The postgame handshake between Bears coach Ben Johnson and Packers coach Matt LaFleur is still reverberating across the NFL nearly a week later. The contentious farewell has apparently even given Rams coach Sean McVay extra motivation to win a playoff game this weekend.
While you may have thought that McVay would have wanted to beat the Bears because his team's ultimate goal is the Super Bowl, that probably just means you cannot comprehend what one bad palm-to-palm interaction can do to a coaching tree.
Real ball-knowers understand that we're not just waiting for the divisional round playoff game between the Bears and Rams to see which team advances to the NFC championship game. We need to get this game over with so we can see McVay and Johnson meet at midfield.
This is how things work now. After every game the coaches must meet on the grass and act classy or there will be controversy. The days of Buddy Ryan not shaking Mike Dikta's hand after a playoff game are over.
When Ryan spurned his former boss back in 1989 he told the press that he was only doing what Bud Grant, the legendary Vikings coach, would have done. In Ryan's words, Grant "coached for years and never shook hands and nobody said anything."
These days, everyone shakes hands no matter how little they like each other. Coaches getting together for that pointless, awkward moment after the game is part of the sport's tradition now. Even Bill Belichick admitted it back in 2011. Via ESPN:
"Like a lot of things in football, it’s become something a lot different than what it was really intended to be or what it really is. I think there was a time when you could go out there and actually exchange some words with your competitor after the game, like a lot of other players do. You have a relationship with a guy, or whatever, and after the game you go up and say something to him and talk for a couple seconds, then go into your locker room and that's it. As a coach, you could easily go up and say something to the coach about the game. If you lost, you could congratulate him. Or if you won, to maybe talk about the way his team played, or whatever.
“Of course now, it’s so heavily scrutinized by the media that it’s an event bigger than the game itself, which is so absurd. Like a lot of things, it takes any personalization out of the game and makes it a public topic of discussion. I think it’s pretty ridiculous that the media focuses on it the way it does.
“I’d like to think that the reason that the people are there is to see the game and to see the competition. But they seem to want to talk about everything but the game. That’s not uncommon. That’s the media’s job, so that’s what they do. It certainly takes away from, as a coach, the things that you would say, so you find other times to do it outside of that. Maybe before the game, or a phone call to the coach after the game, that kind of thing.”
The days of Bud Grant and Buddy Ryan are gone. Now all eyes are on the coaches after the games and when anything out of the ordinary happens, we take notice. With that in mind, here's a brief history of some modern handshake moments involving NFL coaches.
Jim Harbaugh and Jim Schwartz
Belichick was asked about handshakes because of what happened after the 49ers beat the Lions 24-19 in Week 6 that season. The 49ers, on their way to a 13-3 record, had started the season 5-1 and were headed into a bye week so Jim Harbaugh was just a little too excited when he met then-Lions coach Jim Schwartz at midfield. Harbaugh got a little too handsy and Schwartz took exception and chased after him. The two coaches had to be separated and Peter King and Steve Rushin both had to write about the incident for Sports Illustrated.
John Harbaugh and Mike Tomlin
Of course, Jim isn't the only Harbaugh with a handshake incident. When the 2012 Ravens lost to Mike Tomlin's Steelers in Week 13 the two coaches shared a tense handshake. Video of which still lives on the Baltimore Ravens website more than a decade later.
Jim Harbaugh and Pete Carroll
Back to Jim ... Harbaugh coached against Pete Carroll for years in a heated rivalry that has its own Wikipedia page. They started in the Pac-10 with Stanford and USC and then in the NFC West with the 49ers and Seahawks respectively. The two coaches met after one college game to ask each other "what's your deal?"
Eventually Jim went back to Michigan which put their heated rivalry on ice long enough that by the time Carroll and Harbaugh met on the field after two Chargers and Raiders games in '25 that their postgame handshakes were downright amicable.
Bill Belichick and Bill O'Brien
O'Brien spent many years working for Belichick before he became head coach of the Texans. Then it took him a while to beat his former team. When finally did it in '19 his reward was an "awkward" handshake that Yahoo! called a "dead-hand, cold-fish handshake."
Is Bill O’Brien out of the circle? 🥶 pic.twitter.com/mkwK59Of0P
— Will D. (@WAD1980) December 2, 2019
John Harbaugh and Zac Taylor
John Harbaugh was dragged back to the world of notable handshakes a couple years later when he confronted Zac Taylor for throwing deep in the final minutes of a blowout.
Florio is right in this case. Post game handshake with Taylor says it all. Who cares about his answer to the media, that means nothing pic.twitter.com/s7K3JOpo25
— noah (@noah_p42) December 27, 2021
And that brings us to this weekend. Can Sean McVay extract handshake revenge for one of the branches of his coaching tree? Will Ben Johnson continue to push people away? Will we add another chapter to the annals of the NFL's worst handshakes? The world will be watching.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as A Modern History of Controversial NFL Coach Postgame Handshakes.
