The NFL season is over for 30 teams, which means we can ask the truly important question: Who is winning the offseason so far? Six teams have new head coaches, and one (New Orleans) is still weighing its options. So let’s go through the winners and losers of the coaching carousel to see which teams are off to a great start for 2025 and which appear to be stuck in neutral.
Winner: Brian Schottenheimer
If you were an NFL coordinator for long enough and were never offered a head coaching job, it’d be understandable if you eventually gave up on that dream. Schottenheimer first interviewed for a head position almost two decades ago but didn’t get hired. And even just a year and a half ago, Schottenheimer seemed to be at peace with never becoming a head coach. “If it happens, it happens,” he told Yahoo Sports’ Jori Epstein in August 2023. “I honestly want to give back.”
Then, last week, Schottenheimer’s time finally came when the Cowboys hired him as their head coach. “Brian Schottenheimer is known as a career assistant,” Dallas owner Jerry Jones told ESPN’s Adam Schefter on Friday night. “He ain’t Brian no more. He is now known as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.”
Schottenheimer—or, uh, sorry, I believe I am supposed to call him “the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys”—was hired after an exhaustive search that included two defensive coaches (Leslie Frazier and Robert Saleh), Dallas’s last two offensive coordinators (Schottenheimer and Kellen Moore), and literally nobody else. Jones’s process after satisfying the Rooney Rule (NFL teams must interview two minority candidates for all head coach, coordinator, and general manager openings) was to call Moore—whom Dallas parted ways with as offensive coordinator two years ago and whom, until 2019, Jones called “Keelan,” much like former Washington president Bruce Allen called Kirk Cousins “Kurt”—and then look in-house. Dallas checked the boxes needed to hire the guy who already ran its offense—which ranked 25th in DVOA in 2024—without even talking to any offensive-minded candidates who had never worked for the team before.
Ultimately, Schottenheimer was hired because he can be Jones’s pain sponge. Jerry gets to have all the fun, like picking the players and deciding whom to pay, while Schottenheimer will get to do the boring stuff, like cleaning up every mess Jerry makes while saying yes to everything he wants. Mike McCarthy, who campaigned for the Cowboys job five years ago like a politician, all but ran from the position when his contract expired earlier this month.
Perhaps Schottenheimer will be a good hire. Many of us made fun of the Lions’ hiring of Dan Campbell a few years ago, and he’s created an incredible culture in Detroit. Dan Quinn was not Washington’s first choice, yet in year one of his tenure, the Commanders made their deepest playoff run in three decades. Nick Sirianni was a mockable pick for the Eagles, and now he has Philly playing in its second Super Bowl in three years. So perhaps thinking outside the box can be a good thing.
But Dallas is in a precarious position. Not only is Jones at the helm of the team, but its roster is getting more expensive. If the Cowboys couldn’t win with CeeDee Lamb and Micah Parsons making 5.5 percent of the team’s salary cap this past season, how will they win with those two making roughly 22 percent? Dak Prescott coming off a hamstring injury doesn’t help matters, either.
For now, though, Schottenheimer has reason to celebrate. Not only did he achieve a lifelong goal, but he’s also shown a generation of coaches that if you just sidle up to an eccentric, out-of-touch billionaire and hold firm while they drive everyone else away, you too can obtain a dream job that slowly morphs into a gilded-cage nightmare. Think about how many coaches Schottenheimer—sorry, the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys—has inspired.
Loser: Trent Baalke
In the Lord of the Rings universe, there is a place called Rohan. And Rohan is notable because its king is overcome by evil magic and puppeteered by a Rasputin-esque guy named “Gríma Wormtongue,” who makes the king abandon his people, family, and kingdom and just generally do whatever Wormtongue wants.
For years, the Jacksonville Jaguars have been Rohan, owner Shad Khan has been the king, and Baalke has been Wormtongue. Throughout his NFL career, Baalke has never been directly hired to a general manager position—in both San Francisco and Jacksonville, he ascended to the job after his bosses left. He won a power struggle in San Francisco with Jim Harbaugh, which, man, imagine picking against Harbaugh in that scenario. And in Jacksonville, his tenure has been dreadful.
The short list of his worst moves includes taking Travon Walker over Aidan Hutchinson in the 2022 draft, paying wide receiver Gabe Davis more money this past season than Saquon Barkley is making, and giving receiver Christian Kirk such a big contract in free agency that within a fortnight, both Tyreek Hill and Davante Adams demanded trades to get paid as well. (Relatedly, the extent of Baalke’s free agent scouting seemed to be looking at who had played well against the Jaguars the previous season: Kirk and Davis both dominated versus Jacksonville, did little else, and got signed to sizable deals.)
Baalke hired and fired Urban Meyer, he outlasted the Doug Pederson tenure, and he was initially retained this offseason to help choose the next Jaguars head coach. But it turned out nobody wanted to work for Gríma Wormtongue.
Ben Johnson was scared off. Which is fine—he was the hottest candidate on the market, after all, and had plenty of options. But then rising Buccaneers offensive coordinator Liam Coen decided to return to his position with Tampa Bay rather than take the Jaguars’ head job. Whether that was the straw that broke the camel’s back or this had been coming for some time, Khan finally did the unthinkable and fired Baalke just weeks after he said the team would keep him. Then Coen, who had already agreed to return to Tampa, flipped back around and took the Jaguars job.
Now Coen, who has barely stepped into Jacksonville’s corridors of power, has already seen the team’s most corrosive influence be removed and is getting the team ready to defeat its enemies. Basically, Liam Coen is Gandalf.
The Jaguars, like Rohan, have been freed from the yoke of evil. They now have one of the most impressive offensive planners in the league, and they’ll pair him with Trevor Lawrence, a solid enough offensive line, and a star in the making in young wideout Brian Thomas Jr. Lawrence and the riders of Rohan—or, uh, Jacksonville—can breathe the free air. Hopefully Coen’s staff is as strong as Gandalf’s.
Winner: Tom Brady
Yes, Tom Brady is calling the Super Bowl for Fox in a little over a week. But he’s a winner here because, as a minority owner of the Raiders, he already appears to be imposing his will. Raiders majority owner Mark Davis seems to have ceded front office control to Brady. And now Brady has hired Pete Carroll, the former Seahawks coach he (barely) defeated in Super Bowl XLIX, to work for him as Vegas’s head coach.
It’s good timing, too, because the Raiders’ coaching search was beginning to look like a mess. They were late to fire Antonio Pierce. They were late to fire general manager Tom Telesco. And they were either actually in the mix to hire former Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson or trying to rumor themselves into the mix before Johnson went to Chicago. But this coaching search ended with something the Raiders have not had in decades: an honest-to-God adult running the organization. Carroll will become the oldest coach in NFL history after he turns 74 in September. But he has far more energy than people 30 years his junior. His time in Seattle ended, in part, because of an inability to adapt his defensive schemes (and some offensive ones) to modern times. But now he’s got a chance to learn new tricks—or, well, not.
The funniest possible outcome would be for Carroll to reunite with Russell Wilson in Vegas. That may sound like a silly idea, but few know the quarterback better—and may be more willing to give him a shot if he doesn’t re-sign with Pittsburgh—than Carroll. And Carroll may be desperate. All the Raiders have at quarterback currently are Aidan O’Connell, Gardner Minshew, and Desmond Ridder. O’Connell is serviceable at best, and this group is unspeakable at worst. It wouldn’t be shocking to see the Raiders take a cheap flier on Wilson, and ironically, Vegas was on his original trade destination list from Seattle four years ago.
At the start of the 2024 season, Brady’s ownership tenure seemed potentially worrisome. But with Carroll, Brady’s gotten a lot closer to respectability than humiliation.
Loser: The Detroit Lions
As if the Lions weren’t heartbroken enough by their failure to reach the NFC championship game after earning the conference’s no. 1 seed and having perhaps the best season in team history, they quickly lost both offensive coordinator Ben Johnson and defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn to head coaching jobs.
With the Jets, Glenn will follow a tale as old as time—he’s a widely beloved and respected defensive coordinator who will now slowly have his passion for the game sucked from his soul by the cursed organization. Sound familiar? But there are some interesting differences between Glenn and past defensive coordinators turned Jets head coaches, including the fact that he served under many of the most important defensive coordinators of the past 20 years and then learned offensive systems under Sean Payton. And to support Glenn, the Jets hired Darren Mougey from the Broncos front office to be their new general manager. Mougey, 39, is younger than current Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, 41.
Losing Glenn and Johnson robs Detroit of one of its secret strengths—having one of the most stable coaching staffs in the NFL. Glenn led the Lions defense for four seasons, and Johnson was on staff for six years. Detroit’s culture was key to bringing the best out of its talent, and now the Lions will see whether they can re-create the energy and touch that Glenn brought to a Lions defense that stayed competitive all season despite a dozen injuries—not to mention whether Jared Goff and the offense can sustain their production with a new coordinator.
Winner: Caleb Williams
Williams was pranked earlier this month with a fake phone call from someone pretending to be Ben Johnson, telling him that Johnson had accepted the Bears’ head coaching job. (The text Williams got that convinced him to take the FaceTime was, as Williams said on The St. Brown Podcast, “mad professional.”) Now, though, Johnson actually is the Bears head coach. And his first job will be to unlock Williams’s game.
There is no guarantee that Johnson—or any star coordinator—will become a good head coach, but Johnson has been the top candidate around the league for two full years now. And his success will be based on adapting the offense he ran with Goff in Detroit to Williams’s skill set. Goff excelled at the under-center, play-action game, whereas Williams—who is 3 inches shorter than Goff and much faster—thrives on improvisation. If the Lions were a symphony written by Johnson and conducted by Goff, Williams is more of a jazz artist. Johnson isn’t likely to bring a pure under-center, play-action attack to Chicago but rather the basics that Williams didn’t learn from Shane Waldron—playing on time and tying footwork to routes.
Williams is not the reclamation project some people seem to think, however. Chicago’s offense disintegrated around him last season—which was hardly a surprise given the mess that was the Bears coaching staff. But despite losing both head coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Waldron in-season, Williams still led 14-point, fourth-quarter comebacks; set up potential game-tying field goals; and adjusted blocking protections and identified hot routes against some of the league’s most complicated defenses. He took too many sacks—his total of 68 is one of the five largest sack totals on record for an NFL quarterback—but those failures were a result of the lack of an offensive vision and a serious offensive line. As long as Johnson brings a cohesive system to Chicago that matches Williams’s style, the Bears should get their hero quarterback—even if franchise salvation remains a long way off.
Winner: Mike Vrabel
Outside of Schottenheimer, nobody is a bigger winner in this year’s coaching carousel than Vrabel. Vrabel is the only true Bill Belichick disciple who’s had any coaching success—ironic since he played for Belichick but never coached with him (perhaps telling of how Belichick treats his assistants). Vrabel even outcoached Belichick in Tom Brady’s final game as a Patriot, with Tennessee beating New England 20-13 at home in Foxborough.
There’s a good argument that Vrabel stepping in now is better than him replacing Belichick directly. Instead of trying to fill the shoes of the best coach in the history of modern football, Vrabel is replacing Jerod Mayo, who, as of December, couldn’t even name the correct Patriots starting running back 20 minutes before kickoff. While Vrabel was molded by Belichick, in truth, he is closer to Bill Parcells, with a brutally honest style that players appreciate (or suffer under).
Vrabel internalized all of Belichick’s obsession with clock management and week-to-week game-planning and motivation but is far better at connecting with players. Now he gets to be compared to Mayo, not Belichick, and he gets to work with Drake Maye, who already looks like he has the stuff to be a long-term, above-average quarterback—if not a truly special player. This situation, overall, is reminiscent of Mike Tomlin going to the Steelers in 2007—a defensive head coach who makes his teams weirdly competitive combining with a young and talented quarterback. Together, Vrabel and Maye may soon make the Pats a Super Bowl contender—and the Pats are likely in an even better spot now than they would’ve been if they had hired Vrabel last season.
