The 2020's fireable coach rankings debut, the start (?) of a COVID disaster, and more
oh my god Thursday Night Football, are you kidding me?
“All good NFL coaches are alike; every awful NFL coach is awful in his own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, I’m pretty sure.
Good coaching, when witnessed, rarely makes for good conversation. Playing the game clock like a broken claw machine at the arcade or running directly at an opponent’s top defender on fourth-and-short? That’s the content that powers bad AM radio through a full week of callers.
The NFL has never shied away from sideline incompetence. Each year, between 15 and 25 percent of the league’s teams fire head coaches and start from scratch. Sometimes it casts a Bill Belichick or Andy Reid to the unemployment line; more often, however, it traps a Freddie Kitchens or Steve Wilks under a glass case labeled “LIFETIME ASSISTANT.”
2020 will be no different, even as teams navigate a public health crisis. This fall is destined to be the last season atop the coaching tree for several young(ish) veterans. And like venerable(ish) leaders such as Mike McCarthy and Ron Rivera in recent years, these soon-to-be relieved coaches may find themselves cashing severance checks before the regular season ends.
Who has sailed the seas of incompetence with the deftest hand?
5. Mike Zimmer, Vikings
Minnesota was supposed to compete for an NFC North crown. Instead, the Vikings are 0-3 and coming off their most concerning loss yet.
The loss of offensive coordinator Kevin Stefanski has left a significant impact. The current Browns head coach helped coax career years from QBs like Case Keenum and Kirk Cousins in Minneapolis. With his departure — and the trade that sent Stefon Diggs to Buffalo — Cousins has seen his quarterback rating plummet from 107.4 in 2019 to 73.8 to start 2020.
Cousins’ regression isn’t the only problem. Zimmer’s defense has been one of the league’s worst, giving up 98 points in three games (Cousins has also been sacked twice in the end zone, which bears mentioning). The Vikings have been bad everywhere but their run game to start the season. Zimmer has a solid resume — and a 57-38-1 regular season record before this season — to fall back on, but Minnesota’s lack of postseason success and one bottomed-out campaign could portend his ousting after seven years.
4. Bill O’Brien, Texans
Houston is 0-3 after one of the league’s toughest opening schedules — against the Chiefs, Ravens, and Steelers (8-1 combined). That’s understandable, but not helpful in an AFC South where the Titans are already out to a 3-0 start.
One of O’Brien’s biggest obstacles this fall has been the work of his general manager … who is also Bill O’Brien. As I noted back before the season started, he failed mightily to extract value on either the trade or free agent fronts the past two offseasons, but still followed a template that allowed him to keep his QB and blindside protection for the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, the moves that allowed him to get there — trading away DeAndre Hopkins, shipping off multiple first-round picks for Laremy Tunsil and then giving him the richest OL deal in NFL history, etc — have left the Texans lacking talent in 2020 or avenues for immediate improvement. Deshaun Watson has seen a dropoff in efficiency (lower touchdown rate, higher interception rate) since replacing Hopkins with Brandin Cooks and Randall Cobb, who have 21 catches for 315 yards between them. Hopkins has 32 for 356 on his own in three games as a Cardinal.
The defense has been a problem as well. Houston has given up more points than all but three other teams and currently ranks 26th in FootballOutsiders’ defensive DVOA metric. The secondary has been a significant liability, allowing a 112.2 passer rating while forcing zero turnovers. The Texans will have a chance to stabilize and fulfill their “9-7, threatening to no one” destiny, but a difficult offseason may loom if O’Brien can’t get his team back around .500.
Will he be dismissed? Will the team take his GM duties away? Or will the Texans continue their slow slide into O’Brien-induced entropy for another underwhelming year?
3. Matt Patricia, Lions
Patricia was put on notice before his third season in Michigan: either show marked improvement or you’re done. Fortunately for the former Patriots assistant, the Lions looked like a prime candidate for a bounce-back year. Matthew Stafford was healthy again, a solid free agent haul was prepped to pump up a flagging defense, and the team had four top-75 draft picks to bolster the roster even further. The pieces were in place to meet franchise owner Martha Ford’s modest demand of being a “playoff contender.”
Instead, the Lions had a very Lions start. A 23-6 fourth-quarter lead over the Bears crumbled thanks to the comeback prowess of … Mitchell Trubisky, good lord. A 14-3 advantage against the Packers devolved into a 42-21 defeat. CVS had barely put its Halloween displays up and it already looked like Patricia was done.
Last week’s comeback road win over the surging Cardinals was more in line with what prognosticators had hoped back in the preseason. Stafford got to do Stafford things — remember, he’s led or shared the league lead in game-winning drives three times — and the defense ruined Kyler Murray’s day by intercepting him thrice.
So which team is this? The one incapable of sustaining double-digit leads, or the one that threw ice on the Arizona glow-up? The former is going to get Patricia fired. The latter might too, only more slowly.
2. Dan Quinn, Falcons
Quinn was a hair away from being fired in 2019, but a harried rally from 1-7 to 7-9 simultaneously saved his job while damaging Atlanta’s draft stock. Instead of adding an instant difference maker like Chase Young or Isaiah Simmons with a top-five pick, the Falcons had to settle for cornerback A.J. Terrell at No. 16. Through two games he’d given up eight receptions on nine targets and then ended up on the team’s reserve/COVID list.
Of course, Terrell is merely a symptom of the continued Falconing in Georgia. Quinn’s team appears irreparably broken following the PTSD-inducing experience of Super Bowl 51. The 2020 season has seen Atlanta start 0-3 while blowing double-digit fourth-quarter leads to the Cowboys and Bears. Quinn’s team, already dense in meme mythology, added a new giffable moment to its history by being completely baffled by an onside kick in Week 2:
Since crashing and burning on the game’s grandest stage, Quinn is 25-28 as a head coach. He hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2017. There’s a silver lining here, however. After next Monday’s showdown with the Packers, the Falcons have five straight games against teams with 1-2 records or worse. There’s still time for Atlanta to rebound from 0-3, but the way Quinn’s been losing games suggests no victory is certain, or possibly even likely, from this team.
1. Adam Gase, Jets
Gase promised to push New York into “hyperdrive” after an 0-2 start. In Week 3, his Jets … gained 260 yards of total offense and got mollywhopped by the Colts, 36-7.
The problem isn’t just that Gase is 0-3 to begin his second year with the Jets; it’s that at no point has his team looked competitive. New York has lost its games this year by an average deficit of 19 points. His offense, once hailed as the selling point for handing him the reins, has scored four touchdowns in three games.
Some of these struggles can be explained by injury concerns — the team’s top three wideouts last Sunday, by targets, were Lawrence Cager, Braxton Berrios, and Chris Hogan. Even so, Sam Darnold has failed to look like the franchise quarterback he was supposed to become. Gase has some proven NFL success under his belt; he led top-two scoring offenses in two years as Denver’s OC and guided Jay Cutler to his most efficient season in 2015. That hasn’t rubbed off on Darnold, who is playing the worst football of his brief pro career. He’s thrown for a measly 5.7 yards downfield on average and has a 3:4 TD:INT ratio.
What’s even more concerning may be the success of former Gase players outside of his influence. Former Dolphins wards like DeVante Parker, Kenyan Drake, and Ryan Tannehill all had career years *after* Gase was given his walking papers in Miami. Meanwhile, the Jets went from 29th in offensive DVOA in 2018 to 32nd the following season in Gase’s debut. They currently rank 31st, ahead of only a hapless Giants squad. This all creates the very distinct possibility Adam Gase is Munchasen by Proxy-ing his teams to set up a situation where only he can play hero and save them, only to forget the antidote to his specific brand of team-splitting poison.
So yeah, Adam Gase is getting fired. The question is “when” rather than “if.” Please contribute to my GoFundMe, which will allow me to score all his upcoming press conferences to “Nearer My God to Thee.” — CD
Congratulations to the NFL for playing 3 weeks before its first Covid crisis
Years ago, when the Rams were shitting upon the city of St. Louis — a place with delicious pizza — in an effort to build a new ATM-slash-stadium in Los Angeles, I had the idea that all NFL games should just be played on a soundstage anyway, no need for stadium fights and the league could still bank its usual gazillion dollars off TV rights. If only the NFL had listened to my idea, which I don’t think made it out of the old company Slack channel, the league would be so much better prepared for the pandemic, and not tripping over itself in the wake of the current fiasco with the Titans.
Without regurgitating the entire timeline of what's going and how it went down, the whole thing feels like the NFL’s classic hamfisted approach to every single crisis it’s ever faced, from domestic violence to concussions. And ultimately, its response is to forge ahead, interruptions be damned.
(Though it does seem like there was a HUGE flaw here in that Tennessee’s linebackers coach tested positive on Saturday, and the rest of the team, which tested negative, traveled to Minneapolis and played a game. Considering the virus has an incubation period of two to 14 days, that’s pretty much inviting an outbreak.)
The Titans can’t have any in-person team activities until Saturday, at the earliest. The Vikings, so far, haven’t had any positive tests, and they could return to team facilities sooner, if that holds. Again, the incubation period is tricky here, and not at all considerate of the grinding weekly schedule NFL teams have to go through.
The plan, as it stands now, is to compromise player safety. The Vikings-Texans game is still on the docket for Sunday, while Steelers-Titans has been slightly delayed. Titans head coach Mike Vrabel’s message to his team is essentially to rub some dirt in it and get back out there; literally the no excuses response.
The game in Tennessee will either be moved to Monday or Tuesday night to allow for one whole extra day or two of testing and contact tracing. And though it doesn’t appear to be the preferred course, the NFL could still reschedule the game for Week 7, necessitating some shuffling with other teams too.
If the league does go forward with having both games this week, player health and safety be damned, it’s either going to risk further spreading the virus and/or ask players to play without practicing (or being able to get into the training room, etc).
Goodell’s message so far is to remind teams that they need to “remain diligent,” which seems at odds with the league’s instinct to press ahead and risk a major outbreak that could shut down the season for much longer than a week or two of inconvenient schedule shuffling. — RVB
Thursday Night Football picks
After a few weeks of “eh, not that bad” Thursday night games, the Poopfest TNF we all know is officially back. No one asked for Jets-Broncos, but there’s a comfort in such an unpalatable matchup, isn’t there?
Whether it’s on Thursday night or not, the NFL should always reserve one weekly primetime slot for a truly awful contest. When everything else in the world is unstable, we should all be able to rely on that small bit of normalcy. One evening each week in the fall, we know what’s waiting for us: an NFL game we can hatewatch together on Twitter, laugh about on our group texts, or just guiltlessly skip altogether so we can finally catch up on, say, the new season of Fargo.
Unfortunately, the NFL gave us too much of a bad thing in Week 4, considering the entire primetime lineup could fit the under “unwatchable” umbrella (Eagles-49ers on SNF; Falcons-Packers on MNF). But Jets-Broncos is easily the poopfestiest of the bunch. And yet, after Tuesday night’s presidential debate, it won’t even be the worst event to air on TV this week.
Let’s quick introduce you to the two teams, courtesy of the bleakest quotes we could find about their quarterback situations.
Broncos:
Rypien, who has never played in an NFL game before, ended up getting the nod. He’ll be the ninth different quarterback to start for the Broncos since 2017, which is bordering on “Browns jersey of sadness” territory.
Jets:
Honestly, I feel sorry for him. Even though Darnold looks like he has regressed, he has no weapons around him to help and he’s spent his entire NFL career with Adam Gase as his head coach. So far, anyway. He’s probably about a week away from Gregg Williams being his interim coach, which isn’t much better. If Darnold longs for the days when he had mono, I don’t blame him.
Neither team has won a game yet, and unless their Week 4 matchup ends in, like, a 6-6 tie (which is possible, maybe even likely), that will change Thursday night.
There’s a clear consensus among our panel this week on which team that will be. Despite all their injuries and that Vic Fangio doesn’t even know his new quarterback’s name, we’re siding with the Broncos. That includes our latest guest picker, Louis Bien.
Louis was a do-everything editor and writer at SB Nation for nine years. Currently, he’s the editor-in-chief of Publication to Be Named Later, an independent quarterly that aims to tell unique sports stories from some of your favorite writers on the internet. You can order the first edition right here, for as little as $1. You can also follow Louis on Twitter and sign up for his newsletter, I Dream In Polka Dot.
Check back with us on Friday, after we’ve endured Jets-Broncos, for the rest of the Week 4 picks. — SH
Keep up the good work man! You're on fire!
I really would like if y'all posted all picks on Wednesday. Would really help me with my picks that i need swaying with.