- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
- Messages
- 120,131
By Bob Sturm 3h ago
“No aspect of coaching has a more substantial or a more lasting effect on the players and their performance than the methods and techniques used to install and teach the team’s system. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that no procedure has more dramatic differences in philosophy and practical application from one team to the next than the approach a team utilizes to install and practice its system.
Whatever the offensive or defensive philosophy of the head coach, however, the core of any type of detailed preparation is the need for maximizing meaningful repetitions. Accordingly, as the head coach, you have to develop and implement a plan that ensures that every player gets the meaningful repetitions he needs to refine his skills and techniques.” – Bill Walsh, Finding the Winning Edge.
This summer has been plenty unique. There is no place where creatures of habits despise unique quite like the National Football League. These guys have not deviated from their calendars much more than a few degrees in any direction since they were in seventh grade. But here is 56-year old Mike McCarthy, on the verge of one of the toughest assignments of his career, and we have literally nothing but deviation.
Now, he isn’t alone by any stretch. Thirty-two NFL teams all need to figure this out on the fly. But think about the inconveniences.
Team A might have a new starter at three different positions, and QB might be one of them! It is very important for them to be getting their situation tightened up from March — when they made those moves — until Labor Day. But time is on their side most years. Just not in 2020.
Team B is installing a new defense and drafted to help implement that change. Well, the offense will have to support them heavily in the early going because there will be growing pains.
But the following teams are engaged in a significant overhaul that they know is probably a two-year transition in the best of worlds. Can first-year coaches maximize their franchise’s best-case scenario right away? Of course, two have even won the Super Bowl in year one (Don McCafferty and George Seifert took over and won with teams built by Don Shula and Bill Walsh, respectively), but neither of those coaches were overhauling much. Like Barry Switzer in his second year, it is a different animal altogether when you are simply trying to figure out how to not derail a speeding train as it tries to coast to yet another title.
The NFL usually features seven or eight coaching changes per year. Surprisingly, only five teams changed coaches this year. That has nothing to do with the pandemic. All moves were made in January or before, so the lower team count is pretty much a matter of blind luck with the subtraction of what appears to be the entire offseason program and perhaps a great chunk of training camp.
Here are those five teams. You will definitely see the NFC East has the market cornered:
First Year Coaches
| TEAM | COACH | YRS HC | W-L-T CAREER |
|---|---|---|---|
 Dallas Cowboys | Mike McCarthy | 13 | 125-77-2 |
|
| Ron Rivera | 9 | 79-67 |
 New York Giants | Joe Judge | 0 | 0-0 |
 Carolina Panthers | Matt Rhule | 0 | 0-0 |
 Cleveland Browns | Kevin Stefanski | 0 | 0-0 |
At least Dallas and Washington have veteran head coaches. The Cowboys can also lean on a veteran quarterback and a returning offensive coordinator. Other than that, though, it is all going to be brand new, right down to a new special teams coach.
Otherwise, look at these four situations.
Washington has a new head coach, Ron Rivera, who certainly understands the job. Now he is with a new staff altogether, planning to coach a very young and unproven QB. They also have a few more things on their plate, with a team nickname controversy and now a shocking workplace harassment scandal on top of it. Man, the Washington NFL team is pretty much where it always seems to be. Any plans Rivera and Dan Snyder had to see marked improvement hopefully came with a reasonable timeline.
New York has hired a very young first-time head coach in Joe Judge, who has been coordinating Bill Belichick’s special teams for a few years and handled the wide receivers in New England last season (not the best year for the Patriots pass catchers). He has made former head coach Jason Garrett his OC, with former head coach Freddie Kitchens assisting. Miami’s DC in 2019 was long-time New England assistant Patrick Graham, and he will attempt to design the Giants defense. In other words, we can certainly suggest the Giants could have used a few offseasons to get their ducks in a row.
Carolina is attempting to figure out life after Rivera by going with ex-Baylor head coach Matt Rhule. Rhule understands the mechanics of a program and rebuilding, but the transition from doing that at the college level to the NFL has tripped up many confident men before him. Now he brings in Joe Brady to coordinate (from LSU/New Orleans), and the defense will surely be part of Rhule’s work and a rebuild. It is rather safe to say Carolina does not feel the urgency to be great in 2020 and probably will not panic.
And then we have Cleveland. The Browns have employed the following head coaches since Jason Garrett replaced Wade Phillips in 2010: Eric Mangini, Pat Shurmur, Rod Chudzinski, Mike Pettine, Hugh Jackson, Gregg Williams (interim), Freddie Kitchens and now Kevin Stefanski. Cleveland certainly hopes to not take forever to get Baker Mayfield back on the 2018 path and to figure out why he and Odell Beckham Jr. looked “off” last year. They are trying to address everything, so you could argue the urgency is highest there with a head coach who, despite being just 38 years old, had been with the Vikings for 14 seasons working his way up the coaching ladder for several different head coaches. He has a very talented cast of characters, and the Browns are trying to win right now, with a decision about whether Mayfield is worthy of the next “market value” QB deal looming next spring. But given the modest accomplishments of the Browns franchise, I assume modest goals are in order in 2020.
Clearly, this is not the year to have a new head coach, but pandemics don’t ask for our permission. There are many who still think the season is in jeopardy, and while I don’t fully believe that, I do admit a season with empty stadiums is rather likely, and therefore, we are living in a very unique time that our grandkids might like an account of someday.
It is probably useful to know about those other four situations, but in the end, you aren’t reading Cowboys stories to sort through the messes in the other four spots. Of course, Dallas will play Rivera twice, Judge twice and Stefanski once this season. So maybe it should matter a bit. Overall, though we know the stakes are high in Dallas this year and to be honest, anything short of the playoffs and some noise therein should be considered a disappointment, given the investment and talent that this team currently enjoys. That won’t be the case forever.
The team will have very high expectations and a quick conversation with McCarthy would surely reveal how he wishes things were different. For instance, let’s look at the 2019 offseason in Dallas, with a realization that Jason Garrett was beginning his 10th season as head coach. While that season was quite important, it would have be a lot of the same in many regards to setup and general plans:
Dallas’ first day of practice will be April 15. The team’s first organized training activity session (OTAs) will be May 21 through May 23, with the second session May 28-30 and the final OTA session June 3-6. All of these sessions are voluntary.
The club will then host a mandatory minicamp June 11 through June 13. Following will be a long break of six weeks before the team heads to 2019 training camp in late July, likely back in Oxnard, California.
Now, those dates listed in 2019 all say voluntary, but we know the truth. They aren’t. You pretty much must be there unless you are so secure in your spot that you challenge decades of NFL tradition. That is a month of installation, training and overall classroom teaching that gets you all up to speed on anything basic — as well as what Walsh was stating up at the top when he mentioned the vital nature of “detailed preparation.”
This carries limited importance for teams making no massive structural changes to the way they are operating. But to a team like Dallas with a new coaching staff and general team message, we are already wondering how badly they have been set back.
With tomorrow being the day that teams would very much like to begin preparations under the umbrella of “training camp,” we brace for the next slumping of the shoulders for McCarthy and his new program. Maybe the rookies do report tomorrow, but based on the discussions we have been privy to at the NFLPA, the veterans have no real plans to show on July 28th unless the NFL and its owners are clear on how they wish to deal with the pandemic without exposing families to the potential wildfire of viral spread you could expect in the close quarters of the NFL. You could suggest that they are simply negotiating right now against the owners floating a rollback of $40 million per team, but unless your work situation requires working in tight, sweaty spaces with a hundred other humans who may or not be operating wisely in their life decisions, I am not sure our opinions matter a whole lot.
All through it, the work that needed to be done loses a chance to actually get done. So while it isn’t anyone’s fault, you can imagine that Dallas might have the most to lose. No, they don’t have to teach Andy Dalton everything that Kellen Moore and Dak Prescott already have done. That offense produced plenty in 2019, with most everyone back and the potential upgrades of Ceedee Lamb replacing Randall Cobb. But without Travis Frederick, up to 20 new roster players plus a new defensive scheme that was going to be chiseled out more once they knew what they had to work with from the OTAs and mini-camps, you can see issues abound.
I said yesterday that the four weeks provide plenty of time to train and prepare. Let me be clear: that is for the league. In most cities — take New Orleans or Kansas City or even Philadelphia — teams don’t need seven to eight weeks to prepare for the opener. But in Dallas in 2020? I bet they thought they were getting 12 weeks if you combine the four from the spring and the eight from camp.
Those weeks continue to disappear. and there is no chance to completely get them back through Zoom calls or even video sessions. You can see, then, that we should be careful to understand the expectations for this year and the ability to “hit the ground running” with so many new veterans and a rookie class that needs to step in to replace Byron Jones, Frederick, Cobb and Robert Quinn. Well, we might need to alter our own thoughts a bit as well.
McCarthy got the most coveted opening in the NFL last year, and I am not sure it is close. But with that comes expectations: This team is ready to win now, and the window is open for a short amount of time. Perhaps by Halloween, the concerns and trepidation raised in this piece will seem silly. But as we sit here one day before rookies appear and eight days before everyone is expected to report by the owners, the players seem poised to offer protest in the form of an impasse. You can imagine McCarthy and his staff’s agitation that the rehearsals and detailed preparation to try to close the gap between teams that needed overhauling and those that were just fine in 2019 is very quickly slipping away.
If any team needs to get to work as soon as possible, you can make a real case it is the Dallas Cowboys. They had big plans for 2020, but may already need to reel in those expectations.
