A Conference of Losers

 Seven weeks into the NFL season, the playoff races are starting to take form. On the NFC side of things we have five teams that appear destined to coast to a playoff spot, with the Cardinals, Packers, Buccaneers, Rams, and Cowboys all having one loss apiece. After that it gets a little messier, but honestly it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s the Vikings or the Falcons or the Saints who make a brief appearance in the opening round of the playoffs.

Things are a lot messier over on the other side of the league. Five teams in the NFC have one or fewer losses, and none in the AFC can say the same. The top seven teams are all sandwiched between 5-2 and 4-3, and there are five more 3-win teams breathing down their necks.

There is very little margin for error in the NFL, and the top teams in the AFC have already used up most of theirs. The Bills, Raiders, Chargers, Ravens, Bengals, Browns, and Titans all have winning records, but they’ve all dropped multiple games as well. So I figured I’d take a look at those fifteen losses and put them in order, ranking them from the most understandable to the most baffling.

You Can’t Beat Big Brother

As I mentioned above, the NFC has five very good teams this year. A loss against one of them is far from shameful, and in the long-run an out-of-conference loss will be less damaging if it comes down to tiebreakers for seeding.

Arizona Cardinals 37 – Cleveland Browns 14

Arizona Cardinals 38 – Tennessee Titans 13
I’m lumping these first two games together because they’re basically the same story. Two AFC contenders welcomed the Cardinals into their homes, and Arizona left after comfortable victories. They were even almost identical scores, in a pair of games where the Cardinals opened up first half leads and never let the opposition get within a single score.  

The only real difference was when they happened. The Titans lost opening week, before we realized how good Arizona is this year. It was a coming out party for Kyler Murray, and a bunch of red flags raised for Tennessee. By the time the Cleveland game came around, it was mostly business as usual. The Browns certainly weren’t happy to lose this game a week after dropping a close contest versus the Chargers, but it didn’t end up as a referendum about their entire season’s hopes.

Green Bay Packers 25 – Cincinnati Bengals 22 (OT)

The Bengals missed multiple field goals that would have won them this game. They also only had the opportunity because Green Bay missed multiple field goals that would have won them this game. Still, keeping things tight enough to come down to some wild field goal nonsense is impressive against one of the best teams in the NFC. The Bengals held Aaron Rodgers in check for most of the day and didn’t allow a touchdown after halftime. After wins against an otherwise easy schedule, this was probably the performance prior to this past weekend that most revealed Cincinnati as a legitimate contender.

Dallas Cowboys 20 – Los Angeles Chargers 17

The weirdest thing about this game in hindsight is that there were only 37 points scored. These are two of the most explosive offenses in the NFL, and they ended up playing a low-scoring, grinding game that ended with the Cowboys killing the clock and making a 56 yard field goal as time expired.

The Chargers should feel good about limiting Dallas as effectively as they did, and less good about only managing 17 against a poor Cowboys defense. This is the one blight on an otherwise stellar start to the season for Justin Herbert, as his 338 passing yards came with a pair of interceptions in Cowboys territory. The last of these was particularly brutal, an interception in the endzone to erase an 11 play drive at the end of the third quarter with the game tied. Instead of taking the lead, the Chargers handed the ball back to Dallas, and were only able to manage three more points the rest of the day.

 

Someone Had to Lose

These seven teams have already played each other six times this year, and someone had to come out on the losing end. Some of these games were close and could have gone either way. Others were a bit less competitive.

Tennessee Titans 34 – Buffalo Bills 31

It’s hard to hold this one against the Bills. It is always difficult to go on the road for a night game, and they were facing off against a Titans team still smarting over an embarrassing defeat a couple weeks earlier (which we'll get to below). Buffalo led most of this game, and in the first half they looked like the clear better team. But a couple of failed red zone trips early on kept the Titans in the game, followed by a big run by Derrick Henry when the offense couldn’t get anything else going. And in the end the Bills still had a very good chance to win it, only for Josh Allen to be stopped on a fourth down quarterback sneak.

Las Vegas Raiders 33 – Baltimore Ravens 27 (OT)

What did I just say about going on the road on Monday night? Baltimore entered this game as thoroughly beaten up as I’ve seen any team in opening week. They had basically no running backs, and they had to lean their entire offense on both the legs and the arm of Lamar Jackson. He’s good enough to keep them competitive when they do that, but they needed a little more out of their defense to hold the Raiders in check. Instead Las Vegas was able to turn a couple of Jackson fumbles into touchdowns to pull off this overtime upset.

Los Angeles Chargers 47 – Cleveland Browns 42

This one hurts because it feels like a game the Browns should have had. They led almost the entire day, only to surrender four fourth quarter touchdowns in a frenetic finish to what has likely been the best game of the year to this point. The two teams traded scores back and forth through the fourth quarter, and it was just one failed series that doomed the Browns.

With just over three minutes left they had the ball and a one score lead, only to go three-and-out and give the ball back to the Chargers. This series included a run call on third and nine that essentially gave up any hope of converting, and it took the Chargers only one play following the punt to make it into the red zone. Cleveland did get the ball back with a chance to drive for the win, but once again their offense came up short.

Los Angeles Chargers 28 – Las Vegas Raiders 14

This was a mostly sleepy game that wasn’t even as close as the final score indicated. The Chargers were up 21 points at halftime, as the Raiders managed only one first down the entire opening half. They couldn’t get anything going on the ground against a weak Chargers run defense, ending up with 18 carries for only 48 yards. They showed a little bit of life in the second half when they decided just to put the ball in the hands of Derek Carr, but on the whole this was a concerning day for their offense. Their offensive line has been a ragged unit all year, and Josh Jacobs is clearly not at full strength, averaging only 3.4 yards per carry this season. The development of the passing game has been exciting, but Carr isn’t good enough to carry the team on his own against most top AFC teams.

Cincinnati Bengals 41 – Baltimore Ravens 17

This game from this past weekend was closer than the final score indicates. Cincinnati broke off a couple of long touchdowns in the fourth quarter to put things away, but for most of the game the Ravens appeared to be within striking distance. Baltimore moved the ball well enough in the middle of the field for most of the day, but they had three drives end in Cincinnati territory without any points and only made one trip into the red zone the entire day.

Baltimore Ravens 34 – Los Angeles Chargers 6

This is by far the most lopsided of all the games in this group. The Chargers and Ravens may be right beside each other in the standings, but two weeks ago they didn’t belong on the same field. Baltimore is simply a terrible matchup for Los Angeles, and I doubt that will change if they find themselves facing off again in the postseason. The Chargers struggle to stop the run, and the Ravens happily rolled down the field at will against them.

 

A Little Bit of Shame

The teams that won these games may not have winning records, but they at least bring something to the table. These losses could have a big impact come playoff time, but everyone drops a game or two they shouldn’t somewhere along the road.

Kansas City Chiefs 33 – Cleveland Browns 29

I’m not giving up on the Chiefs yet. They sit right now with a losing record, having just dropped a game against Tennessee where they were somehow held to just three points. Their defense is a catastrophe, and their offense has been frustratingly inconsistent all year. But the thing is, by most advanced measures they still have the most efficient offense in football, and they’ve just been killed by fluke turnovers and by the inability of their defense to get off the field. All four of their losses have come against teams in this top seven of the AFC, and the remainder of their schedule isn’t quite as daunting.

This game was an example of how I think the rest of the year will look for Kansas City. Cleveland controlled the ball on the ground and managed to prevent things from getting too out of hand, but in the end they couldn’t keep up with the firepower of Kansas City. 62 combined points may not seem like a shootout, but each team only had the ball nine times, and the Chiefs scored on six of their first seven possessions. Cleveland was efficient themselves with touchdowns on their first three possessions, but in the end it just took a couple bad plays—a sack late in the first half, a fumble early in the second half, and a botched snap on a punt—to allow Kansas City to pull away from them.

Pittsburgh Steelers 27 – Buffalo Bills 16

Pittsburgh has won two straight to get back to respectable status, but for a while this game was looking like a pretty glaring outlier. Pittsburgh certainly benefited from some fortunate breaks, with a blocked punt resulting a touchdown that allowed them to break the game open in the second half.

For the first half of this game, neither offense could really do anything. The Bills showed the first signs of the defensive resurgence we’ve seen since then, but on offense they couldn’t keep Josh Allen upright long enough to attack the Steelers downfield. Pittsburgh ripped to shreds a Bills offensive line that played a big part in their offensive breakout last year, so naturally all the questions were about whether Allen had turned back into a pumpkin. But it turns out there are very few teams that boast the talent up front that Pittsburgh does. Cleveland could present a problem, and maybe Tennessee, but otherwise Buffalo’s offense looks capable as long as they don’t cross paths with Cameron Heyward and TJ Watt again.

 

Simply Baffling The longer the season goes on, the less sense these outcomes make.

Chicago Bears 20 – Cincinnati Bengals 17

This happened early enough in the season that it kind of snuck past us. The Bengals weren’t expected to be good, and the Bears were thought to have some hope of making an NFC playoff run, so no one was surprised that Chicago managed to win this game. A month later, it looks like a pretty embarrassing early season defeat for the Bengals.

The final score makes this game look closer than it was. The Bears led 20-3 before the Bengals scored twice in the final five minutes to make it look interesting, the final flashes of offensive life after a day of seeing nothing. Cincinnati’s offense looked like this a lot during the first few weeks, when they were still taking things easy with Joe Burrow to avoid exposing him coming off his knee injury. They have since picked things up. After averaging only 25 pass attempts per game over the first three weeks, he’s averaged 34 per game since, and the Bengals offense has emerged with him.

Chicago Bears 20 – Las Vegas Raiders 9

Something about the AFC seems to make the Bears defense look like the unit it was a couple years ago. A few weeks after stifling a restrained Bengals offense, they choked the life out of a Raiders team that had looked fairly impressive to that point. Chicago didn’t do much on offense themselves, especially in the second half, but it didn’t matter when the Raiders couldn’t get anything going on the ground and Derek Carr had a flashback to the days when he was afraid to throw more than five yards past the line of scrimmage.

New York Jets 27 – Tennessee Titans 24 (OT)

There are excuses the Titans can make. They were without both Julio Jones and AJ Brown. Zach Wilson made some jaw-dropping plays in the second half that he hasn’t been able to replicate elsewhere. It was a weird game that made it into overtime, where everything is a bit of a crapshoot.

But man, it’s the Jets.

Coaching Catastrophes

The NFL is a league of superstars. Quarterbacks with rocket arms, wide receivers who make leaping catches, defensive ends that bend in defiance of gravity around the edge to sack the passer. There are big names and bigger personalities. And yet so far in 2021, as is often the case, we find ourselves spending a lot of time talking about fucking coaches.

Hiring a head coach in the NFL is often a total crapshoot. Most of these people make it as far as they do due to a combination of luck and schematic knowledge, and then they’re thrust into a position that is as much manager as schemer.

Most head coaches flame out within three or four seasons. Usually this is due to poor performance on the field, and these coaches are quickly forgotten as they fall back into the shuffle of assistant roles. But every couple of years, a coaching tenure is disastrous enough that it is impossible to forget.

The end of Jon Gruden in Las Vegas was ugly, and I don’t think we’ve heard the last of it yet. The situation in Jacksonville with Urban Meyer is a much more entertaining shitshow, and somehow it’s still going. I will be shocked if he makes it through the season, and I basically see no chance that he is the Jaguars coach in 2022. It’s very likely that his name will be remembered in NFL circles as part cautionary tale and part joke that will be brought up any time a coaching situation goes to hell for years to come.

Below I’ve gone through some of my favorite coaching catastrophes of recent history. These aren’t just cases where the product on the field led to a quick firing—you won’t find Steve Wilkes or Ken Whisenhunt or Pat Shurmer on this list. To make this group you have to be just as disastrous off the field as you were on it, the sort of catastrophe we simply cannot bring ourselves to look away from.

Adam Gase, New York Jets, 2019-2020

It takes a special sort of madness to hire a coach who failed with a division rival immediately after he was fired, but a special sort of madness is kind of the thing with the Jets. Gase hit the ground running with an utterly bizarre performance at his press conference, and it only escalated from there. For his defensive coordinator he hired Gregg Williams, known for being a terrible coach and an even worse human being. He led the Jets to humiliatingly bad offensive performances that saw former top three pick Sam Darnold go down in flames, then did just enough at the end of his final year to cost them a chance at Trevor Lawrence.

Probably the most amusing part of Gase’s time with the Jets was watching what happened to the players from his Dolphins team once they were free of him. DeVante Parker produced a 1200 yard season after being considered a bust under Gase. Minkah Fitzpatrick was traded to Pittsburgh and became an immediate All Pro. And Ryan Tannehill emerged as one of the most efficient quarterbacks in the league once he found competent coaching in Tennessee. This trend has only continued this season, as Darnold has gotten off to a solid start in Carolina. Unfortunately, the Jets themselves don’t seem to have benefited, as they remain comfortably the worst offense in the NFL.

Hue Jackson, Cleveland Browns, 2016-2018

Jackson is a bit of an outlier on this list, since most of his struggles were strictly on the field. But as far as struggles go, it’s hard to top the 1-31 stretch he had over his first two years with the Browns. It’s extremely difficult to win only one game over the course of an NFL season. It’s laughable to manage only a single victory across two seasons. And somehow this was enough to get him brought back for a third year, where he lasted half the season before the Browns decided to free Baker Mayfield from him.

Ben McAdoo, New York Giants, 2016-2017

I’m not sure I’ve seen a situation go as far south as quickly as it did for McAdoo in New York. In his first year in charge of the Giants they won 11 games and made the playoffs, which remains their only postseason appearance since winning the Super Bowl in 2011. That should have been enough to buy him good grace through some rough patches his second season. It would have been the case with almost any other coach, and it’s a testament to McAdoo’s incompetence that he lasted only 12 games after his playoff appearance before being tossed aside.

Reports of a coach “losing the locker room” are common when things go bad, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an example as clear as the 2017 Giants. As the team fell to 1-7 over the first half of the year, reports surfaced of players being disgruntled with too-harsh discipline and overly intense practices. Players began to push the coach’s boundaries, and he responded by suspending crucial players on a team that was already struggling on the field.

The team and fans were on the verge of full-scale revolt when November rolled around, and then came the final straw. McAdoo decided to bench Eli Manning, who had started the past 210 games for the Giants. This might have been defensible if they'd had a young quarterback waiting in the wings. Instead he went to Geno Smith, a 27 year old veteran who had just come off flaming out in literally the exact same city. McAdoo was fired the day after that game, and Manning returned to start the rest of the season for the Giants.

Doug Marrone, Buffalo Bills, 2013-2014

This one makes the list mainly for the bizarre way it ended. I’ve seen coaches get fired, I’ve seen coaches retire, I’ve seen coaches leave for college jobs. I’ve never really seen one just leave. After two middling seasons with the Bills, Marrone opted to take advantage of a clause that allowed him to terminate his contract if there was a change in ownership. They wanted to bring him back as their head coach for another season, and he simply elected not to return.

At the time the belief was that he decided to leave because he expected another, better head coaching opportunity would come his way. Instead he spent the next two seasons as the offensive line coach in Jacksonville, before being made the interim head coach and then taking over the full-time job in 2017. He somehow lasted four years in Jacksonville, three of which were utterly forgettable. I don’t expect he’ll get another opportunity this time around, but stranger things have happened.

Greg Schiano, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 2012-2013

Schiano’s brief time with Tampa Bay seemed to have more controversies off the field than victories on it. His harsh, disciplinary style alienated players from the start. He angered people across the league when he asked his defensive players to dive at the legs of the opposing offensive line when they tried to take a knee to run out the clock, in some vain effort to send a message about never giving up (he clearly still hasn’t gotten over this stupidity, as I saw him pull the exact same bullshit earlier this year at Rutgers).

These are pretty typical issues for a college coach adjusting to deal with players who are actual grown adults they can’t push around. The real weird shit happened more quietly within the locker room. The Buccaneers had multiple players see their careers end due to an outbreak of staph infections, which led to lawsuits around unsanitary locker room conditions and disinterest from the medical staff. Starting quarterback Josh Freeman was released after reports leaked about drug and alcohol issues, reports that many suspect originated with a coaching staff that wanted an excuse to move on from him. By the end of that season of course, the Buccaneers were the ones moving on from Schiano.

Josh McDaniels, Denver Broncos, 2009-2010

There are several ways a new head coach can put his stamp on an organization. Starting a feud with a 25 year old Pro Bowl quarterback is certainly not the approach I’d go with, but it’s what McDaniels decided to do. As soon as he arrived in Denver, reports began swirling that they were looking to trade away starting quarterback Jay Cutler. It’s not really clear what happened behind the scenes, but it eventually escalated to Cutler cutting off contact and demanding for them to follow through with the trade.

In the long-run it actually worked out for the Broncos, as Cutler’s development stalled in Chicago and Denver got an excellent trade package with two first round picks. It would have worked out better, however, if McDaniels hadn’t decided that his new quarterback of the future was going to be Tim Tebow. Tebow barely saw the field as a rookie and looked pretty terrible when he did, and McDaniels was gone by the end of that season.

Interestingly, McDaniels ended up being part of another coaching disaster, one where he was never actually the head coach. In 2018 he was announced as the new head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, for a couple hours before he came out and said he didn’t want the job after all. He’s now sitting around as the offensive coordinator in New England, hoping Bill Belichick will retire soon and he can coast off that association to be the successor. Because I feel pretty good saying none of the other 31 franchises will touch him anytime soon.

Lane Kiffin, Oakland Raiders, 2007-2008

Kiffin was a young, hot coaching prospect coming off a successful tenure as offensive coordinator at USC. But he wasn’t ready to be a head coach, and he certainly wasn’t ready to join a team led by a declining Al Davis. It didn't help that he was immediately forced to use the top draft pick on JaMarcus Russell against his wishes. Even if everything else had gone smoothly, that alone likely would have been enough to sink him with the Raiders.

Everything else did not go smoothly. Russell held out for the first couple weeks of the season, and Kiffin kept him on the sidelines until December against the wishes of ownership. Kiffin’s brash personality clashed with Davis, and reportedly the owner tried to force the coach to resign after his first season and forgo the $2 million he was due the next year. But Kiffin did return, for four games before Davis finally fired him. These four games included sending Sebastian Janikowski out to attempt a 76 yard field goal, partially as a middle finger to the meddling owner.

The whole mess didn’t end even after Kiffin was fired. Davis used the press conference to attack Kiffin and call him a “flat-out liar” who brought “disgrace to the organization”. He refused to pay Kiffin the remaining guaranteed money on his contract, and it ended up going to an arbitrator who sided with Davis and the Raiders.

This is one case where it’s difficult to place all the blame at the feet of one party or the other. On the one hand, this was the low point of a decade-long period of chaos within the Raiders organization. On the other hand, Kiffin has hardly walked the straightest road through numerous stops in the college ranks since. It’s possible that this was simply the ultimate collision, of a completely toxic coach with a completely toxic ownership situation.

Bobby Petrino, Atlanta Falcons, 2007

Petrino got pretty unlucky to jump on board the Falcons right before Michael Vick’s dogfighting arrest, but it's hard to give him much benefit of the doubt given everything that has happened with him since. He lasted only 13 games in Atlanta before deciding to go back to college, a decision most players and assistant coaches learned of when they arrived at the practice facility to find him already on his way to Arkansas. About the only good thing he did as the Falcons coach was hiring Mike Zimmer as his defensive coordinator, making sure there was someone around to call him a "gutless bastard" for his actions.

Lou Holtz, New York Jets, 1976

Most of the names on this list are within the past fifteen years, for a couple reasons. First of all, NFL coaches receive a lot more national scrutiny these days than in the past when their issues were mostly covered by local beat writers. Secondly, and probably more significantly, I chose most of these names based on my own memories of the situations, which makes it hard for me to pick coaches before the year 2000.

Holtz is the one where I’m willing to go back, because the stories of his one year with the Jets are too funny to just ignore. Coaches jumping from the college ranks to the NFL have produced some of the biggest successes (Bill Walsh and Jimmy Johnson), and also some of the biggest disasters (Marrone, Schiano, Kiffin, Petrino). In this day and age it’s easier to understand teams taking that risk, as college level talent has gotten better and schematic differences between the two levels have gotten less meaningful. 

This was not the case in 1976. Holtz entered the league having never even watched an NFL game, and he expected he'd have no trouble implementing the same veer option running scheme he found success with in college. Of course, he did this with a 33 year old and half-crippled Joe Namath at quarterback, so it's unsurprising the Jets only managed 12 points a game. And if these schematic issues weren’t bad enough, he demonstrated how little he understood the professional environment by asking his players to sing a fight song after each victory. Fortunately they only had to sing three times in his 13 games before he decided to return to college where he belonged.