NFL Owners to Vote on Changing the Coach-Hiring Cycle

The proposal would delay interviews until after the divisional round of the playoffs. Plus, why Frank Reich gave up play-calling in Carolina, Aaron Rodgers’s impact on the Jets and Zach Wilson, the grass-turf war and more.

Run-of-the-mill owners meeting today and tomorrow in New York, and we’re off and running from there …

• NFL owners are scheduled to vote on a proposal this afternoon that would push the coach-hiring cycle back, essentially delaying head coach interviews of candidates working for NFL teams (coaches that are out of work or in college wouldn’t apply) until after the divisional round.

The proposal comes two years after the Bills submitted a similar, albeit more aggressive, plan that would have barred front office and coach interviews until after the conference title games and hires until after the Super Bowl. The thought then, and now, is to be fair to candidates whose teams are still in the playoffs, and to the teams who are competing in the playoffs, too. And that part does make some sense.

Colts coach Shane Steichen was working at the combine to fill out his staff :: Jenna Watson/IndyStar/USA TODAY Network

The flip side here is that it would make getting an operation up and running even harder on a new coach, at a time when job security across the NFL is as tenuous as ever. If, say, February hires become the norm, then more teams will be in the situation the Colts were in last year, when they were at the combine still working to fill out their coaching staff. That would also mean good teams would have to replace coaches poached into March.

The reality is there’s no easy answer here because of how the league has arranged the offseason calendar—with the downtime between the playoffs and unofficial start of the offseason (the combine)—essentially ground down to nothing.

That said, the fact that it’s a voting matter at a meeting football people don’t attend, tells me there are owners and/or league-office people motivated to push it through now.

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• Micah Parsons’s sack last night against the Chargers is a very good example of how Dan Quinn has retrofitted the old Seattle 3 defense he learned under Pete Carroll.

The first piece of it is where the Cowboys lined up Parsons, and how they freed him up to get to Justin Herbert. Parsons was basically a three-technique defensive tackle on the play. At the snap, he shot the B gap, to his left, past Chargers right guard Jamaree Salyer. As Parsons engaged Salyer, defensive end Chauncey Golston looped inside and hit the guard, and freed Parsons from the block. The result, from there, was predictable.

That it was a five-man rush, and that there was a targeted effort to get Parsons loose is, in fact, a departure from the way the old Carroll defense (which Seattle has adjusted, too) has been run.

The second piece is the coverage. Those who know Carroll’s system best say that it looks like Quinn is taking as much on the back end from his days working for Nick Saban as he is Carroll. The Cowboys are playing match-carry zone coverage, which calls for players to go with the man that comes into their area. And that’s mixed, too, with some man coverage.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how Carroll’s defense has evolved, especially with coach Robert Saleh in New York and defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt in Dallas, also doing more to move forward from a tried-and-true old system that worked for years and years, but one that the league had also caught up to a bit.

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• We covered a bit on the Jets’ hopes that they’ll get Aaron Rodgers back in the playoffs—if they qualify—in Monday’s Ten Takeaways. But to some degree, they do have him now—he’s been commuting between New Jersey and California, and in Zach Wilson’s ear a bunch, and they even got him to the game against the Eagles on Sunday.

What has he brought to the table?

“It’s always good to see him—I missed that mustache,” linebacker-captain C.J. Mosley told me. “Just to hear his voice, to see him walk around on the sideline, getting mad at calls. And he’s just that safety net, especially for the young players on the other side and for everybody on offense. He’s one of our leaders. Well, he is our leader, obviously, the one on offense. So, just with Zach to be around him, talk to him, say what you’re seeing. I'm sure they were going over plays every time he came to the sideline.

“So [he’s] just another coach that we have and a coach and a friend that we have on the sideline for us.”

And maybe, just maybe, a player again, too.

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Reich planned to hand over play-calling to Thomas Brown :: Lon Horwedel/USA TODAY Sports

• It may look a bit like Panthers coach Frank Reich is panicking after handing over play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Thomas Brown after Carolina fell to 0–6, but that’s what bad teams do. But I can say, just from my conversations with Reich over the offseason and into camp, that the plan was to have Brown take over play-calling. And if you’re gonna do it in-season, the bye week makes the most sense to make the move.

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• There’s still a lot of uncertainty on how long Justin Fields will be out in Chicago, outside of the high likelihood that he’ll miss this week’s game with the Raiders due to a dislocated thumb on his throwing hand. One staffer told me he could be out just this week, or it could be four weeks. At any rate, Tyson Bagent has some tools and was good enough to win the backup job, so how he plays should be interesting in a number of ways.

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• Craig Reynolds emerging as an important piece for the Lions with David Montgomery banged up the past few weeks has been an awesome story to follow—and not just for those on the outside, but people on the inside in Detroit, too. He’s 27, the Lions are his fourth team and he had one career carry before arriving in Detroit. And his determination to make it is a big reason why he’s so beloved.

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“He’s a guy that’s like us as an offensive line; we love him,” left tackle Taylor Decker told me. “We love Craig. He adds a lot to this team and this organization. I was just happy to see him get some plays out there, and they were good plays. He was running hard. If you could just roll a bunch of different backs in there, two, three, maybe even four backs that can run the ball, that keeps them fresh. The defense is having to chase them. I was just happy for him.”

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• The Raiders’ big push in the offseason in augmenting their roster was to add more smart, alert, aware veterans to create a more situationally sound team (the signings of guys such as Robert Spillane from Pittsburgh and Marcus Epps from Philly are two good examples). And it appears over the past couple of weeks, that’s paid off, with wins over New England and Green Bay, in the sorts of tight games that last year’s Las Vegas team routinely lost.

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• The Vikings and Giants should be viewed the same way, as I see it. This is the retool year, and was always going to be, with the teams cleaning up their salary caps and making moves pointed at the future. In a lot of ways, for both teams, this is like 2019 in Buffalo.

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• I’d expect the turf-grass subject to be one of discussion at the meetings today and tomorrow in New York.