Chicago Bears - Pete Carroll

Before we get into Pete Carroll’s fit with Chicago, I want to preface this by saying that Ben Johnson is the best fit for every team. He’s the golden goose this year, everyone will try to hire him, but I think he’s specifically a great fit for a team we’ll mention later on. Now to Carroll and the Bears- The Bears need some leadership in that locker room. Eberflus was a solid coach with the X’s and O’s, but off the field, it felt like they were a chaotic team that lacked leadership and discipline. Think about all of the times you saw Chicago in a headline. Now think about the last time one of those headlines was because of something good they did. 

Carroll fits so well here because even as an older coach, there are not many people in the history of the NFL to have as much energy and joy coaching as him, not even to mention the fact he’s mainly responsible for coaching one of the most dominant defenses ever. For Chicago, the offense will be getting the most attention from the national media, people think it’s 100% necessary to hire an offensive mind to help with Caleb Williams’ development. I believe that way of thinking is a misunderstanding of what it takes to be a coach. If you put yourself in that box of only getting the next “offensive guru” you limit so many parts of your team. 

Carroll has proven to be an effective team-builder on the offensive side of the ball from his days in Seattle. They leaned heavily on a run game and had explosive plays with Russell Wilson off of that run game. With Williams, his rookie year went far from the way everyone expected (90% of which wasn’t his fault, the Bears were a joke this season.) If they want any chance to get him back on the right track, they need to put him in that 2014 “let Russ cook” style of offense, because in hindsight, that was the perfect role for Wilson, and it could be the type of style to get Williams to the potential we all see in him.

Jacksonville Jaguars - Joe Brady

Joe Brady is the most underrated candidate in this coaching cycle, if your team hires him you should be thrilled. When you look back to last year’s Buffalo Bills team, it was a high-powered offense that struggled mightily in finishing drives and therefore struggled to close out games. Sitting at 5-5, they fired Ken Dorsey and promoted Brady as the interim offensive coordinator and immediately reaped the benefits of it. They went from .500 to winning their division and making it to the divisional round before losing to the future champs, Kansas City. 

Looking at statistics like EPA and success rate, Buffalo’s rankings are basically unchanged. All of those advanced analytics loved the Bills offense, even before they fired Dorsey. So what changed? To start, they used motion in more of their plays. Even from the 2023 season to now, they use almost 20% more motion than they did last year and use motion at about 80% of the time. Anyone can just move people around, so at face value this is a meaningless stat, but how they use motion specifically in the run game is where Buffalo took such a massive jump. Motion used smartly forces defenses to be perfect in their communication and having to think on the fly. This video is a great example of it if you need a visual explanation. 

Even though a new coach would have to almost certainly come in under general manager Trent Baalke, there’s a lot to like in Jacksonville. The number one reason people would take this job is Trevor Lawrence, even after a down year. The Doug Pederson era was shaky and felt dead in the water early on this season, a full offseason of working with Brady and an offense a little more creative than Pederson’s could do wonders for Lawrence and this offense. 

Dallas Cowboys - Ben Johnson

I’ve been pro-Mike McCarthy the last few years, and the Cowboys took their time and considered bringing him back before ultimately letting him go. What I’m about to say is complete speculation since he hasn’t even been interviewed by the Cowboys yet, but letting a good coach in McCarthy go feels like something you’d only do if you knew you were getting a guy you covet. There’s nobody more coveted than Ben Johnson, and Jerry Jones will pay whatever it takes to get someone like him in the building.

From an on-field standpoint, there’s not much to say about Johnson that isn’t widely known. The Lions are a total juggernaut, the best offense in the league. They’re first in success rate per dropback and success rate as a whole, they play physically in the run game with two distinctly different styles of running backs and use play action off that to make Jared Goff’s life as easy as any quarterback has in the league. Dak Prescott would thrive in an offense like this, playing a lot under center. And having Johnson will give the Cowboys at least a semblance of a run game.

Johnson has been linked to the Bears and Raiders in the last few weeks, but his best chance to win immediately is with Prescott and the Cowboys. They don’t have much cap space, even before a Micah Parsons extension that’ll dent that number even more, but they’ll have 10 draft picks, three of which are in the top 100, and had some younger guys show promise down the stretch of the season. If they can build on the exciting young guys they have with a mix of the Lions culture that’s taken the league by storm, Dallas could be looking good in the short term and the long term. 

Las Vegas Raiders - Robert Saleh

The Raiders are not at all close to being a contender soon, so it doesn’t make much sense to hire a first-time coach. Most people can agree that Saleh got a raw deal in New York, they were all tied to the Aaron Rodgers experiment, and at the first sign of failure, they hit the big red button and abandoned ship, even though the defense, the side of the ball Saleh is most responsible for, was playing at an elite level. He’s proven he’s a good defensive coach at every place he’s been, and the Raiders need a lot of things, but most importantly they need stability.

Ever since Jon Gruden resigned after reports of using misogynistic and homophobic language in 2021 came out, the Raiders have had a carousel of bad coaches. While Saleh probably won’t be the guy to lead them to a Super Bowl, there’s value in building a culture of hard work and grit. Take the Commanders for example, Dan Snyder was running the team into the ground, they were never a major contender for a Super Bowl run, but always performed above the team’s talent level and even won the division with Taylor Heinicke at quarterback one year. Once the wheels fell off, they moved on and the new regime got to build from the culture Rivera established. What culture do the Raiders have now? I genuinely don’t know. Saleh brings much-needed stability to a team that hasn’t had any in half a decade.

New Orleans Saints - Aaron Glenn

This has made sense since the second New Orleans fired Dennis Allen. Aaron Glenn is a former player who spent a season in New Orleans and spent four years as their defensive backs coach from 2016 to 2020. Glenn has been in Detroit since 2021, following Dan Campbell over from New Orleans. He’s improved the Lions’ defense each year since he’s coached there, going from a heavily outmatched unit to one that’s top 12 in every EPA and success rate category. 

What’s most impressive about his role with this defense is how the secondary was completely rebuilt in one offseason. They drafted Terrion Arnold and Ennis Rakestraw with their first two draft picks, traded for Carlton Davis and signed Amik Robertson, all of whom have played important snaps this season.  

Saying the Saints are going into rebuild mode is the understatement of the century. They’re a team with no quarterback, no cap space and no elite playmakers on either side of the ball. They’ll be a heavy favorite to get the first pick in the 2026 draft, which is really where they can get this rebuild started. Glenn has gotten more out of less in the past, and there isn’t someone who put themselves on the coaching radar more this year than Glenn. 

New York Jets - Brian Flores

Hindsight’s 20/20, but we can comfortably say the New York Jets had one of the most embarrassing two-year stretches we’ve seen in a while. They traded for Aaron Rodgers and gave him the keys to do whatever he wanted- sign Nathaniel Hackett as the offensive coordinator and acquire multiple old Packers receivers. They put every single egg they had in Rodgers’ basket, and he tore his Achilles immediately. The Aaron Rodgers saga blew up in their face catastrophically, and with reports of the owner Woody Johnson taking advice from his teenage sons and citing Madden ratings as reasons to not trade for players, the Jets have once again become the joke of the league. They need a coach with a backbone, someone who has a vision and a powerful voice. I can’t think of a coach who stands on his morals more than one who’s actively suing the league he’s coaching in.

Flores reinvented his defensive philosophy during the time he spent in Pittsburgh as the linebackers coach, and implemented it last season in Minnesota. His defense has been controlled chaos. Still blitzing at one of the league’s highest rates, something that dates back to his Miami days, but with more complicated coverage structures behind it. Running zero blitz with zone was unheard of until two years ago, now it’s something teams routinely do around the league, and that’s because of Flores. He’s taken a re-tooled and duct-taped defense in Minnesota and turned it into an elite defense, finding players with unique skill sets and putting them into places where they can succeed. (Josh Metellus, for example.) If he’s been doing this with an average defensive roster, imagine what he could do with an elite one. The Jets have playmakers at every level of that defense, and with Flores’ system in place, they could be a problem for years to come. 

Flores has received criticism from Tua Tagovailoa for creating a toxic atmosphere and being too harsh with his coaching, and he’s in a lawsuit claiming that the Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him money to lose on purpose for a better draft pick, along with racial profiling allegations. How much these things impact Flores as a candidate is impossible to know from the outside, but from everything we’ve seen of him since he was fired as the head coach of the Dolphins is someone who deserves another chance.