Josh McDaniels took arguably the best available head coaching job in the NFL on Sunday, much to the surprise of the lay NFL world who last checked in with the Patriots’ offensive coordinator when he backed out of the Colts’ job in 2019, leaving a mostly assembled staff in the lurch while he scampered back to the league’s ready-made coaching factory.
We’re not here to criticize. McDaniels’s reasoning for not taking the job has since filtered out through various surrogates. Maybe he and current Colts general manager Chris Ballard weren’t in as much a lockstep as they originally thought. Maybe there were granular philosophical differences that ended up being a deal breaker. Even if it had nothing to do with operations squabbling, we are all humans working for a living. Family comfort, school quality, proximity to other loved ones, that feeling in your gut when you walk into the front door of a place for the first time; all of it becomes a factor. If people aren’t still talking about Eli Manning refusing to work for the Chargers, we need to let this McDaniels thing go.
But it is interesting, especially in the current state of coaching affairs. McDaniels left the Colts, ultimately, because he knew he could. He knew that his time would come again because of the league’s unending desperation to replicate New England’s two-decade stretch of success. McDaniels upset many powerful people across the league, but the ultimate truth is that no owner is immune to the idea that if they place the right number of Patriots assistants and executives together in the same place, they’ll start to glimmer like the rings in Captain Planet and summon some superhero from the depths of earth to solve all their problems.
