The world's weirdest job searches
NFL owners are hiring new guys to run their billion-dollar enterprises, and in some very strange ways
Sometimes the NFL offseason delivers comedy, as the owners of their multi-billion-dollar playthings make strange, rash decisions.
Even against that normal standard, this winter has been a delight. The New York Jets this week hired Darren Mougey as their new general manager. That’s not particularly odd on its own, as he fits the profile for the job: assistant GM for the last couple of years in Denver, and a decade before that in various personnel roles with the Broncos.
What is funny is that the Jets hired Mougey at more or less the same time that they also brought in their new head coach, Aaron Glenn. He’s also a very defensible hire, a former player for the franchise who was most recently the defensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions.
But Darren Mougey quite obviously didn’t hire him. The brand-new GM was handed his brand-new coach and now, I guess, they will discover together whether they have similar opinions on how to build a successful NFL roster. I hope that one wants to keep Aaron Rodgers and one wants to release him. That would make for an awkward first meeting.
Down in Jacksonville, the offseason began with a bang when owner Shad Khan made the predictable move to fire head coach Doug Pederson. He had been brought in to raise Jacksonville’s offensive game around would-be franchise QB Trevor Lawrence, but the Jaguars went 9-8, 9-8 and 4-13. Lawrence was hurt for much of this season, but the Jags stunk even before he went out. The big surprise, as Pederson departed, was that Khan stuck with general manager Trent Baalke.
Baalke’s first big move had been to hire former college coach Urban Meyer to run the Jags; that didn’t last even a full season. Pederson replaced him and the team maybe-sorta was on the upswing, until it wasn’t. Over four seasons in Jacksonville, Baalke’s Jags were 25-43. Not great! But Baalke is said to be one of those guys who had worked his way into Khan’s inner circle and had the owner’s trust. Khan no longer trusted him to hire the next coach, though, so he did those interviews on his own — and eventually discovered that candidates were not all that hot on working for Baalke. One of those potential coaches, Bucs assistant Liam Coen, passed on the job and decided to re-up with the Buccaneers. Then Khan fired Baalke and suddenly Coen was back in, but not before an exceedingly awkward period in which he had to pretend he was still interested in staying with the Bucs while secretly working out a deal with the Jags. ESPN reports that Bucs executives were waiting for him to come in and sign a new contract that would make him the highest-paid assistant coach the league, but Coen was actually across the state in Jacksonville interviewing with Khan. (He also turned off his phone. Wise.) As I say: awkward.
Coen is now the Jacksonville coach, and Khan says he plans to have a new GM in place by the end of next month. No hurry!
And we still haven’t arrived at the offseason comedy prize.
Throws back curtain dramatically…
Hello, Jerry Jones!
Look, the Cowboys owner is an easy target. He sits atop the most valuable franchise in the sport, he’s worth billions, and he still, at 82 years old, runs it like a fantasy football team. And not particularly well. Dallas hasn’t been to a conference championship game in 30 years, the longest drought in the NFL, and they are 5-14 in the playoffs over that stretch.
But the last few weeks have been bizarre, even for them. Mike McCarthy’s contract as head coach ran until a week after the regular-season ended. During that week, Dallas had an exclusive negotiating window with him, and in fact Jones blocked an interview request from the Chicago Bears. This is one of the reasons it was widely assumed that Jones was bringing McCarthy back — and also because the Cowboys had been showing no interest in searching for a new coach during that week when all the hot candidates are being snapped up by the coach-needy teams. And then, with that week almost up, the owner announced that, actually, McCarthy would be departing after a five-year run. He said it took them that amount of time to reach the mutual decision to part ways. (Reports suggested the real sticking point was over contract length.)
Now Jones had a late start on a coaching search, and after two weeks he landed on Brian Schottenheimer, who had been McCarthy’s offensive coordinator in Dallas and, crucially, had never been an NFL head coach before.
It is wild. I will say right here: Schottenheimer could end up a great choice. The job of NFL head coach is so complicated, with a million inputs that they can’t necessarily control, that it’s foolish to pretend that he couldn’t be an upgrade on his former boss. Maybe he’s finally getting the chance he long deserved. But the son of legendary coach Marty Schottenheimer has been on NFL staffs long before anyone coined the term “nepo baby,” and he was an offensive coordinator for 14 seasons on four teams. Usually coordinators become head coach candidates after a season or two of success in the role. Like, say, Liam Coen. Schottenheimer was not on any short lists this cycle. The Jets didn’t even interview him, and they interviewed everyone.
Jones, always one to speak plainly, took umbrage at the suggestion that he was just picking a guy that he was already comfortable with.
"This is as big a risk as you can take. As big a risk as you can take. No head-coaching experience."
He also acknowledged that his new coach might be a “less-than-glamorous” choice to some fans. And, as a capper, his son Stephen, who helps run the team, took issue with the notion that the Cowboys were in a playoff drought. He put air quotes around “drought” when answering a question about said drought.
Dude, 30 years is a drought. Time flies, et cetera.
There remains just one head-coach opening left in the NFL, with the New Orleans Saints. McCarthy, incidentally, has taken himself out of the running.
Speaking of head coaches…
One of those who will almost certainly not be replaced is Sean McDermott in Buffalo. In my latest for theScore, I consider whether that is wise.
Speaking of heads of large organizations…
An election campaign is underway in Ontario, as has been forecast for some time now. This is very much Doug Ford trying to press home an advantage in the polls, but the Premier has also handed his relatively unknown opponents a great chance to introduce themselves to voters. As I argue in the Star: risky!