As we begin, please regard this actual tweet from 2025:
Among the approximately 642 candidates the Jets have interviewed for their vacant head coaching position, Rex Ryan must be the most spectacularly embarrassing to admit out loud. This is saying quite a bit, given that the apex of another candidate’s past year involved clogging a toilet. Given Jets history, it must also mean that Ryan’s chances at landing the job are pretty good.
This is meant as no offense to Ryan, the last coach to coax an actual playoff appearance out of this franchise. The Jets absolutely could do worse, even if Josh Allen would likely carve Ryan’s blitz-happy defense into pieces with the elaborate dexterity of Callimachus. It’s just that there’s something so purely backward about an NFL organization relying on Mike Tannenbaum, a former Jets executive fired more than a decade ago, as a consultant for a coaching search that has them interviewing a former coach he worked with (and who was fired two years after he was).
Actually, though, I shouldn't say “an organization,” since it’s not the amorphous concept of The New York Jets that’s doing these things. It’s team owner Woody Johnson. I’d love to use this entire space to hash out the full reaches of the absurdity of the Jets’ coaching search and how Johnson is running it. That would allow me more word count for this:
Brick! Johnson! A billionaire’s kid with a name the Succession writers would have laughed out of the room for being too on the nose. But we actually have to move on because, in the current NFL head coaching and executive hiring cycle, Johnson is just one of a number of team owners who seem to be completely blowing it! Consider:
- In Tennessee, Amy Adams Strunk fired general manager Ran Carthon with four years left on his contract. This came one year after the Titans fired head coach Mike Vrabel, who went 54-45 and won two playoff games in his six seasons, in part due to Vrabel’s disagreements with Carthon’s front office decisions. Now both are gone, and Vrabel is one of the most desirable coaching candidates in this cycle. His replacement, Brian Callahan, is left responsible for aligning with a new front office, managing a no. 1 pick (who will likely be a new quarterback after the whole Will Levis experiment failed miserably in 2024) and improving on a limp 3-14 record from this season.
- In Las Vegas, Mark Davis fired Antonio Pierce after his first full season, and is now scrambling to use all the power of Tom Brady’s contact list to try to hire Vrabel or Bill Belichick, both of whom were readily available last year, when Davis simply removed the “interim” tag from Pierce’s job title. (Belichick is currently employed as the head coach of the University of North Carolina, but his relatively affordable buyout—just $1 million after June 1, 2025—has led to reasonable questions about his long-term commitment to the Tar Heels.) Pierce becomes the second straight Raiders coach not to make it through a second season. Whoever replaces him will be the 14th head coach the team has had since Jon Gruden was traded to the Buccaneers in 2002.
- In Chicago, the Bears are planning to interview more than a dozen candidates to fill their head coach position, vacant for the sixth time in the past 20 years. In the process of covering this developing story, ESPN revealed that the team plans to start flying candidates first class to interviews—an apparent departure from its past policy of a choice between horse and buggy or a Southwest middle seat. A wider seat and a complementary drink will totally make Ben Johnson like you guys, I’m sure of it!
- In New England, the inevitable conclusion of Robert Kraft’s sentimental attachment to a bygone era came when he fired Jerod Mayo less than two hours after the team’s Week 18 game win over the Bills, a game that had significant draft-position implications and that, according to Kraft, he had no input on how it was handled. Executives from the front office, carryovers from the Belichick era who had a hand in years’ worth of dreadful returns in both free agency and the draft, remain in place.
- In Jacksonville, Trent Baalke is still there!
A lot of these spots are open because coaches and GMs didn’t do a good job. But the people in charge of these organizations also have done a very bad job at hiring. The Bears, as I referenced, are on to their sixth full-time coach in the past two decades. The Jets are looking for their sixth, plus their fifth general manager since 2005. The Titans are also looking for the sixth person to lead their front office in that span. The Raiders’ list of 12-going-on-13 coaches in this span (this includes interims) is the most in the league. According to The New York Times, the average head coach or general manager tenure in the NFL is three years, which means that the average hiring process leads to an owner regretting his or her decision in less time than even the most casual fan would tell you it takes to set up an organization for success.
Again, that’s the norm in this league. But this particular hiring cycle does seem to be exposing especially rampant bone-headed decision-making runs at the highest level of some organizational charts around the league. Oddly, the only owners seemingly capable of displaying patience are doing so with coaches like Mike McCarthy or Brian Daboll, whose teams massively underperformed in 2024.
Exacerbating all of this is that there are few intriguing new candidates in this cycle. Vrabel is in high demand, a year after no team wanted to hire him. Ben Johnson remains a sought-after candidate, though there are still questions about whether he will even leave Detroit after turning down interviews the past two years. Buccaneers offensive coordinator Liam Coen is the only candidate who fits the profile of the preferred candidate of the past six years—a young, offensive play caller from Sean McVay’s coaching tree. There are a handful of qualified defensive coordinators who have put together fabulous résumés, like Detroit’s Aaron Glenn, who was reportedly requested by all six franchises with openings (and will interview with five of them). Brian Flores, whose Minnesota defense has been one of the best units in the league, recently said he’s interested in another head coach job, and is also actively suing the league for discriminatory hiring practices.
The combination of this relatively uninspiring traditional candidate pool with the general lack of imagination and tendency toward knee-jerkiness of these owners is creating a bizarre hiring cycle, where professional NFL reporters are delivering straight-faced accounts that the Jets are interviewing Ron Rivera, Matt Nagy, and Ryan Grigson like it’s 2015 or something, while the Bears’ search has included both Pete Carroll and Iowa State’s Matt Campbell.
Impatient, aimless, and impulsive hiring practices from most owners is de rigueur in the NFL. And talking about it is, in some ways, irrelevant, given that there are no consequences for bad processes, and the fact that in the business they are actually in—of maintaining the league as a year-round entertainment product and making lots and lots of money—is served pretty well by this ever-turning carousel. But hey, we can still point out when most of them are totally goofing it, which they are!
So we’ll see you next year, when the Jets have fired Rex Ryan and are on to their second-round interview with Urban Meyer, and congratulations to all those flying to Chicago on that extra leg room and those warm nuts.