WASHINGTON — For the second time in less than a week, an NFL head coach is out of a job.
Just six days after Jeff Fisher was fired after a 4-9 start in Los Angeles, Gus Bradley was canned before he could even board the plane from his job leading a 2-12 Jaguars team that blew a nine-point fourth-quarter lead to lose its franchise-record ninth straight game.
Both men deserved to be fired. Fisher has been mediocre for several years, and the only person with a worse win percentage than Bradley’s .226 is Bert Bell’s .185 (and that guy actually owned the team he was running into the ground).
But does firing a coach in-season actually help a team turn things around more quickly? History suggests not.
Bradley is the 29th coach since 2000 to be fired during the season. None of those changes would beget a playoff berth or even a winning season the following year, and only nine of the 27 interim coaches prior to this season have managed to shed the interim tag and stick around.
An experienced coach like Jags interim leader Doug Marrone has a chance to stick around, but John Fassel — son of former Giants head coach Jim Fassel — might have trouble staying in Los Angeles (especially since he looked like a lost high school gym teacher in the Rams’ loss in Seattle).
Perhaps the only real recent success story is Jason Garrett in Dallas. In 2010, Wade Phillips was fired after starting 1-7, and Garrett turned a 5-3 finish into the full time gig. Since then, Garrett is 52-42 with only one losing season. But even that comes with a bit of an asterisk, because he’s also got just a single playoff win.
Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures. The locker room is lost, the product on the field is unpalatable for fans, and conventional methods aren’t working. However, the end result doesn’t appear to be any better than it is for teams that wait until the end of the season to make a change.
Think about it — interim coaches are already in-house, and thus tied to whatever losing culture is in place. The Garrett example is a drastic exception, because he was already anointed the next Cowboys head coach by owner Jerry Jones. No other NFL team has sacred cows as assistants, so there’s no reason to believe that the next great head coach just happens to be languishing under a lame duck.
Furthermore, the notion that a team can get a jump on the next hiring cycle is misguided. Just because you’re the first job available doesn’t mean you’re the best, and quality coaches like Jim Harbaugh (and even hot coordinators/retreads like Josh McDaniels) aren’t going to just settle for crappy situations, because you don’t know what the NFL’s annual game of musical chairs is going to yield in the offseason.
The contrast between the two firings during the 2015 season couldn’t be more stark: Miami let go of Joe Philbin in Week 4, and handed the reigns to assistant Dan Campbell, who seemed to regain order in the aftermath of the Dolphins’ bullying scandal. But his 5-7 record wasn’t enough to pass on hiring the hot coordinator, Adam Gase.
Then, Tennessee decided in Week 8 they’d seen enough of Ken Whisenhunt and handed the keys to Mike Mularkey, who won just two of his seven games at the helm but still managed to keep the job full time. Now the Fins and Titans are both major players in the AFC playoff picture.
Would both teams still have those respective coaches and currently be in the midst of playoff pushes if they stayed pat until the end of last season? That’s hard to extrapolate, but I doubt Gase would have minded Miami finishing worse in 2015 to get a better draft position. Meanwhile,Tennessee might still have decided Mularkey’s work with Marcus Mariota warranted a longer look as a head coach (not unlike the Tampa Bay situation with Dirk Koetter and Jameis Winston).
I get that teams need to shake things up in a lost season, but firing a coach during the season makes owners look impatient, and general managers appear to be scapegoating. Nothing definitive can be gleaned from an interim coach guiding a bad team to the finish line. As good as Mularkey looks now, there’s a chance he ends up just as disappointing as Mike Singletary or Leslie Frazier.
Ironically, if Mularkey wants to be a rare interim success story, he’ll have to beat an interim coach making his Jaguars debut Saturday. The NFL coaching business is fickle, indeed.
The NFL Week 15 Recap, however, is quite fair.
