Here’s a wild observation about the NFL head coach hiring process that speaks to both how ineffective and maddeningly routine the entire system has become: For the past five years, teams have been trying to hire someone reminiscent of Sean McVay without realizing how the Rams got McVay in the first place and trying to reverse engineer that process.
In 2016, McVay’s last year as an offensive coordinator, the Commanders were 8-7-1 and did not make the playoffs. The team was middling in some offensive categories and upper tier in net yards per passing and rushing attempts. The hiring world was full of people who would bloviate about the young coach as if he were still some kind of ripening fruit. But there were only a small handful of teams willing to swallow the potential public relations speedbump that came with legitimately considering the hiring of a very young coach from a team that didn’t perform all that well the previous season.
Mostly, teams stay in their comfort zone, which consists of waiting until a club performs well and then plucking a coach from that team, hoping the coach replicates that success. In many circumstances, they have to wait a year after the team has peaked so that the coach has time to squeeze in an interview. By then, it has already become somewhat evident that the team was less a product of the coach than the coach was a product of an expertly built roster, a soft schedule, a winnable division and so on and so forth.
