A few months ago, a trio of owners lording over the Giants, Dolphins and Colts made decisions to retain their head coaches. The moves were unpopular enough with their respective fan bases that each necessitated one of the NFL’s true oddities: a statement announcing that the coach would not be fired. In the case of the Giants and Brian Daboll, that also snowballed into an end-of-season ownership press conference in which the decision was placed on trial.
Historically, these lame duck-type decisions have a strange path forward and mythos. The Giants once opted to work with Tom Coughlin and tweak his grisly personality instead of firing him, which led to a pair of Super Bowl wins. The Eagles, a team that opted for awkward silence instead of a statement after Nick Sirianni’s team collapsed down the stretch in 2023 amid rumors that the club was flirting with Bill Belichick (which, it seems in hindsight, may have been generated by Belichick’s own personal PR team), also won a Super Bowl the following season.
