A few months ago, a trio of owners lording over the Giants, Dolphins and Colts made decisions to retain their head coaches. The moves were unpopular enough with their respective fan bases that each necessitated one of the NFL’s true oddities: a statement announcing that the coach would not be fired. In the case of the Giants and Brian Daboll, that also snowballed into an end-of-season ownership press conference in which the decision was placed on trial.
Historically, these lame duck-type decisions have a strange path forward and mythos. The Giants once opted to work with Tom Coughlin and tweak his grisly personality instead of firing him, which led to a pair of Super Bowl wins. The Eagles, a team that opted for awkward silence instead of a statement after Nick Sirianni’s team collapsed down the stretch in 2023 amid rumors that the club was flirting with Bill Belichick (which, it seems in hindsight, may have been generated by Belichick’s own personal PR team), also won a Super Bowl the following season.
Meanwhile, last season the Cowboys lame-ducked Mike McCarthy, who performed incredibly well with a backup quarterback, then offered him an insulting contract extension that was turned down and then embarrassingly entered the coaching carousel weeks after every other competing team. The Bears stood by Matt Eberflus coming into 2024 and ended up firing him in the middle of the season during a complete meltdown.
This season—and particularly this Sunday—we’ve seen the correct and incorrect ways to handle this scenario play out in 4K clarity. It’s understandable, not just from a cost-saving measure but from an emotional health perspective, to try not to appear too reactionary at the head coaching position. Jets owner Woody Johnson, for example, is ripe for another filleting after his actions not only torched a team that had an upward trajectory in-season last year, but also the course of the the team under the interim head coach and, it seems, the current coach who replaced both of them (Aaron Glenn became the first head coach in Jets history to go winless through five games).
However, the Dolphins forced Mike McDaniel to work with an even lesser version of a roster that had reached its concrete ceiling. And, on Sunday, Miami blew an embarrassing 17-point lead to the Panthers. In the process, the Dolphins gave up the worst single-game rushing performance in franchise history … to Rico Dowdle.
The Giants lapped onto their coaches’ plate a strange quarterback troika-cum-transition scenario that by Week 4 resulted in a rookie first-round pick starting behind one of the worst offensive lines in the sport. And, on Sunday, New York managed to erase any of the goodwill created from Jaxson Dart’s first start a week ago, by committing five unforgivable turnovers in a 26–14 loss to the Saints. The game saw New York hand away an 11-point lead against a previously winless team.
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The Colts allowed Shane Steichen to summarily cut ties with the franchise’s most glaring issue—quarterback Anthony Richardson—and this week Indianapolis walloped the Raiders so badly that Richardson was able to enter the game and throw two passes (fittingly, just one more than first-round tight end Tyler Warren). Steichen is in the poll position for NFL Coach of the Year (which you would have been hip to had you read the MMQB’s preseason predictions) and, thanks to the flailing Texans, Indy has a clear shot at an AFC South title for the first time since 2014.
The point is that, without addressing the root cause of coaching failure, which is almost always a damaged pipeline of talent, there is no way to legitimize the retention of a coach and it only serves to exacerbate the exhaustion from a fan base that rebelled against the coach coming back in the first place. Nearly the entirety of Daboll’s offense revolves around a pair of tight ends and Cam Skattebo, a talented player, for sure, but a 2025 fourth-round pick (Skattebo fumbled inside the red zone Sunday, leading to an 86-yard touchdown return). This came a year after infamously allowing Saquon Barkley to walk down I-95 to Philadelphia.
The Dolphins traded their best defensive player in Jalen Ramsey and drafted a defensive tackle in the first round who, while showing flashes of valuable quickness, has also struggled mightily against the run (including Sunday). The Dolphins failed to trade Tyreek Hill, an aging weapon and oft-noisy detractor who has undermined the coach’s message and gotten him targeted as too laissez-faire, before Hill sustained a season-ending injury. The direction of the franchise has been harder to comprehend for an outsider than the plot of a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Only the Colts, who realized that failing to allow legitimate competition for Anthony Richardson would’ve been malpractice—despite the confounding outside drumbeat for the Colts to continue developing Richardson at the cost of the rest of the roster—did anything to truly serve their embattled coach. Make no mistake, this choice was a massive indictment on the organization’s personnel department and its also-embattled general manager, Chris Ballard. Importing Daniel Jones in Richardson’s place looked like a death knell.
However, it was an investment. Removing Richardson from the fold injected a talented play-caller with enough breathing room to do what he does best. It was also an acknowledgement, that the process leading to Steichen’s years having to tote Richardson along clearly contained egregious mistakes. Daboll, while getting to part ways with Jones, is still very much saddled by the Giants’ past. McDaniel, who still doesn’t have an offensive line to power his run game, or a defense to stop anyone (save the Jets), is very much in the same quicksand.
If it felt too late for these coaches going into this season, I can’t imagine the madness that comes from asking them to do something different amid more of the same.
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