NFL rumor pixies Dianna Russini and Adam Schefter are on the record as saying that there may not be any NFL head coaching openings by Wednesday. Given that Wednesday is still scheduled for tomorrow, this means that one of the league's most vexing employment riddles should finally be solved, and much sooner than recent events would suggest.
That riddle concerns who is going to be the head coach in Cleveland. The Browns fired Kevin Stefanski three weeks ago, and every candidate rumored as a replacement has managed to either get a better job, decide that they prefer the one they have, or commit to spending more time with their family, nudge-nudge-wink-wink. The new common wisdom, which is code for bullshit thrown at a wall to see what sticks, is that because Cleveland owner/dingbat Jimmy Haslam apparently insists that whoever gets the job has to keep defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz in the fold, Schwartz may just wind up with the job outright. He has experience as a head coach, after all, albeit with some decently grim wilderness-era Lions teams. Schwartz's nickname according to ProFootballReference.com is "Gym Shorts," and he has the haunted look of a zombie mailman, all of which makes him the perfect—or, anyway, a fitting—choice for the role of "guy who tries to figure what to do with Shedeur Sanders and Dillon Gabriel." Nobody will remember that it took three weeks to hire him for the position, or that Haslam and general manager Andrew Berry seemed to indulge in the orgiastic hijinks of firing Stefanski without any solid idea of how to fill the chair.
So let's call this case closed, at least until it is Thursday morning and we still have nothing from the Browns. That would be both a delightful contradiction of Schefter and an uncanny imitation of their game days.
But Cleveland's situation isn't the only whosdoinit in the NFL right now; with the pre-Super Bowl Dead Week now out of the blocks, you can expect to hear plenty of noise about that. But perhaps the most intriguing and confounding job opening in the sport is the offensive coordinator job with the Philadelphia Eagles, a much lower profile job but one with a much crazier constituency of observers both inside and outside the building. Nick Sirianni, the much criticized head coach who is either too moody, too mercurial, too distracted, or too self-obsessed to function while still having a .685 winning percentage and a Super Bowl, is currently looking for his fifth OC after five years on the job. Philadelphia being Philadelphia, this is taken as proof that his winning percentage is actually .315 and he should have been blown to smithereens on the day after the championship parade.
First, the details. Sirianni's first offensive coordinator, Shane Steichen, got the head coaching job in Indianapolis; Kellen Moore, his third, got the top job in New Orleans. Fair enough, there. But his second and fourth offensive coordinators, Brian Johnson and Kevin Patullo, each got fired after a year amid waves of criticism from the members of the broader Philadelphia community who take the time call in to WIP and shriek about the Eagles when things are a little slow at work. Patullo's firing on the night of the Eagles' first round loss to San Francisco has served as proof of every nasty assumption made by every nasty person who has anything to say about the nasty Iggles. That this firing was not remotely undeserved has only raised the temperature; Eagles fans were always going to be insane about this, but now they also get to enjoy the comparatively novel experience of being right.
The news here is that the Eagles have talked with about a dozen candidates since then—we'd list them if not for the risk of sudden-onset narcolepsy—and seem no closer to filling the gig than they were on the Monday morning after Patullo got smoked. Some of those candidates took better jobs, some got equivalent jobs with poorer teams or stayed where they were, and some are still in the cardboard box portal. But seemingly everyone agrees that this job is fraught with outsized dangers, despite or because of the fact that Sirianni is always a blown flea-flicker away from being canned despite his record.
And here is the kicker. The much disgraced Brian Daboll, who bombed spectacularly with the New York Giants and is now known as The Guy Who Peeked Into The Injury Tent, is still considered the best choice for any OC job, but is not yet hired. This is because he wanted either the Buffalo head coaching job—which currently looks like a shitshow featuring Josh Allen when it should be a great job because of Josh Allen and which at any rate was awarded to Joe Brady, the team's erstwhile OC, late Tuesday morning—or the offensive coordinator job in Tennessee, which would give him the opportunity to collaborate with the equally bald Robert Saleh. That is to say, the Eagles still don't have what they want, even though Sirianni seems perpetually this close to being fired for cause, the cause being "because it's Philadelphia."
The Philly gig does not fall under the Russini/Schefter edict because it isn't a head coaching job, but it has still been three weeks and change since a seemingly appealing job came open—again—so it could remain vacant until after the Super Bowl. That will come with more shrieking and middle fingers and punchouts in neighborhood bars as Eagles fans react in their traditional way to inertia with its football team. It also suggests that coaches think Sirianni may be too loose a cannon, or that Jalen Hurts isn't Joe Burrow-y enough even though Sam Darnold just changed the paradigm for desirable quarterbacks and therefore makes Hurts seem more appealing. Or maybe it's that Philly is just too mean a town. The problem here is that Sirianni has never not been a loose cannon, and Philly has always been that prickly. Your mileage on Hurts/Darnold may vary according to operator's taste, but you get the deal. They all know the job is dangerous when they take it, and that at least partially explains why no one seems to be in any kind of rush to do so.
But as the days drip by, this much we can hope for—that the Eagles will have to resort to a job fair in the media center in San Francisco next week, so we can all see how the scrapple is made. It's a guarantee that a televised round of interviews would do a better number than the Pro Bowl Games, which amazingly now includes the aforementioned Shedeur Sanders. Ultimately, the one thing the NFL never gets wrong is figuring out how to pander to an audience that didn't even know it needed more pandering.
