We've arrived at the final Sunday of the 2025 NFL regular season. Some teams are fan bases are laser-focused on reaching the playoffs, and what seeds and matchups might await them once they get there. For those less fortunate, though, it's already time to start looking ahead to an offseason full of changes.
That process will begin in earnest on Black Monday, the day after the end of the regular season in which most organizations make decisions on which coaches will stay and which will be getting pink slips. Nearly a full third of the league could be making changes at the top this season ... that is, unless each coach on the hot seat can manage to pin the blame on somebody else.
Jonathan Gannon, Arizona Cardinals
Fall guy: Director of football performance Shea Thompson
For pretty much the entirety of Gannon's tenure in the desert, the Cardinals have been viewed as a trendy sleeper in the NFC. And yet, three years in, Arizona doesn't have even a single playoff appearance — heck, even a single season above .500 — to show for it.
We're not going to pretend as though Gannon is totally blameless here; the lack of progress on defense, allegedly his area of expertise, is alarming. But progress is hard to come by when an alarming number of your core players are unavailable on a weekly basis. Per Sports Info Solutions, the Cardinals have been the team most affected by injuries this year, and it's not close: By total points missed — an attempt to quantify not just games but value lost to injury — Arizona is 40 points clear of the field.
Kyler Murray is the most obvious place to start, but he's just the tip of the iceberg, both on offense (Marvin Harrison Jr., Paris Johnson Jr., James Conner, Trey Benson, Evan Brown) and defense (promising rookies Walter Nolen and Will Johnson). It's awfully hard to win when you're playing one-handed.
Raheem Morris, Atlanta Falcons
Fall guy: GM Terry Fontenot
A season that began with sky-high expectations has ended with the Falcons once again falling short of a playoff berth. According to The Athletic's Dianna Russini, though, it sounds like it might be Fontenot, rather than Morris, taking the fall for this season's failures.
Is it really hard to figure out why? Morris (and Jeff Ulbrich, his hand-picked DC) has done fine work with this defense, including overseeing the development of a promising rookie class. The offense has been the problem, starting with the quarterback situation — one for which Fontenot bears all the blame. Paying Kirk Cousins while also using a first-round pick on Michael Penix Jr. seemed hare-brained at the time, and wouldn't you know it, the former's contract was almost immediately underwater while the latter has alternated between injured and turnover-prone.
After five years of trading up in the draft and sinking capital into this offense, it's still no closer to being a unit capable of making noise in the NFC. Why get rid of the popular defensive coach who's handled his side of the ball rather than the guy providing him with the players?
Baltimore Ravens: John Harbaugh
Fall guy: GM Eric DeCosta
Blame another injury-prone season from Lamar Jackson if you want, but let's be honest: If Harbaugh forces Baltimore to choose between himself and a two-time MVP quarterback, he's picking a losing battle.
DeCosta has also built up his share of equity in Baltimore. But in recent years, his draft-and-develop blueprint (and his reticence to wade into the deeper end of the free agency pool) has come back to haunt this Ravens team. The offensive line, pass catchers and edge rushers are all homegrown groups that DeCosta has chosen to hitch his wagon to, and all three of them have been profound disappoints this season.
Blame injuries to Jackson, Nnamdi Madubuike and others if you want, but this roster is starting to feel a bit stale. It would be foolhardy to throw a consistently winning coach overboard for it.
Zac Taylor, Cincinnati Bengals
Fall guy: Owner Mike Brown
Could it be anybody else? This isn't even so much about a defense of Taylor — who bears his share of the blame for this offense's limitations in recent years — as it is an indictment of an organization that's been dysfunctional since before he arrived and will continue to be long after he leaves.
Sure, Cincy finally listened to Joe Burrow and paid up to keep both Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins around. That doesn't change the fact that this is consistently among the cheapest organizations in all of North American sports, one that decided to antagonize the lone bright spot on its defense rather than simply pay him what he's worth (or trade him for a haul). It's hard to consistently compete when you won't spend the bare minimum, and besides, it is really Taylor's fault this defense is the mess that it is?
Kevin Stefanski, Cleveland Browns
Fall guy: Former chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta
The still-baffling trade for Deshaun Watson is the original sin, the root of pretty much everything that currently ails this Browns franchise. And while Watson himself no doubt deserves criticism, both for his play and his conduct ... well, no one was forcing DePodesta to give up a king's ransom for him in the first place.
Quite the opposite, in fact: Watson was darn near radioactive back in 2022, and yet the Browns negotiated against themselves anyway, forfeiting not just a haul of draft picks but doubling down by handing their new QB a fully guaranteed megadeal. It's gone about as terribly as anyone could've imagined since, not just hamstringing Cleveland on the field but also hamstringing their ability to improve the roster in the years since. Stefanski has managed to draw blood from a stone with the likes of Joe Flacco, Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders, but $230 million for nothing is one heck of an albatross.
Pete Carroll, Las Vegas Raiders
Fall guy: Owner Mark Davis
Carroll's debut season in the desert has been a nightmare, sure. But then again, that's been the fate of just about every other coach who's held this job in the last two decades.
Forget about the roster largely devoid of impact talent. Start with a more fundamental question: Who's actually in charge here? Is it GM John Spytek? What about minority owner Tom Brady, frequently seen lurking in the coaches box (and whose dislike of Sam Darnold reportedly led the Raiders to opt for Geno Smith instead)? Davis is pathologically incapable of developing a single, coherent plan and sticking to it for more than a few months at a time. Good luck to whoever comes next, unless Brady wants to move to Vegas full time and convince him to get out of the way.
Mike McDaniel, Miami Dolphins
Fall guy: QB Tua Tagovailoa
Really, McDaniel is a victim of his own success. The reality is that this Dolphins team was way ahead of schedule when it first burst onto the scene a few years ago, in large part thanks to a McDaniel offense that managed to be much more than the sum of its parts. Tagovailoa's physical and mental limitations at the position were always apparent, and as he (and other key parts of the roster) became more expensive, those limitations became fatal.
Even amid another lost season, McDaniel hasn't lost his locker room. And he also hasn't lost his ability to call plays. Is there any doubt that he'd hit the ground running somewhere else as an OC? What Miami really needs is a reset under center, and a means of getting out from under the cap hell they've constructed for themselves. Get a quarterback who is either 1) a true difference-maker or 2) cheap, and we'll be in business.
Mike Tomlin, Pittsburgh Steelers
Fall guy: Owner Art Rooney II
Tomlin might be the trickiest case to make on this entire list, if only because at this point he seems to have as much say over the composition of his roster as any head coach in the NFL. But it should be said that Tomlin also has an owner giving him a mandate to try to compete at all costs — "rebuild" is not a word in the Rooneys', or the Steelers', vocabularies, and that's made life increasingly difficult for a roster getting long in the tooth and a quarterback purgatory with no end in sight.
What this team needs, really what they've needed for a few years now, is to hit the reset button. But the idea of falling well out of playoff contention is so unpalatable to this franchise that they're unable to stomach it, instead desperately clinging to an eight- or nine-win present at the expense of the future. You see the consequences most clearly at QB, but it's evident elsewhere on the roster as well. It's just really, really hard to compete for Super Bowls for multiple decades running.
Todd Bowles, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Fall guy: ... honestly, your guess is as good as mine
Blame Baker Mayfield and his turnover problem. Blame injuries that have ravaged this offense, from Mayfield himself to his backs and receivers to his offensive line. Blame the inevitable dropoff in year one post-Liam Coen. But the fact remains that offense hasn't really been Tampa Bay's problem over this late-season swoon. The Bucs' defense has been consistently below-average, and who could that fall on but their defense-minded head coach?
This is hardly a one-year problem, either; this unit has been poor for three or four seasons running now, and at some point, regardless of personnel concerns, you'd think a defensive guru would be able to find something that worked. Add that to the fact that Bowles has, by his own admission, seemed to lose the locker room a bit this year, and just how poor he is as an in-game tactician (30th in fourth-down decision EPA, ahead of only the Jets and the Titans), and it's tough to make the argument for keeping him around even if Tampa does somehow steal the NFC South.