Or... maybe McVay is going to get some guy hired who might normally be overlooked.
Why Are Most NFL Owners Afraid of Creative Coaching Hires?By The SI Staff November 16, 2018
When the NFL coaching carousel heats up, I often marvel at the gravitational pull of league groupthink.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an owner. Someone worth billions of dollars. Someone who, as I’ve found through my research, can help control a county, state or national government by writing a couple of checks. There are few people on earth who can tell you what to do. Your NFL franchise is a play palace where you and wealthier, more powerful people trade stock tips.
Why do almost all of them play it safe every hire, scared to make a gigantic mistake in front of their billionare friends? What does it really matter to most of them?
I’m not asking an owner to go out and hire Kevin Kelly from Pulaski Academy, though that would be spectacular and awesome. But I am suggesting they don’t stop trying to hire another Chip Kelly just because the last one didn’t work out. Sean McVay had a massive boom or bust potential, and just look how far the Rams have come since the Jeff Fisher era.
The hiring cycle arrives with so much promise and excitement every year, but ends like you’re choosing health insurance: Here are seven options laid out by price, which will, to varying degrees, delay your eventual death.
The seven league-acceptable coordinators du-jour are tossed into a grinder and, for the most part, out filters mediocrity—a guy you’re going to run out of town two years from now because he’s not as interesting or exciting as some other coach somewhere else doing something different.
A devil’s advocate might say that Bill Belichick was once a warmed-over, eye-roll inducing candidate. A Norv Turner–Cam Newton pairing looked about as appetizing as a buffalo chicken martini (it’s a thing) before this season started. Andy Reid looked finished before literally reinventing football. There are lifers who are open to new ideas. That’s why they’re still around.
But there are also recycled names who have been bandied about on hot candidate lists every year. Sure, some of them are capable of having an epiphany. What are the chances it happens under your watch?
I recently wrote a piece for the magazine about the future of NFL defenses. I traveled to NAIA schools in the Midwest, high school football fields in New Jersey and the United States Military Academy at West Point to find coaches doing incredible things without many resources. In the past I’ve done similar stories offensively, hanging out with the staff at Princeton where they once ran a three-quarterback offense and another offense where one passer played between the 20s and another went from 0–20 and 20–0.
I’d encourage owners looking for a new coach to spend some of their vacation time on a similar journey. Not necessarily to hire a certain candidate, but to learn for themselves what else is out there and what more could be had besides the boilerplate options delivered to their desk in late December. — Conor Orr
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