Black Monday used to be a sacred thing in the NFL, the traditional day for coaches who couldn't fix the poor choices of their bosses to be fired by those same bosses. But like everything else, it is a tradition often honored in the breach, and already the revolution against the ritual employment slaughter has begun in England, where both Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Ruben Amorim at Manchester United have decided to force their own firings in the first five days of the new year to get that sweet, sweet severance pay from the people they flipped off in press conferences. Now that's panache.
That's the cutting edge of coach firings, even more than the new college football tradition of hiring someone for huge amounts of cash, turning on him, and paying him every dime as he drives off laughing at the drunken sailors on leave who brought him in, because he knows that they're going to do the same thing again in two more years, probably in hopes of hiring Lane Kiffin.
The NFL, though, clung to the old traditional ways as would be the case with 32 Mr. Monopoly impersonators who believe there is a proper way to do these things, which is to wait until the morning after the season ends and then make the defrocked employee do the perp walk before the media can gather to ask when the perp walk is officially scheduled. It was Monday because God intended it to be Monday.
Or so it seemed until last night. In Atlanta, of all places, where Raheem Morris and general manager Terry Fontenot were fired within a few hours of the Falcons' ritualistic just-below-.500 finish. Morris didn't even get to dangle in the wind for a last unsettled sleep before owner Arthur Blank, who we can all agree knows infinitely less than either of the men he fired, fired the men. He couldn't even sit on his ritualized fury long enough to recognize that these Falcons who finished 8-9 are just like the 2024 Falcons, who finished 8-9, or the 2023, 2022 or 2021 Falcons, who finished 7-10, or the 2019 and 2018 Falcons, who finished 7-9. Indeed, since the Super Bowl they lost after the 2016 season, they have been the most devotedly featureless team in the NFL—never awful enough to be offensive, never compelling enough to be relevant. Kind of like the owner himself, whose own surname should explain everything you need to know. He even hired Morris to replace Dan Quinn in midseason 2020, then let him go for the blandly named Arthur Smith, and three years later brought him back after interviewing Bill Belichick. On gratitude alone for dodging that arsenic martini, Morris should have received an extension.
Instead, Morris got the chop at the end of a four-game winning streak that could only keep them just outside the depressing fringes of the NFC South title race, which suggests that the decision to fire him predated the final month of the season. If that was the case, firing him so swiftly thereafter seemed driven more by anger than by boredom, though being bored by the Falcons is innate rather than learned behavior. And how on earth does anyone get angry at the Atlanta Falcons for anything? They pay their league dues, they almost win half their games, they don't bother anyone, and well, someone's got to finish 18th.
There will be other firings coming today or maybe tomorrow, because Black Monday often bleeds into Tuesday because of travel, because of staff meetings, maybe even to allow for hangover recovery. All the coach-on-the-hot-seat stories immediately transform themselves into who-got-it-and-why stories and then to who-are-the-top-candidates-to-be-fired-in-two-years stories—all part of the lifestyle of this showtunes-in-the-graveyard tradition that goes hand in claw with Black Monday.
That the Falcons broke protocol isn't in and of itself all that compelling, certainly not as dope-slapping as Blank's desire to hire former quarterback Matt Ryan as their version of Tom Brady with the Raiders. Between those two and Troy Aikman's new role as a consultant with the Miami Dolphins (a.k.a. Falcons South), the league is leaning hard into the out-of-work quarterback/TV-meat-puppet market for their newest group of influencers.
With this as the new trend, we can expect the Arizona Cardinals to make a run at Santa Margarita High School coach Carson Palmer as their new organizational guru, or the Indianapolis Colts to try to spirit Andrew Luck away from Stanford because losing eight of your last nine games and beating only the Falcons in that stretch demands blood on the moon. And now that Kevin Stefanski has been fired in Cleveland, in deference to the strictures and traditions of Black Monday, we can see the window for Deion Sanders leaving Colorado to reunite with his son just because Jimmy Haslam is every bit as unequipped to run a football operation as Arthur Blank, Mark Davis, or Stephen Ross.
That, though, has nearly always been true—the unqualified but wealthy making decisions on people who know more than them. It's frankly a wonder how anyone wins with that as the business model. It's why Black Monday was always a comfort—it allowed the owners to know the day they could can one guy and find another. If they don't have that designated template for wreaking righteous unemployment, they could start firing coaches at any old time: Christmas Day, or in the middle of the third quarter, or when the coach is going in for surgery, or on the day the coach's child is getting married.
And now let us return to the comforts of the NFL's time-honored tribute to GTFO, and the other coaches who are about to become ex-coaches on the designated day—because not every owner is as much of a wild-eyed renegade as Arthur Blank.
