Eric Bieniemy: Still Not A Head Coach
Last year, I wrote an intentionally very one-sided look at both the merits of Kansas City’s offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy and the lack thereof for the men who had been hired instead of EB as head coaches in the span that he has been OC for the Chiefs, that is, since 2018.
In it I concluded that Bieniemy was easily a better idea to hire than any of the coaches therein, and with the singular exception of Brian Daboll, I feel like I hit on most of those.
A notable exception from the list,(aside from, on principle, the only two black coaches who were hired, one of whom, Lovie Smith, was just fired, by the Texans, of course) Doug Pederson, a super bowl winning head coach and an excellent play caller, the only guy truly more qualified on a generic level than anybody including Bieniemy, took on the task as Jaguars head coach and has resurrected Trevor Lawrence and his team, although they didn’t run the ball well. Lawrence had a tumultuous start but ended the season 9th in EPA/play and 4th in success rate. In the regular season he had 8 games out of 17 in the regular season with passer ratings (a stat which I think is just fine, thank you,) of over 100, although he certainly had rougher days as well, including a 6–13 loss to the tanking Houston Texans where Lawrence threw two picks, only completed 53% of his passes, and never scored. Their up and down year resulted in one of the most insane wild card games ever seen, where in the first half Trevor Lawrence threw 4 picks and then in the second half threw 4 touchdowns and the Jags won the game. They beat the Chargers, of course. They were then defeated by Kansas City who went on to win the Super Bowl, so they just about maximized their potential. It’s hard not to say that, especially with the up and down nature of the year and yet still going literally as far as they reasonably could have, Doug Pederson deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the Jags transformation into a team that’s actually capable of winning more games than they lose. I knew what I was doing leaving Pederson off of my little burn book last year.
Honestly, I quietly knew Brian Daboll would work out, but he still wasn’t nearly as qualified as Bieniemy even if Daboll’s role in “fixing Josh Allen” did make him more suited to a project quarterback like Daniel Jones. This was a miss, but on a principled swing I’d take every time. For a second here I found myself typing “but it’s not like they didn’t barely make the playoffs and then lose as soon as they’d beat the even more fraudulent vikings” even though that’s exactly what the Jags did to the Chargers. Bias is a hell of a drug. I have to take this L, but I’m ok with that . . . but don’t be surprised if the Giants regress runs away like a cartoon character.
Now, before I get to everybody else, I need to remind people what the idea is here. The idea is not: “Eric Bieniemy would performed better than these coaches.” The idea is: “Eric Bieniemy would likely have similar results within one or two wins/losses, and if he’s capable of executing the long term project of running something like Andy Reid’s offense (which as we were just reminded, works just fine even if your all-time QB is in tons of pain and isn’t capable of reaching their peak athleticism,) on your team, you could be in business for years.” More importantly, the idea is that so many folks are being hired with resumes that are simply less rich in positive experience. When Bieniemy was runningbacks coach of the Chiefs, he did benefit from the last two great years of Jamaal Charles, but he did just so happen to be the position coach of a group that consistently performed well on a per-snap basis under a head coach who is never going to call a game for volume rushing stats. After he took over as OC in 2018 with Mahomes coming in under center, the rest is obviously history. He has now coordinated offense in a third super bowl, earning his second victory, in a game in which the most notable overall narrative is that the Chiefs offensive coaching staff wildly outcoached the Eagles defense in the second half, slicing them up through the air with wide receivers wide the fuck open on many critical plays. The defensive coordinator from this game just got a job as a head coach. I can’t make that up. We’ll get to him later. (The Eagles OC also got hired, but at least his unit kicked ass in the Super Bowl!)
Dennis Allen of the Saints lead a poor football team this year. I am told that the team retaining Allen as head coach has something to do with his “excellent coaching staff,” which I suppose has many survivors of the Sean Payton era. But Allen has been a head coach before, and accumulated a record of 8 wins and . . . if I’ve done my math correctly here, 32 losses, translating to a win rate of exactly 25% over that span. Results like this do not make one look like a knockout hire over Bieniemy. That said, my issue with the Saints last year had less to do with this hire and more to do with the Saints supposedly interviewing EB for 8 hours before ultimately not offering him the job, which seemed a bit insulting especially since hiring Allen seems like such an obvious decision, one that was made before Bieniemy was interviewed.
In my original article I called Nathaniel Hackett “Diet Brian Daboll” and uh, wow, Brian, I am sorry. Hackett immediately established himself as one of the worst coaches of the 21st century, only outdone by the likes of the genuine worst of the worst like Urban Meyer. In the opening game against the Seahawks, his team failed to execute in the red zone in spite of moving the ball at will between the 20s and Russell Wilson lost to Seattle, giving rise to narratives that never really went away. Notably, Wilson seemed to improve when Hackett was fired. The Broncos wanted Aaron Rodgers so they hired a guy that nobody thought could really coach to get Aaron, who would pretty much coach the offense himself which . . . wow, what an idea. When they didn’t get Aaron they got Wilson instead, traded at the exact moment seemingly that his engine hit 150 thousand miles and shit started to fall apart. Still, even with Russell missing throws badly in week 1, if they had managed to win that one game the entire momentum of their season the energy of the team may have been completely different. The loss obviously crushed Russ who played one of the worst seasons ever by a still-likely future hall of fame quarterback. This was an obviously bad hire by the Broncos, who have now doubled down on Russ by trading yet more firsts to get Sean Payton, who frankly I just think is overrated. Drew Brees was arguably the best ever at the most important singular skill of the modern QB passes (lethally accurate short and middle ranged passes) and Payton’s teams still found a way to lose 27 games in three seasons. He has exactly as much championship success as John Harbaugh, but has coached in fewer conference title games even in an era when the NFC was the weaker conference. (A continuing narrative, seemingly.) Do I think Bieniemy would’ve been a better choice over Payton? Honestly, I kinda do. We have evidence that QB mobility and deep bombs can be a massive part of a Reid style offense, and I’m not exactly sure how Payton plans to mold Wilson into a guy he’s never been, a dude who can make plays on schedule and throw passes to where the guy is going to be on throws of less than 10 air yards. Maybe that’s an over simplistic analysis, but color me shocked if Payton and Wilson doesn’t pan out. (Note: this is the exact language I used to describe Daniel Jones and Brian Daboll last year.)
Matt Eberflus’ Chicago Bears were not a good team. QB Justin Fields nearly broke Lamar Jackson’s recently-minded QB single season rushing record, but it didn’t translate into winning football at all. Whether EB could’ve done better, I have a hard time thinking he would’ve done worse than Eberflus’ 4 wins this year.
Josh McDaniels. How many fucking times do we have to teach the NFL this lesson? McDaniels doesn’t have what it takes to be a head coach, it could not be any more clear in a season where McDaniels took a team that made the playoffs last year while being coached by Rich Bisaccia, then added one of the league’s best wide receivers Davante Adams to a passing attack that had the reliable-but-unspectacular Derek Carr, as well as Darren Waller, one of the best tight ends in football, McDaniels took that team and he generated 11 losses, including the ONLY career coaching win for former and likely future ESPN Analyst Jeff Saturday, in a game that should forever be known as “Any Given Saturday.” Bro. You have Davante Adams and you got beat by a guy whose job is to do hot takes on tv. Retire, man!
Bieniemy probably would’ve panned out a lot better than some of the other coaches who started in 2022 but we can go ahead and move on to the new guys now.
Addressing The Hiring of Other Black Head Coaches in the NFL
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why I’m bothering doing this because I think anybody who is informed or wishes to be informed about the ongoing crisis of structural racism in this country would already be aware that, yes, while other black coaches have been hired, the circumstances around those hirings have been genuinely dubious at best.
Todd Bowles for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
I’m not going to spend that much time on this one. You know why Tampa put Todd Bowles in at head coach? Because it was an open secret that when Bruce Aryans was going to be done coaching, he wanted his beloved DC, Bowles, to replace him. Aryans, notably, is white. Bowles, to his credit, also does not have some of the darker moments in his past like Bieniemy, and has prior head coaching experience, even if it did result in a losing record. But I think we can pretty quickly conclude that Todd Bowles, whether he would’ve been Tampa’s first choice or not, made his way into the boys’ club in a way that Bieniemy has not and is now reaping the benefits even though, to date, his tenure as Tampa Bay HC has not been a winning one. I think being part of the boys’ club with Aryans in the front office is one of the reasons he still has the job even after underperforming, some would say vastly underperforming, with Tom Brady. Like I said, this one doesn’t really require deep analysis.
David Culley, Lovie Smith, and DeMeco Ryans of the Texans
To say I’m shocked Ryans took this job is an understatement. At the end of both 2020 and 2021, the Texans hired a new black head coach. What nobody has really said out loud but is obvious to just about anybody is that the Texans have clearly been tanking, and thus their idea behind hiring Culley and Smith was not to win games. This was gallingly obvious with David Culley in particular. I’m familiar with David Culley. He used to be the wide receivers coach of the Baltimore Ravens before being hired by the Texans in 2020. Can you name a good wide receiver on the Baltimore Ravens? He was also a wide receiver’s coach in tons of other places and has no real notable results to show for it, oh, other than that he was the WR coach for a Kansas City Chiefs team that had zero touchdowns by wide receivers. It’s extremely obvious to anybody who isn’t lying to themselves that they hired Culley because he sucks and that’s even more obvious when you consider the fact that Culley’s contract, which has no effect on the salary cap, was a one-year deal. God bless Culley, he’s an aging man and he probably badly wanted to even just experience being a head coach, he took the job. But everybody with a brain knows what’s going on there.
Lovie Smith was at one point one of the league’s great defensive minds. As a coordinator he masterminded the Tampa Two defense that helped the Buccaneers win their first Super Bowl, in 2002 over the Raiders. In 2006, with his best offensive player being Devin Hester, he managed to get the Chicago Bears to 13–3 and a Super Bowl where they were beaten by the Colts. Ultimately his tenure ended with the Bears at 81–63, which is completely reasonable. Then he sat out for a year, and was brought on by Tampa to be the head coach in 2014 and 2015 . . . which is when he won a combined 8 games. 7 years later the Texans hired him to be their head coach, notably this occurred soon after the league and its teams were sued by Brian Flores for their failure to meaningfully comply with the Rooney Rule that requires teams to interview at least one black candidate for their coaching positions.
Ultimately, Smith is the sort of hire that either says “we’re not trying to win” or “we have no idea how to put together a team that wins” and frankly it leans towards the former. It’s been no secret that Smith’s decision to go for two at the end of Houston’s final regular season game that won the game infuriated the Texans FO who were hoping to get the #1 pick. That pick now belongs to Smith’s former team, Chicago. None of this spells out a winning culture.
I could talk about the Texans’ ownership group not particularly great track record on race in other areas (they make their money owning private prisons for christ’s sake), but the simple analysis is that the past two coaches they’ve had they simply never hired them to win. And frankly I even find that a little bit insidious since they could’ve hired any dopey white coach to lose games, but instead hired black coaches who had no chance to succeed, which has the effect of subliminally telling other owners already biased not to hire black coaches that black coaches aren’t winners. I realize that doesn’t sound smart, but it makes a lot more sense when you step inside the mind of utter fucking idiots like the Houston Texans ownership group.
We can really only hope that the Texans hired Ryans with the honest intention of winning football games, because their track record over the past three does not indicate that to be the idea whatsoever, even if they are in a position to pick a new QB and start fresh as a team.
Onwards . . .
Among the new hires to be head coaches in the NFL include both of the opposing coordinators from this most recent Super Bowl: Former Eagles OC Shane Steichen is now the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts and DC Jonathan Gannon is now head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.
It would be somewhat inconsistent of me to criticize the hiring of Steichen. Steichen’s offense since 2021 has averaged the 4th highest EPA/play and 4th highest success rate, including being 9th in dropback EPA/play when many people, myself included, were skeptical before 2022 that Hurts was a genuinely capable thrower of the football. His offense also utterly dominated in this postseason, churning out .190 EPA/play against Kansas City’s .197/play. Steichen’s offensive playcalling did not generate Hurts’ careless fumble in the Super Bowl, and his team ultimately lost by three in a game where KC had, functionally, the final possession. Shane Steichen’s resume, based on how contemporary hiring of NFL coaches works, is functionally flawless, and I’ll flat out say that I think he’ll probably succeed with the Colts if they give him time . . . but his resume is also obviously nowhere near the level of Eric Bieniemy’s, and Eric Bieniemy after year two of being an OC, having a Super Bowl win, is better than Steichen’s, even with both coordinators being in charge of likely the best QBs in their respective conferences and extremely high level players at the skill positions.
Notice how EB’s offense is an entire 10% of an expected point better on a per-snap basis. Keep in mind when referencing the above that EB’s offenses are consistently carrying notoriously bad defenses, whereas the Eagles defense in 2022 especially was one of the league’s best. In the 2019 playoff run to make the Super Bowl, KC had to overcome double digit deficits in each playoff game. In 2022, the Eagles faced the New York Giants and San Francisco, neither of whom have a real quarterback. They faced zero challenge to get to the Super Bowl, offensively speaking, on top of having a very soft regular season schedule.
So if you’re choosing between two brilliant minds at offensive coordinator who’ve both had amazing success, why would you not hire Bieniemy instead of Steichen? Especially given I’ve been only comparing EB and Steichen’s first two years as coordinator. EB’s subsequent three years, including beating Steichen’s team who had a double-digit lead in the motherfucking Super Bowl, is all positive additions. Steichen is a fine candidate to be Colts head coach. EB is flatly and obviously better.
Frank Reich has gotten a reputation as a good coach and a good leader, at least as far as I can tell, and the thing is that’s kinda surprising when you really take a hard look at what his resume is on paper. Carolina is starting a full rebuild with no quarterback and no truly great skill position players, which will be interesting to see Reich handle because in multiple years with very skilled offensive players he has managed to coordinate bad offenses and lead bad teams.
From 2014–2015, Frank Reich was the offensive coordinator of the then-San Diego Chargers where the Chargers averaged out to -.001 EPA/play, that’s right, negative EPA/play (and in case you’re wondering, they got worse in 2015, not better, to achieve that), and a success rate of 43%, and won only 13 games across two seasons. In 2013, they year before Reich was brought on, they had averaged .142 EPA/play, the 2nd best in football that year only to the historic barnburner offense of that year’s Denver Broncos squad lead by Peyton Manning. During Reich’s tenure he had Phillip Rivers at quarterback, never a dominant player in terms of wins and losses, but a perfectly capable QB to anybody who knows his era of football. In 2013, under Ken Whisenhunt, Rivers achieved a passer rating of 105.5, 7.79 adjusted net yards per attempt, a year in which he also ranked 2nd in EPA+CPoE composite score, and 4th in EPA/play. Under Reich as OC, each of those stats fell off. In 2014 and 2015 he had a passer rating of 93.8, (which is still good, obviously, but it did fall,) 6.45 adjusted net yards/attempt, ranked 10th in EPA+CPoE composite score (the actual number was down by roughly 50%), and 16th in EPA/play. (The actual number was down roughly 66%.) Whatever the Chargers got better at on offense, if they got better at anything, their offense became less productive and their QB became less efficient. This tenure as Chargers OC is a pretty obvious negative mark on his resume.
From 2016–2017, Reich was the offensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles. Now, again, I hear what you’re thinking. “Didn’t they win a Super Bowl? Weren’t those Eagles teams really good?” And yes, it is true that when Frank Reich was offensive coordinator for the Eagles, which he was for two years, one of those years they made the playoffs and rode their momentum all the way to one of the most exciting Super Bowl victories ever. During that three-game span the Eagles had the best offense in football without a doubt, averaging .331 EPA/play and manufacturing maybe the most explosive and impressive postseason from a QB in the 21st century from the now-legendary Nick Foles. But along with that undeniable success of the 2017 postseason, there is also the 2016 and 2017 regular season to consider. In 2016, admittedly with a rookie at QB, the team went 7–9, missed the playoffs, and were not an offensively efficient team, averaging a negative EPA/play and ranking 24th. Even in 2017, when the Eagles went 13–3, the team was still 11th in EPA/play at .054, not exactly explosive. When mixing postseason and regular season together, the Eagles were 10th overall in EPA/play between the start of the 2016 regular season and end of the 2017 postseason, but so much of the heavy lifting there is coming from the 3 game sample size of the 2017 postseason rather than the literally more than ten times larger sample size of the 32 games they had played before that. Which begs the question: why are you hiring the coordinator of the league’s 10th best offense to be your offensive head coach? Your reflexive answer might be “he’s a top 10 offensive coordinator,” but I always like to remind people that the NFL has 32 teams, not 40, meaning that Reich’s offenses, cumulatively, ranked in only about the top 3rd of what was happening in the league at that time. Still, I don’t think anybody, even me, would be upset about the winning offensive coordinator of the super bowl getting a head coaching job considering that that’s kinda the entire premise of this article.
Reich just finished a 5-year run as the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, where he amassed a record of 41–40–1. The only year he won a playoff game as a head coach was during Andrew Luck’s last run. In the playoffs, the Colts amassed a 1–2 record under Reich. In his tenure, the Colts brought in multiple skilled QBs, Phillip Rivers, Carson Wentz, Matt Ryan, and even Nick Foles, but found no sustained success either on offense or in terms of winning football games, running an offense that, over that five-year span, averaged .010 EPA/play. I could offer deeper explanation, but I feel like a sample size of 5 years says plenty. I don’t think we need to do any serious digging to say that Reich’s tenure as Colts head coach, whether his prior performances as a coordinator are any sort of indicative or predictive metric, was not successful. If it was, he’d probably still be coaching there.
So uh . . . why did this guy get hired? No seriously, think about it. In his tenures as an offensive coordinator his offenses on average have simply not been good. In his tenure as a head coach his teams were not winners. What deeper justification could there possibly be for giving Reich a second chance to be head coach over guys with stronger resumes? I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Frank Reich wasn’t the offensive play-caller for the Eagles in his tenure, Doug Pederson was. (I realize that I kinda pulled apart the Eagles offense a few paragraphs ago, but work with me here because I have a good point.) So for this opening, the Panthers job, you have two options: one of them is a former head coach with a .500 record and a 1–2 playoff record across a span of five years. Prior to that he was the offensive coordinator for a team that won a Super Bowl, but didn’t call plays. Your other candidate has not been a head coach, but he was similarly a non-play-calling offensive coordinator, except the offense that he helped coordinate was significantly better, and they played in three super bowls and won two of them. I feel like those are pretty similar resumes except that one guy’s pre-head-coaching record isn’t as good as the other guy’s, and that same guy’s head coaching record isn’t that good. It really just doesn’t add up why you would make this decision if Bieniemy was available.
. . . What in the fuck is anybody doing hiring Jonathan Gannon to be their head coach? Your new head coach’s unit just got roasted in the Super Bowl. Were they great in the regular season? Yes, but they also played a notoriously soft schedule and got cooked by almost every good QB they faced, even if the Eagles ultimately won the game. It says a lot that they only actually faced three good quarterbacks in the regular season: Goff for the Lions, Rodgers for Green Bay, (who sucked all year but does have obviously a great resume and most importantly did cook on them,) and Dak for the Cowboys, especially Dak, who, as the best QB they faced on their schedule, put up 300 yards on them. (For context, Dak is somewhere roughly around the league’s 7th best quarterback.) I’m ashamed to admit that I kinda thought the Eagles would win the Super Bowl because, as the old cliché goes, they were the most balanced team on the field. Their QB and TE were worse, but their overall combination of QB and skill position players was better, not to mention Philly and KC’s defense is an utter mismatch. What I should have seen coming, and what so many others did, is that the Eagles looked like a great defense because they ate up on bad opponents all year, which is what virtually all of the “great defenses” of recent NFL history have done in a league where defense has been heavily nerfed for most of the 21st century.
The first time they faced a really good QB, Dak, they not only sacrificed a lot of offense, but they lost. The second time they faced a really good QB, Mahomes, they not only sacrificed a lot of offense, but they also lost, and in this case, embarrassingly, giving up a functionally perfect completion rating to Mahomes in the 2nd half (his one incompletion was a throwaway) and an unreal .825 epa/play in those final two quarters, for Mahomes to land on a final score of .567 EPA/play for the Super Bowl, the highest recorded such Super Bowl EPA/play for a QB since 2010, which is as far as the currently available data goes back. In short: they not only got beat by the league’s best QB, but they also allowed him to have one of his, or anybody’s, best games ever. It’d be one thing if the Eagles had won the Super Bowl against a different QB and we didn’t have evidence of how they perform against league-best Mahomes. It’d be a knockout hire if they’d actually won the game. But the Cardinals just received massive evidence that, for as long as the Chiefs core staff and roster remains the same, there’s a strong chance that they will decimate Gannon’s defenses in the playoffs, that is, assuming Gannon can get the Cardinals into a Super Bowl. In fact, I’m just gonna go ahead and say that without the addition of obvious future Hall of Fame talent, the Cardinals have exactly zero shot of winning a Super Bowl with Gannon at head coach, most especially because they wouldn’t be able to beat any of the AFC contenders in the actual Super Bowl unless AZ suddenly signs Jalen Hurts, Dallas Goedert, and AJ Brown.
Eric Bieniemy is black, and the white opposing defensive coordinator he just embarrassed in the Super Bowl just got a head coaching job. I’m really not sure how obvious I need to make this for some people before they just accept the obvious truth that there’s clearly a lot of a very particular kind of bias at play here and that bias is what we who are in the know like to call “racism.” Bieniemy is neither the first coach with noteworthy character concerns (Urban Meyer), nor the first non-playcaller from a strong offensive team to be hired as a head coach since he started coordinating the Chiefs offense. He also wouldn’t be the first or last guy to get a head coaching job just by being associated with an all time great player(s) or an all time great coach. Based on the standards of how the NFL hires young head coaches, Bieniemy should’ve gotten a shot years ago. In my opinion, and in this case my opinion reflects objective fact, Bieniemy’s resume attached to a white coach would’ve gotten that white coach hired 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1 year(s) ago, since we’ve seen so many white coaches with worse resumes get jobs.
The sad conclusion of this story is that Bieniemy has been compelled to take another job as an OC elsewhere just to prove that he can be successful when calling the plays. The team he’ll be doing that for? The Washington Commanders. While I would love to predict success for Bieniemy, it’s actually hard to do so with any amount of intellectual honesty. Washington is heading into next season with Sam Howell as their quarterback, which does not bode well. If there is one theoretically legitimate criticism of Bieniemy, it’s that he’s a known hardass. In the locker room after their most recent Super Bowl win, an interviewer asked Patrick Mahomes point blank what his relationship with Bieniemy meant to him, to which he replied that Bieniemy kept him “accountable,” which means he’s probably roasting Pat’s ass anytime he throws a pick or does something weird. That kind of coaching probably works better when you’re not operating as a member of the least popular franchise amongst players. The turf at Fed-Ex Field is infamously bad, and the stadium has literally leaked raw sewage onto people before. An environment like that plus hard coaching could prove to be a rough combination, especially since, frankly, Bieniemy is walking into a situation where he’ll have to coach up a lot of shitty players. If he succeeds, a head coaching opportunity is certainly on its way, but if he fails, he will almost certainly be blamed for failing in a situation where he had an extremely low chance of success. Some will call this him getting “exposed.” Meanwhile, off in the distance, you’ll be able to hear the feint sound of mediocrity as Brandon Staley achieves a divisional round exit with Justin Herbert, and John Harbaugh wins a maximum of one playoff game with Lamar Jackson, and Sean Payton who went 7–9 three times in a row with Drew Brees will probably find a way to escape responsibility for failing with Russell Wilson, and Sean McDermott’s defense will blow another lead for Josh Allen, and the cycle of this bullshit will seemingly continue.
. . . Hail to the Commanders? Good luck, man.
— Durante Pierpaoli, Lynnwood, WA, 2023
