The NFL tends to move in cycles, and we’re not talking here about teams moving out of and back into Los Angeles. We’re talking about the way teams find their coaches.
Four have been hired since the season ended. All four come from the offensive side of the game.
One, Miami’s Adam Gase, was credited with getting good performances from a string of quarterbacks with markedly different personalities. He’ll be a first-time head coach trying to do what no one has done successfully for years in his division — compete with the Patriots.
the last two years, was popular with the players and is walking into a good spot in a diminished division.
The two coaches embarking on their second NFL gigs both are walking into minefields, however.
In Cleveland, Hue Jackson takes over a team that has suffered through a string of bad hires and bad drafts since the Browns returned to the NFL in 1999. Jackson seems to have taken the first needed step, however, by announcing he doesn’t want to keep Johnny Manziel around.
But the most interesting marriage of all is in San Francisco, with Chip Kelly taking over a team that has Colin Kaepernick on its roster. Kaepernick was thought to be headed for the reject pile at the end of the season, but if anyone can revive his career, it would seem to be Kelly, whose fast-paced offense thrives with a passer who can also be a runner.
The sudden rush to hire offensive-minded coaches is a reflection of the current reality in the NFL. The rules favor the offense, particularly the passing game. It will be worth watching to see which way other teams go in the current hiring cycle, and how it all works out. The playoffs are evenly split between coaches with backgrounds in offense or defense; it was 6-6 going into the playoffs and it is 4-4 after the wild-card round among the eight teams still alive.
Of course, specialty is just one issue at play here.
The old rule of thumb was that coaches were good for one go-round, and that was it, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. Twelve of the last 18 Super Bowl winners were coached by someone who had been fired on a previous job. In 31 previous Super Bowls, every winning coach except Weeb Ewbank and Don Shula was on his first job.
Coincidence?
Think not.
Think free agency, salary cap, think twitter and ESPN, too, because not only has the game and the composition of rosters changed, so have the outside influences.
Ernie Accorsi, formerly the general manager of three NFL teams and more recently signed on as a consultant in Detroit, explained once that before the media glare grew so white-hot, teams could lose, return home, deal only with local media, work to improve and not be troubled so much by outside influences calling for coaches and owners to be burned at the stake.
Now, well, patience is a word rarely associated with anything in the NFL unless it is figuring how to milk the most cash out of a return to LA, which required two decades. One loss is cause for an hour’s fodder on one of the many TV shows devoted to the NFL. Two losses might lead to a mini-series.
From all indications, Gase is suited to the challenge. He had success coaching Peyton Manning in Denver and Jay Cutler in Chicago, and it’s hard to find two guys more different on the personality scale. Now the Dolphins hope he can take their quarterback, Ryan Tannehill, to that elusive next level. You never know how someone will act in the big chair until they actually get to sit in it, however.
McAdoo worked with Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay before signing on with the Giants to work with Eli Manning. During McAdoo’s two years as his coordinator, Eli had two of his three best completion percentage seasons in a 12-year career, two of his three highest touchdown pass totals, two of his three best years for interception avoidance.
Jackson did not do poorly in his one season as a head coach. He happened to be on the job the season Al Davis died, which made for an emotional time in Oakland. The Raiders started 7-4 and had a chance to reach the playoffs until their final game, losing four of the last five and finishing 8-8. Bad as that sounds, it is one of only two .500 seasons they have managed in 13 years. All the rest were losing seasons.
Kelly led Philadelphia to two 10-6 seasons before imploding this year under the weight of his own ego. Winning a power struggle that gave him more juice in the organization, Kelly remade the roster, discarded some key players and wound up getting fired. The 49ers are not giving him that kind of latitude, at least at first, but their recent history contains a measure of intrigue that means things are not always what they seem.
Further, the two first-time new coaches have the one thing they most need to get started — a quarterback. Miami’s Ryan Tannehill is a four-year starter whose completion percentage, yardage and passer rating improved each season until this year. Gase’s charge is to resume the upward trajectory. Eli Manning has two Super Bowl rings.
Jackson has to find a quarterback in Cleveland; all we know is it will not be Manziel. San Francisco could be the most fun to watch to see what Kelly can do with Kaepernick. When he led the 49ers to the Super Bowl a few years ago, Kaepernick looked like a new wave coming. More recently, he looked like a wave that was overtaken by a tsunami because of his weakness at reading defenses and finding alternate receivers. The 49ers surely were attracted to Kelly because they thought he was the guy who could save their quarterback’s career.
Can he? You can almost see the schedule-makers at work today. First Sunday night or Monday night in September … 49ers at Rams … in Los Angeles.
–Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.