Saints in the first round, he might still be fired. 

WHAT’S ON TONIGHT:

Early season NBA Action- CATCH THE FEVER!!!!

        Seriously, I used to a. watch the NBA religiously and b. start paying attention to college basketball in February.  Now, a. college basketball can fuck itself off into a deep dark festering hole and b. I start paying attention to the NBA in February.  Only problem is that this year, the NBA Finals ended like…two weeks ago.  I’m not ready for more basketball.  I’m barely ready for dinnertime.  

    DALLAS @ HOUSTON (NBA TV, 7 p.m. DFO Standard): Do we care? Luka Doncic is injured. James Harden is both deeply impressive and terribly boring to watch. Everyone involved with both teams seems like terrible people.  I recommend watching Great British Baking instead.