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.