The Annual Josh McDaniels Head Coaching Rumors Season Begins

From Josh McDaniels’ conference call today:

Q: There are some vacancies in the NFL and your name has been brought up. I’m just curious of your thoughts on your future but more importantly, how do you balance doing your job but also keeping your eye on the future?
JM: I don’t really worry about the future and honestly, each week is a tremendous challenge and we try to stay in the moment and focus on the task at hand. … All the other stuff is just, it is what it is and don’t really pay too much attention to it. I love what we do here in terms of working hard to try to come up with the best plan for our players each week and that’s where my focus is going to remain.

Q: Your future goal hasn’t changed though? You still want to be a head coach again someday?
JM: If that’s in the cards for me, then that’s great. I’ve said that before. But again, I’m not worried about that right now.

So now that the Browns and Packers are the first recent divorcees to get on the coaching version of PlentyofFish looking for available singles interested in long term relationships, Josh McDaniels name is already all over the internet being linked to these openings. And not just those. Poor, hapless Todd Bowles hasn’t even been handed a box and told security will see him out yet and the New York sites are all listing him among the prospective candidates to be the next accursed SOB to get suckered into taking that thankless job.

So McDaniels is once again rolling into a final month of the season fielding the questions and answering them with the same Power Point presentation they teach you on the last day of Coordinator Training School, the bullet points about focusing on next week’s opponent and what a unique challenge they present and he’s happy and not worried about the future which will take care of itself in a what’s-in-the-cards, down-the-road, one-step-at-a-timeish kind of way. God knows he’s done this dance before, so that’s to be expected.

What shouldn’t necessarily be expected is that McDaniels is already a leading candidate for these jobs and the usual 6-8 that will come available. It’s as if this never happened:

Or this:

We are nine months removed from McDaniels leaving the Colts at the altar. Remember the talk about the damage to his reputation? The stories about the assistants he had hired, like Mike Eberflus and Dave DeGugliemlo, who had already uprooted their families, moved to Indy and were working for the team? And how just days before he decided to stay in New England he was still calling more guys asking them to come work for him?

The consensus opinion was that this move made McDaniels toxic. And that the Pats had better have paid him the big Kraftbucks to stay, along with a commitment to replace Bill Belichick some day because he’d probably never be trusted with another job offer ever again.

Yeah, about that.

But I get it. A little thing like reneging on a major commitment to be the most important man in a billion dollar company is nothing compared to trying to obtain a piece of the Patriots success. These owners and team executives have one Plan A, and that’s to try and transplant an organ of the Patriots Dynasty into your franchise and hope the host reject all the excellence. Their Plan B is to sift through all the available Hue Jacksons and Dirk Koetters and hope they somehow luck into a Sean McVay. And given that Brian Flores has only been on the job a few months and doesn’t even have a coordinator title, it’s only natural they’d forget all about how badly he hosed the Colts.

Personally, I’d say it’s more likely he stays than he goes. As I said when the re-upped him, in about 5 years Belichick will be 70, and age he said he probably wouldn’t still be coaching, “like Marv Levy.” McDaniels will then be about 47, or the same age Belichick was when he took the Patriots job. It just seems to make sense for all involved.

But on the off chance he does take a head coaching job, I think Cleveland is a better landing spot for him than Green Bay. If the rumors are to be believed, the Patriots were hot on Baker Mayfield in the draft last year, but just didn’t have the resources to move up to get him. Sure, the chance to work Aaron Rodgers is tempting. But age is a factor. No one builds a brand new career – and probably his last opportunity around a QB who just turned 35 and celebrated his birthday by getting his previous coach fired. Not to mention the prospect of trying to teach his system to a guy who’s been playing a variation of the West Coast offense for his entire life.

But having said that, I’m standing by my prediction Josh McDaniels will be running the McOffense in New England again next year.