The National Football League has a firings gap. Though still the worldwide leader in commercial interruptions and enormous American flags, the NFL has fallen shamefully behind its college cousin at the vital measure of in-season coach firings; that figure is currently eight, and Mike Norvell, Hugh Freeze, Bill Belichick, and Luke Fickell haven't gotten done yet. The Premier League has seen two guys fired by the same team in the past six weeks. THE SAME TEAM. Every week the NFL allows Brian Daboll to yell into a headset while loitering outside the brain tent is another week it falls further behind.
Before we begin assessing the dregs of the league and their chances of helping the league close this gap, we can eliminate the Tennessee Titans from our considerations. They, alone among their peers in the NFL’s dumpster tier, have taken the first tepid step toward self-realization by firing coach Brian Callahan while retaining football operations head Chad Brinker and general manager Mike Borgonzi. That's not the same as the simultaneously arcane and lyrical phrase of "blowing it up," but it is something. The Titans indirectly acknowledged that they may have aimed too low by sending interim coach Mike McCoy out for an 18-point loss to New England on Sunday; admitting the depth of the problem will necessarily take some time. But at least they have acknowledged what can’t be denied.
So far, the Titans are alone in this. Despite the best efforts of the Dan Le Batard show's conga line of drunken parrots, the Miami Dolphins are not a national team. They also aren't doing anything in particular, and have reiterated through NFL Network's Ian Rapoport that no changes are planned re: the employment status of general manager Chris Grier and coach Mike McDaniel. There isn't even a plan to bench $212 million quarterback Tua Tagovailoa for his recent acts of on-and-off-field self-immolation. The Dolphins are 1-6 and just lost 31-6 to the hilarious Cleveland Browns, another candidate for the league's worst team. They are in both organizational and roster disarray in ways that almost no other team is. They don’t have the most reprehensible roster of any of the teams in this class, but they really might be worse than all of them.
And we'll give you the Raiders, because they have now been transitioning from a bad season for 23 consecutive seasons. They have changed their front office more times than anyone else since Al Davis died, to this effect: Their average record has gone from 6-10 in the last decade of his life to 6-10 in the 14 years since. For sheer consistency, there is no equal.
But the fight for silver remains a fevered one. The Dolphins went all in on Grier, McDaniel, and Tagovailoa and found out that all-in is just a fancy phrase for bustout. Their decision to keep the management team together might have a link to fired coach Brian Flores's lawsuit against the team for wrongful termination, but even if it doesn't the Dolphins are hosed by their own hubris and owner Stephen Ross's terror that he will have not get to celebrate a championship in his remaining years. They are every bit as trapped and doomed as the Browns were when they threw $230 million at Deshaun Watson and turned coach Kevin Stefanski into collateral damage on the hoof. Nicer weather, though, if you can stomach lung-crushing humidity.
Chances Of Regime Change By Season's End: McDaniel only, 54.1 percent. McDaniel and Grier, 29 percent even with the Rapoport report. The three of them, 8.8 percent.
New York is a strong contender for King Of The Dumpster Teams if you combine the Giants and Jets; they are the two worst teams in football individually and combined over the last decade. But in that bag of cats, the Jets are the undisputed alpha. They are 0-7 on merit this season, including a loss to the Dolphins. Special points to the Giants for allowing a point every 27 seconds for the last quarter of the game Sunday, but all that did is obscure the Jets scoring six points against Carolina, benching quarterback Justin Fields, and realizing that their best player is placekicker Nick Folk, who will be 41 years old in two more Wednesdays. Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen are pretty well ready for roasting on the Giants side of things; Aaron Glenn has just started with the Jets and will get more time to steep, although he has made serious we-hate-this-guy-on-his-own-merits advancements with a terrible public persona.
Chances Of Regime Change Before Season's End: 47.7 percent on the Giants' side, 31.2 percent with the Jets, depending on how itchy Woody Johnson's kids get to hire Lane Kiffin.
The Arizona Cardinals started off yet another season with hope and two (2) wins. In the last five weeks, they have lost five times. One of those featured coach Jonathan Gannon hitting one of his players for celebrating a game-breaking touchdown before the game was actually broken; their most recent mouthful of sick saw them take a 13-3 lead with seven seconds left in the first half and somehow still manage to give up a 61-yard field goal to the Packers' second kicker before halftime, and ended with them surrendering a game-winning touchdown in the game's last two minutes. But the Cardinals do things like that all the time, and also all-time. They are the second-worst team in football since leaving St. Louis in 1988, the second-worst team in continuous existence since they left Chicago in 1960, and the worst team in football since their last championship in 1948. They have been owned by the Bidwill family for all of those seasons, and they haven't fired a coach in midseason since 2000.
Chances Of Regime Change Before Season's End: Gannon alone, 11.4 percent. Gannon and general manager Monti Ossenfort, 11.3 percent.
We already mentioned Cleveland, as anyone writing a story about disgraceful NFL teams inevitably must, but they just stood on the shoulders of the prone Dolphins, so maybe they can't be the worst. But we still aren't that sanguine about Stefanski not becoming the scapegoat here, even though the Browns were 11-6 two years ago. Nobody bought Joe Flacco before the team traded him to Cincinnati (where he just kicked Pittsburgh in the ass, likely making himself indispensable for another season), nobody is currently buying Dillon Gabriel, and Shedeur Sanders hasn't looked good enough to usurp either. They did plump for Myles Garrett to keep the defense formidable, but coaches get fired for points not scored rather than points not allowed, and the Browns' offense is worse than any other team besides Tennessee and Las Vegas.
Chances Of Regime Change Before Season's End: Stefanski alone, 24.8 percent. Stefanski and general manager Andrew Berry, 8.4 percent. This may grow if the fan base starts linking their team's steady failures to the parties most responsible for them, which is the Haslam family, thereby triggering the throw-someone-else's-meat-at-them theory that owners love to employ.
The Baltimore Ravens had the weekend off, which was a mercy for all involved. We almost forgot their 1-5 record, and the fact that their last four point totals have been 30, 20, 10, and 3. Lamar Jackson may be back for their next, hotly unanticipated game against Chicago, but it will be fun to see if they can maintain the trend and score negative points. The defense is still in tatters, and John Harbaugh's 18-year tenure is being targeted as often as the team's injury list. Despite aiming for their worst season since 2015, when their best player by the math was guard Marshal Yanda, the Ravens aren't so much awful as they are yesterday's news. We have to guess at whether owner Steve Bisciotti, who hates regime change (he has fired only one coach and watched one general manager retire in his 22 years as the owner), is willing to acknowledge the concept of Really That Bad at some point.
Chances Of Regime Change Before Season's End: Harbaugh alone, 4.8 percent. Harbaugh and general manager Eric DeCosta, 0.9 percent.
The New Orleans Saints are 1-6, banking for the moment on quarterback Spencer Rattler until they draft someone/anything better, and they just hired Kellen Moore to supervise this burning food truck. Everyone knew they were going to be awful, so there's not much local shock, and their history is not nearly that of the teams above them. But owner Gayle Benson is a bit of a wild card in the hiring-firing game, and general manager Mickey Loomis has been in charge for the entirety of this century, except for the season he was suspended in the Bountygate scandal.
Chances Of Regime Change Before Season's End: Zero-point-zero. The plan, whatever it is, must be adhered to.
In summation, the race for the NFL’s reigning toilet franchise is … unfinished. The all-time history says the Cardinals, the last century says the Raiders, the last decade the Jets, and the right now—well, the Titans have the worst point differential, but like we said they already kneecapped Callahan, and owner Amy Adams Strunk apparently likes and trusts Brinker. Unless they decide they need to upgrade the offense immediately for new toy Cam Ward and hire defense-hating Ange Postecoglou, we can assume ownership is done spleen-venting for the moment. So let's just say it's the Jets, because zero wins is the fewest a team can manage, although we wouldn't sleep on the Raiders in the long run, if only for the simple reason that everybody else does. That bed is pretty crowded, and has been for damned near ever.
