Which NFL Head Coaches are firmly entrenched on the hot seat?
The proverbial “hotseat”.
Five or six games into the season (depending on bye weeks) teams are starting to get a feeling for their strengths and weaknesses. The owners and general managers are getting nervous about their team and are anxious to make a change, “just to mix it up”. The “fall guy” ends up usually being the head coach.
Sometimes a coaching change is a good thing as it potentially could be a revitalizing fresh breeze to a team. Change is powerful. Usually though, the move to eject a coach is an ill-advised, desperate attempt to shake things up that doesn’t work out. Sometimes that’s because it’s just that the players aren’t talented enough, not that the coach mismanaged the franchise.
Lovie Smith (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)
The Bucs are 1-4, sitting at the bottom of the NFC South and in trouble. Their quarterback got injured and now they have Mike Glennon under center. Their starting running back Doug Martin has been banged up and has not been very good. Their star draft pick wide receiver Mike Evans has missed time. It doesn’t seem like the coaches fault, but he could easily be gone sooner rather than later.
Tampa Bay has a game against Baltimore this Sunday. If they lose that game and move to 1-5 it is conceivable the team could remove Smith, giving the interim coach a head start as their bye week is next week. However, this is not Smith’s first go-around. He probably has a longer leash. He better win the next three games as they play Baltimore, Minnesota and Cleveland with their schedule pretty brutal the rest of the way after that. If he wants to keep his job, Smith should probably get the Bucs to six wins.
Rex Ryan (New York Jets)
It’s kind of a wonder, Ryan is still the coach of the Jets after three, and now so far four, mediocre seasons. His last winning season was 2010 when New York lost in the conference championship after an 11-5 year. Now the team hasn’t been able to eclipse eight wins since then in a season.
Ryan has a big mouth, always making headlines with his proclamations and hasn’t backed them up as far as it is up to him. They haven’t had the greatest players, but people thought some his players were pretty good at the start. Now the Jets sit at 1-4, last in the AFC East, their star wide receiver offseason acquisition Eric Decker has been banged up, their quarterback Geno Smith has struggled, their run game hasn’t gotten going and their secondary is horrible. The only good thing you can say is their run defense is stellar.
The Jets are probably going to lose their next two games against the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots and then they could easily lose the next four (Bills, Chiefs, Steelers, Bills) and be 1-10. That is probably the breaking point, where Ryan gets the boot.
Gus Bradley (Jacksonville Jaguars)
The Jaguars are not a good football team. They went from their veteran quarterback to their rookie Blake Bortles, have a bunch of rookie wideouts and have an oft-injured and under-producing, but highly-paid running back offseason acquisition in Toby Gerhart.
It’s not necessarily Bradley’s fault, but he’ll probably end up as the “fall guy”. The team is 0-5 and there are only a few winnable games remaining on their schedule. They could conceivably go winless, but will probably finish 2-14. Bradley will be fired sometime either during the season or immediately after.
Jeff Fisher (St. Louis Rams)
Fisher has been in the league for a while with Tennessee, but is not having a good year in Saint Louis. They are 1-3, lost their starting quarterback early in the year…oh yeah and they play on the best division in football. They still haven’t played any division games yet and starting Monday night with the 49ers will still need to matchup against San Francisco, Arizona and defending champion Seattle (all twice!) before the season is over. It’s gonna be brutal. But where will they turn? Fisher is a good coach, they won’t do better than him right now.
Jay Gruden (Washington Redskins)
The Redskins are in nearly the same boat as the Rams. There just aren’t as many holes. Jay Gruden lost his starting quarterback to injury already, though it wasn’t too big a loss as Robert Griffin III wasn’t playing all that well anyway. The team is 1-4 and have two hard and too winnable matchups before their bye in week ten. If they go 1-3 in that span they’re 2-7. However, Gruden is in his first year as a head coach and will be given slack.
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