I have long been a believer that NFL teams need to hire offensive-minded head coaches based on the direction that the league has moved. I especially thought this was true for a team that was reliant on either a top quarterback or a young quarterback that needed to be developed. I'd wager that a lot of you reading this believed that too.
But based on the moves in this coaching cycle, I'm not sure that NFL owners actually agree with this. So far, five teams have made head coaching hires. Three teams hired current defensive coordinators. One hired a former head coach who was an offensive guy. The other hired John Harbaugh, whose pre-Ravens career was mainly spent as a special teams coordinator, though he spent his last year as an assistant as a defensive backs coach.
So, I'm wrong, I guess! NFL owners and general managers take a lot of flak, but they probably mostly know what they're doing, right? And "what they're doing" is hiring defensive-minded guys as their head coaches.
But why? Why are we wrong? Let's talk about why the philosophy for what kind of head coach teams want appears to have changed.
Offensive coaches had success last cycle
I'd say that everyone largely agrees that quarterback is the most important position in the NFL. There's a reason that of the four remaining teams in the NFL postseason, two are quarterbacked by the two guys who are expected to finish one-two in the MVP voting.
In last season's hiring cycle, the Chicago Bears (Ben Johnson) and the Jacksonville Jaguars (Liam Coen) both prioritized offensive minds at head coach to help them develop young quarterbacks and the results were good! Both teams made the postseason and both teams likely feel miles more confident in their quarterback after seeing how they improved in 2025.
Passing Yards Per Game | Touchdown Passes | |
|---|---|---|
2024 Trevor Lawrence | 204.5 | 11 |
2025 Trevor Lawrence | 235.7 | 29 |
2024 Caleb Williams | 208.3 | 20 |
2025 Caleb Williams | 231.9 | 27 |
Meanwhile, the Saints hired Kellen Moore, and while the Saints didn't make the postseason, the team did get strong play down the stretch out of its rookie quarterback, Tyler Shough. The Cowboys made an offensive hire as well in Brian Schottenheimer, which had mixed results: the offense was good enough to be a playoff team if the defense had even just been average, but the defense was far below average, dooming the team.
It sure sounds from that that teams largely had positive results from hiring offensive minds, so why the sudden change?
Quarterback development matters, but so does winning
First, we have to acknowledge that there are only 32 NFL teams and the majority of those don't change coaches each offseason, so we're working from a small sample. Four of the five hires this cycle have been defensive or defensive-adjacent guys, but that's still a fairly small group to be extrapolating from. Some of it's probably just randomness.
But it's also important to remember that head coaches are responsible for the team as a whole, not just the quarterback. We tend to think of the coach-quarterback relationship as special, and it is, but it's also not the only thing that matters. Think of the head coach as the manager of a team. That manager might have a "favorite" employee, but he's still got to make sure the whole team works, and he has assistant managers to delegate tasks to.
The skills to be a top coordinator and the skills to be a head coach differ, and what's most important is hiring the right person who understands this. Sometimes that right person is an offensive mind who can help work with a young quarterback, but other times it happens to be a defensive guy who you're trusting to make a good OC hire.
Current Job | Last Coordinator Role | |
|---|---|---|
Sean Payton | Broncos HC | Giants OC (2002) |
Mike Macdonald | Seahawks HC | Ravens DC (2023) |
Mike Vrabel | Patriots HC | Texans DC (2017) |
Sean McVay | Rams HC | Commanders OC (2016) |
Just look at the four teams left in the playoffs. New England and Seattle have defensive-minded head coaches. Denver and Los Angeles have offensive-minded head coaches. It's a perfect equilibrium and proof that maybe one recent trend might be changing, which is that the last six Super Bowls have been won by head coaches with offensive backgrounds. There's a good chance that trend is officially bucked this season, considering one of the offensive guys left is Sean Payton in Denver, whose starting quarterback is out for the remainder of the playoffs.
The pressure to get the OC hire right is very real
Still, quarterbacks matter. A lot. A whole lot. And when you hire a defensive-minded head coach, you create a lot of pressure in terms of getting the offensive coordinator hire right. Both defensive head coaches left in the playoffs are examples of teams that got it right.
Mike Vrabel almost had a cheat code here, which is that Josh McDaniels feels pathologically unable to say no when asked to be the Patriots offensive coordinator. He's now in his third stint in the job and has done a great job developing Drake Maye. Considering the 49-year-old has two failed head coaching gigs under his belt already, I'd doubt he gets serious consideration for a third. A defensive head coach paired with an experienced OC feels like a good recipe for sustained success.
Then there's Seattle, where Mike Macdonald, hired in 2024 after serving two seasons as the Ravens defensive coordinator. Macdonald hired Klint Kubiak as the offensive coordinator this season and it paid dividends, though I do worry about something: what happens when Kubiak inevitably gets a head coaching job? Even as NFL teams this cycle seem more inclined to hire defensive guys, the concern remains that if this turns out to be less of a trend and simply just a one-year oddity, a lot of these new hires will be bringing along offensive coordinators who might be up for jobs themselves in the near future. You don't necessarily want to get stuck in a cycle where your OC hires are too good and you end up forcing a young quarterback to learn from three different OCs in three years, for example.
So, why all the defensive hires?
I think it's as simple as this: it takes a certain kind of coach to succeed as an NFL head coach, and many of the recent offensive coordinators who are built for head coaching roles already have been hired for those jobs. Of the 27 current head coaches, 17 have offensive backgrounds. There's not some unending stream of guys who have what it takes to be NFL head coaches. Maybe it's just that after years of the league trending one direction, there now happen to be more qualified guys on the defensive side?
It seems almost too easy of an explanation, but it's probably the right one. Hiring offensive guys just for the sake of hiring offensive guys is going to lead to offensive guys who aren't ready to be head coaches being hired. Being a good head coach isn't dependent on what side of the ball you're on.
As long as these new head coaches are ready to do the work of putting together a strong offensive staff to help out the quarterback, then they're probably the right moves.