There’s no more sobering reminder of how quickly new NFL coaching hires are expected to deliver these days than the grisly autopsy results of the seven-man 2016 class, just three years later. Of that season’s new head coaches, six of the seven have already been fired. Only Philadelphia’s Doug Pederson, the most lightly regarded of candidates when he was named, remains on the job, with a Super Bowl ring on his finger no less.
Ben McAdoo took the Giants to the playoffs in his first season, but didn’t even last into the final month of year two. Adam Gase had Miami in the postseason as a rookie head coach, but he still warranted only three years in the eyes of Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. Chip Kelly went one-and-done with the 49ers, and the plug has also been pulled on the likes of Hue Jackson in Cleveland, Dirk Koetter in Tampa Bay, and Mike Mularkey in Tennessee, despite a playoff berth and a playoff win in 2017.
This season there will be eight new coaches in the NFL, a quarter of the league having started over at the most important non-playing position in their organization. While we have learned early success guarantees nothing in terms of job security, the 2018 season marked the 13th year in a row that at least one first-year coach took their team to the playoffs, a streak that began in 2006 when the Jets’ Eric Mangini, the Chiefs’ Herm Edwards and the Saints’ Sean Payton all had their clubs in the postseason in their debut seasons.
We do this ranking of the playoff chances of the NFL’s new coaches almost every year, and last season’s effort was particularly humbling. Of the seven new coaches in 2018, I had Chicago’s Matt Nagy and Indianapolis’s Frank Reich as the longest of the playoff long shots, in the No. 6 and No. 7 slots, respectively. Guess who made the playoffs? The Bears and Colts, and none of the other five newbies in the headset crowd. Not top-ranked Mike Vrabel in Tennessee. Not Pat Shurmur with the Giants. And there were no playoff runs by Matt Patricia’s Lions, Jon Gruden’s Raiders or Steve Wilks’ Cardinals either.
Wilks isn’t even in the Arizona job any more after a 3-13 showing last year, and Gruden and Patricia oversaw disappointing seasons of regression in Oakland and Detroit. While many thought the Bears and Colts would improve with Nagy and Reich’s arrival, playoff projections were few and far between for either club. But then, rapid rises and rapid declines seem to be the way it goes for most NFL coaching hires these days, with little in between.
While the offseason has just begun, and the personnel acquisition phase could change the arc of expectations in several cases, here’s my too-early assessment of the league’s eight new coaches, ranking them from most to least likely to make the playoffs in 2019. To repeat, this isn’t my ranking of the quality of this year’s hires, only of their first-year postseason chances:
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