Curious Hair wrote:
Schottenheimer was a victim of the caprices of Danny Snyder, too, so that kinda shouldn't count either. Yet somehow it's telling that he's been out of the NFL since the Chargers fired him.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if no one hired Lovie as a head coach ever again. Yes, coaches get second chances, but what are you giving a second chance after nine years of exposure, exactly? That after nine seasons, he'll learn how to manage timeouts and challenges? That he won't have acrimonious relationships with subordinates who don't kiss his ass while the ones who do will be grossly incompetent? That he'll adopt a greater football philosophy beyond "my square pegs are so good that it doesn't matter how the hole is shaped"? We've seen loads of Lovie as head coach, defensive coordinator, personnel meddler (hi, Adam Archuleta and Orlando Pace), media manager, and there's not a whole hell of a lot there that can make you say he deserves a second chance. He's spent.
I dunno about this. Unless I'm confusing you with another guy with a hilarious avatar, I believe you've spent the last few days wondering why the Bobcats don't hire one of the NBA's seemingly numberless Shepherds of Mediocrity. The NFL is at least as risk-averse as the NBA, so I have little doubt Lovie will be back, and probably sooner rather than later. He's a great Monday-Saturday coach who's beloved by his players. He's got three division titles and a conference title, and his winning percentage is equal to that of Tom Coughlin and better than that of both John Fox and Jeff Fisher. He's a soft-spoken, even-keeled guy who knows all the right platitudes to feed the media and will never shoot his mouth off or take videos of his wife's feet; to the stodgy old white guys that own NFL teams, that's just as important as anything else. And, though it shouldn't be, the fact that he's black also plays a factor, since it lets racist slime like Jerry Richardson tout the league's "commitment to diversity." The big pitfalls are the personnel thing and his inflexibility in re: his defensive system, but any team that has a strong GM and runs a base 4-3 (or is tearing down and rebuilding its defense from scratch) won't have to worry about it. I guess you could argue that he's clueless when it comes to clock management and in-game strategy, but I think a lot of that is just Bears fans being in-town stupid; Lovie's no worse in that department than Mikes McCarthy, Tomlin, and Smith, and no one's calling for them to be fired.
Minus the black thing, all of the above applies to Andy Reid, except he's got more division titles, a higher winning percentage, and excels at designing passing offense in a league that spends every summer amending its own rules to give us more of it. I'd be stunned if both of them are still unemployed in 2014.