The Devil That You Know

We’re about halfway through the NFL season, which means right now roughly half the fans in the league are pissed off at their team’s head coach. The head coach makes an easy scapegoat when a team doesn’t live up to expectations. The impact of coaching is extremely difficult to measure, and coaches are often bland figureheads that are far easier to hate than the players on the field. And when a change needs to be made, there is no salary cap or dead money to worry about with firing a coach. It all comes out of the owner’s pocket and doesn’t impact the rest of the team.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that coach turnover is so high. Each year after the final game as many as a quarter of the league will toss their coach aside, in a day that has earned the nickname “Black Monday”. The playoffs unfold in parallel with coaching searches, only for the process to repeat again two or three years down the line. Getting hired as an NFL head coach is hard. Keeping the job is even harder.

And of course, some teams don’t even wait for Black Monday to make the change. Each year there are typically one or two coaches who are shown the exit before the season even ends. Someone else from the staff is promoted to the head job on an interim basis, and the team finishes out the season under this new leadership.

This pretty much never goes well. There hasn’t been a single interim coach lead a team to the playoffs since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. On some level this is unsurprising—if a team fires their coach that team is usually bad, and bad teams rarely make the playoffs (the 2020 Bears the exception that proves the rule).

Everyone knows that firing your coach in the middle of the season is a bad idea, but I don’t think everyone appreciates just how badly interim coaches work out. Often when a team struggles early in the season, there is some notion among fans that replacing the coach could be a magic solution. A new coach could revitalize the team, bring new energy, and lead them to a second-half push to get into the postseason. Just because it hasn’t ever happened, that doesn’t mean it won’t work this time.

But the truth is that a midseason coaching change offers essentially no benefits. Not only that, it can actually lead to more problems down the road. To understand this, I think we should look back at the recent history of interim coaches.

Below I’ve listed the 37 midseason coach firings in the NFL since the year 2000. This only takes into account interim coaches due to the firing or resignation of the head coach, so it excludes Bruce Arians’s year filling in for an ill Chuck Pagano in Indianapolis and the Sean Payton suspension year in New Orleans.

Looking over this list, we see a pretty broad set of circumstances. There are quite a few cases where the interim just filled in for the last one or two weeks of the season, which doesn’t really tell us anything. Maybe there was some advantage for the front office to be able to jump into the coaching search a little bit early, but it isn’t like they could actually conduct interviews until the season ended. All of these teams were well outside of playoff contention, so these games were utterly meaningless for them.

The more informative circumstances are the ones where the coaches were fired earlier in the season. In some cases this happened early enough that the team was still mathematically alive for playoff contention. As I mentioned above, none of these teams actually ended up appearing in the postseason, but there were a couple of close calls. Let’s look a little deeper at some of the more interesting cases.

Best Case Outcomes

2000 Detroit Lions
This is the closest any team with an interim coach finished to the postseason since 2000, and it’s kind of a special case. Despite the label in the table above, Bobby Ross wasn’t actually fired. He resigned after a 5-4 start to the season, partially due to frustrations with team management and partially due to personal health issues. Linebacker coach Gary Moeller (and former head coach of the University of Michigan) took over and led the team to a 4-3 record over the final seven games, finishing one win short of a playoff appearance. 

2008 San Francisco 49ers

If we look through the rest of the list, we see only three cases where an interim coach led the team for more than three weeks and finished with a winning record. This isn’t necessarily surprising. If a team fires their coach, that’s usually a sign that they’re a pretty bad team. And on average we do usually see some improvement in record under the interim coaches. With their original coaches these teams averaged a winning percentage of 29%. Under the interim that jumps to 36%. Still pretty terrible, and likely attributable to random chance in a bit of a “dead cat bounce” scenario. But it’s enough that I can’t totally write off the theory of an interim coach infusing a team with new life.

The 2008 49ers are the first instance that would seem to support this theory. After a 2-5 start with Mike Nolan, they promoted linebacker coach Mike Singletary to the head job. His time as an interim coach was a bit tumultuous—he made headlines both for sending Vernon Davis to the locker room early and for allegedly dropping his pants during halftime of a game—but it seemed to work out, with the team winning five of his nine games. Their rough start meant that they still finished two games out of the playoffs, but this is about as close to a success as I’ve been able to find.

2010 Dallas Cowboys

This is a slightly unique case, because Jason Garrett was always going to eventually become the head coach of the Cowboys. He spent seven years with the team as a player and established a good relationship with Jerry Jones, which helped him get the job as offensive coordinator after only two years as a coach. From the time he took the job running the offense in Dallas, it was basically understood that he would have the head job one day. He turned down offers to lead both Baltimore and Atlanta, with the expectation that sooner or later he’d be promoted in Dallas.

His promotion dragged out as the team found surprising success under Wade Phillips, but a 1-7 start to 2010 was enough to convince Jones to make the transition. It was too late for the Cowboys to compete that year, but a 5-3 record down the stretch locked it up as Garrett’s job. He held the position through a slightly tumultuous nine years, winning three division titles but finding no playoff success.

2010 Minnesota Vikings

Leslie Frazier didn’t finish with a winning record as an interim, but considering the circumstances 3-3 was a pretty good outcome. The Vikings were expected to be a contender coming off a heartbreaking loss in the 2009 NFC Championship Game, but things quickly fell apart in 2010. Brett Favre was nowhere close to healthy, they traded for and then cut franchise icon Randy Moss, and Brad Childress was shown the door after a 3-7 start.

Things only got stranger from there. In only his third week as an NFL head coach, Frazier woke up to learn that the roof of the stadium his team was supposed to play in had collapsed due to heavy snow accumulation. The game was pushed to the next day and relocated to Detroit, where the Vikings lost to the Giants to be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. The next week they had to scramble to get the local college stadium prepared to host the game, and to get Favre onto the field for what would ultimately be his final start.

And a week later the Vikings had yet another game rescheduled, this time due to a winter storm that hit Philadelphia. Minnesota actually won this game with converted rookie wide receiver Joe Webb starting at quarterback, one of Frazier’s three victories over as tumultuous a six week stretch as any interim head coach has had to deal with.

2018 Cleveland Browns

Hue Jackson somehow managed to keep his job after winning only one game over two seasons, but a 2-5-1 start to his third year was enough to cost him his job. With rookie quarterback Baker Mayfield under center, the Browns put together a surprising 5-3 finish under promoted defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. It was the first life the Browns had shown in decades, and it set the stage for their playoff appearance two seasons later in 2020.

 

Losing the Interim

One justification people often raise when trying to justify a midseason coach firing is that it would provide an opportunity to evaluate an interim coach in a real-life situation. And if you look at the list above, about a quarter of interim coaches ended up taking over the job full-time the following year.

The four cases I broke down in detail are particularly illustrative. These were the best results of the interim period, and unsurprisingly they convinced management to try to find some continuity the next year. Singletary, Garrett, and Frazier all became the head coaches of their teams the following seasons. And while Williams didn’t take over as the head coach of the Browns, the success of Mayfield led to offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens being named to the position.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is hardly an inspiring list of names. Garrett is the best outcome, and even he was kind of a strange situation as a much-desired assistant across the league who was just waiting for his chance to take over. Singletary, Frazier, and Kitchens were the three who clearly earned the job based on the performance of their teams over the interim periods. None of them lasted longer than three years after their hiring.

It doesn’t get any better if we look over the list of other interim coaches who earned the full-time job. Doug Marrone had one bizarrely good year with the Jaguars in 2017, Mike Tice made the playoffs once as a wild card in Minnesota, and those are about the only good things that can be said about any of these people. Dave McGinnis went 16-32 in three seasons in charge of Arizona. Dick LeBeau was 8-24 in two years in Cincinnati. Tom Cable went 13-19 in two years running Oakland. And Romeo Crennel lasted only a single season in Kansas City, finishing that year with a record of 2-14.

Look over the rest of the list, and you don’t really see any names that jump out as promising future coaches. Wade Phillips had his moments, and I suppose the jury is still out on Dan Campbell. But the truth is, most of these interim coaches are anonymous, forgettable assistants who never sniffed an NFL head coaching job.

And should this surprise us? What are the chances that a team is bad with a bad head coach, but they happen to have a brilliant assistant on the sidelines? When a team fails to meet expectations, it’s usually a sign of problems from the top of the organization to the bottom. And it usually means the best approach is to tear things down and start over.

This is where this post turns into a rant about the Minnesota Vikings. At this point I think it’s reasonable to assume that the Mike Zimmer era has run its course. He’s a good coach who had some very good years at the head of the team, but he has always had flaws that have only become more damaging as the talent of this team has waned. The Vikings need a fresh start, and I would be shocked if Zimmer was at the head of the team in 2022.

Truth be told, I would be surprised if Zimmer makes it through the remainder of the season. The Vikings appear twice on the list above, and they've made plenty of other midseason changes to their coaching staff in that time. There are plenty of people both among Vikings fans and media calling for Zimmer to be shown the door as soon as possible. With a tough schedule ahead, I think a couple more losses will do him in.

If it hasn’t become clear already, I’ll just state it explicitly. I am not in favor of dismissing a coach in the middle of the season. I’ll admit there are some circumstances that could justify it—if a coach is hindering the development of a young quarterback, like Matt Nagy in Chicago, or if circumstances are so toxic that it is unreasonable to ask the players to continue to work with the coach, like Jon Gruden in Las Vegas.

The situation in Minnesota does not meet this criteria. It might be nice to see young players like Wyatt Davis and Patrick Jones see more time on the field, but ultimately a couple of third round prospects aren’t going to make or break the franchise. And it’s not like there’s any reason to believe an interim coach would be more willing to put those players out there.

If you simply step back and look at the potential upsides and downsides of a midseason coaching change, it becomes a fairly straightforward matter. As far as upsides go, there aren’t many to see. Maybe the Vikings could surge in the second half of the season and find their way to the playoffs. But they would be the outlier of all outliers.

And even if they did make it that far, what would that accomplish? We’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch them flame out of the postseason, and this team simply isn’t good enough to go on a real run. They need to tear things down and rebuild from the ground up. And that’s where the real potential downsides of a coaching change come in.

If the Vikings promote an interim coach—likely defensive line coach Andre Patterson—the rest of the season will suddenly become a trial period for him. A playoff appearance would almost certainly earn him the job for next year, and as we’ve seen before even basic mediocrity is often enough to convince ownership to stick with the interim. We saw it in Minnesota itself a decade ago, when they decided to skip a proper coaching search and hand the job to Leslie Frazier for three years that saw a total of 18 wins.

It isn’t a farfetched scenario that the Vikings could fall into that trap again. Say they lose their next two games to the Chargers and the Packers, and sitting at 3-7 they decide to fire Zimmer. The playoffs are pretty much out of reach at that point, but they still have seven games they need someone to coach. Say Patterson comes in and they go 4-3, with a road win over Detroit, home wins over Pittsburgh and Chicago, and a victory either on the road in Chicago or in San Francisco. Hardly implausible, and based on all historic evidence it would be enough to earn Patterson serious consideration for the job.

But the simple fact is I have no interest in Patterson as the next head coach of the Vikings. I don’t want them to try him out. I don’t want them to interview him. I don’t want them to even think about him. He’s a 61 year old defensive coach with an uninspiring resumé, and no other team in the league will even glance at him as part of the interview process.

The biggest issue the Vikings have faced over the past couple years is that they just can’t accept that their window has closed. They signed Kirk Cousins to an extension after the 2019 season. They traded a second round draft pick for Yannick Ngakoue on an expiring contract. They’ve continued to try to patch the holes on their defense with expensive veterans like Patrick Peterson and Dalvin Tomlinson.

I think they’re close to understanding that they missed out. They put together a very good team with the drafts from 2012-2015, but it wasn’t good enough to get it done. And now it’s time to tear it down and start again. With Zimmer at the helm the rest of the year, I expect they’ll recognize this even if the team pulls together some basic competence to finish around .500. Toss an interim into the equation, and that could all go out the window. Firing Zimmer could offer some temporary relief to frustrated fans. It could also set the franchise back another two or three years.