WASHINGTON — Jeff Fisher just can’t seem to lose.
(Not in a cool DJ Khaled way; more like a Parker Lewis way.)
Well, Fisher can’t seem to lose his job, but he’s losing plenty of football games. Sunday, the Rams lost for the seventh time in their last eight games to drop to 4-8, clinching Fisher’s 16th non-winning season in his 22 years as an NFL head coach. Sixteenth. That means he’s been a losing coach for about 72 percent of his career, a rate that shoots up to 100 percent in his five seasons coaching in St. Louis/Los Angeles.
Even still, he has a contract extension that guarantees he’ll at least get a sixth season as Rams coach even though he’s sporting a woeful 31-44-1 record, has already blown through three offensive coordinators, and failed to parlay the bounty of picks acquired in the trade that sent Robert Griffin III to Washington into the foundation for a dynasty — or, at the very least, a perennial playoff contender.
The billion dollar question is why Fisher gets this seemingly endless benefit of the doubt with the Rams. I get that he’s a California kid (born in Culver City, won a national championship as a player at USC). I understand the appeal of having a coach that’s already guided a relocated franchise to a Super Bowl in short order (the 1999 Titans had been in Tennessee just three seasons).
But this isn’t Tennessee. Steve McNair isn’t walking through that door. Quarterback Jared Goff has three starts under his belt and has yet to show he’s a capable starter, let alone a star that warrants the haul of picks required to move up to select him first overall. Fisher and defensive coordinator Gregg Williams deserve credit for developing young stars like Aaron Donald and Robert Quinn, but if you’re going to endear yourself to a city like Los Angeles, you’d better put an aesthetically pleasing product on the field and not just a pretty good defense.
Of course, coaching in the NFL is more than just “Xs and Os.” It’s a lot of politics. Certain coaches haven’t lasted as long as others — or haven’t been hired at all — because of relatively unimportant factors like their age, weight, appearance or ability to handle the media. For whatever reason, Fisher comes off as likable to powerful people, as evidenced by Fisher retaining a limited position on the NFL’s prestigious competition committee in 2011 despite being out of the league (he was between the Tennessee and St. Louis jobs). For whatever reason, his message resonates with owners and general managers even though there’s no tangible evidence that it actually makes his team any better.
There are some legitimate reasons why Fisher’s tenure with the Rams hasn’t yielded better results (and I don’t include strength of schedule among them, considering the Rams have beaten Seattle — consistently the best team in the division — three straight games and won four of the last five meetings). But the fact of the matter is, just 12 games into his tenure in LA, he’s been defined by his stubborn refusal to play his top draft choice over a struggling journeyman QB and a very public spat with Eric Dickerson — one of the team’s greatest players during the first tenure in Los Angeles at a time when the team is trying to, you know, reconnect with fans in Los Angeles.
I honestly don’t understand what the Rams see in Fisher. His 173-164-1 career record doesn’t look terrible on the surface, but he stands just two losses away from the record for most career coaching losses. Fisher hasn’t won a playoff game since 2003 and his 5-6 postseason record is a bit misleading when you consider A) he hasn’t even been there since 2008 and B) three of those wins came during the 1999 Super Bowl run. At a time when this country’s presidential election implied no experience is valued over “bad” experience, perhaps the Rams would be wise to follow suit.
Los Angeles will host three of their final four games, but they’re still far from easy: Atlanta, at Seattle, San Francisco, Arizona. Three home games is good, but facing three teams with playoff aspirations and a Niners squad that got their lone win against LA in convincing fashion (remember that 28-0 prime-time rout in Week 1?) makes it a virtual lock Fisher will surpass Dan Reeves’ record for career losses (in far fewer games than Reeves’ 357, by the way) and fall short of that 7-9 BS Fisher didn’t want but will now be lucky to get.
If the Rams want their luck to improve, they’ll need to move on from the NFL’s most overrated coach.
