It’s NFL wild-card week, and we have a lot of notes with a lot of moving pieces in play …
• The Jacksonville Jaguars’ decision to retain Trent Baalke as general manager had been rumored in NFL circles for weeks—but few believed that owner Shad Khan would go through with it.
Yet, Doug Pederson is gone, and Baalke remains.
This follows a familiar pattern.
Baalke got his first shot at GM after the San Francisco 49ers fired Scot McCloughan. He was given decision-making power in the interim, then the job in 2011. There, he survived a feud with, and the firing of, Jim Harbaugh, then the firing of his hand-picked replacement Jim Tomsula. The Niners caught on in ’16, finally letting Baalke go as they fired Chip Kelly, giving the football operation the reset it needed (I’d say it’s gone pretty well since).
The thought, then, was that Baalke was toxic. But, with years having passed, then-Jaguars GM David Caldwell hired him in early 2020. That November, Caldwell was fired, and Baalke replaced him, first on an interim basis, then permanently as Urban Meyer (who was more concerned with hiring support staff and getting a new facility built) came in. From there, Baalke survived Meyer’s firing after a disastrous year, and now Pederson’s.
This latest shake-up hits some of the same-old notes. There was division over the past year-plus in Jacksonville between coaching and scouting, with Baalke taking aim at Pederson’s offensive coordinator, Press Taylor, and pushing hard for changes elsewhere on the staff after a disappointing finish to the 2023 season.
So where does this leave the Jaguars, with a coaching search kicking off? Put yourself in a candidate’s shoes. Would you trust that things would go differently than they have with coaches who previously worked with Baalke?
I suspect that we will see in the coming days and weeks, a lot of coaches would say, No.
What remains to be seen, of course, is what would happen if someone such as Detroit Lions OC Ben Johnson asked to bring, say, Lance Newmark aboard, or if Mike Vrabel asked to bring Ryan Cowden in with him. How they approach this, I believe, will seriously impact the pool of candidates they can realistically evaluate.
• The Tennessee Titans’ 25-month timeline looks like this: GM Jon Robinson was fired in December 2022, Ran Carthon was hired as GM in January ’23, Mike Vrabel was fired in January ’24, Brian Callahan was hired as head coach and assistant GM Chad Brinker was elevated to president of football operations later that month and, finally, Carthon was fired in January ’25.
So, they’ve fired a head coach and two GMs over that period, and undergone multiple philosophical overhauls that would indicate ownership doesn’t really know what it wants.
That wouldn’t be an unfair conclusion, either. Amy Adams Strunk has been scattershot in her decision making and changed her opinions on those she employs on a dime. It’s now on Strunk to fix it.
I think empowering Brinker is a good first step. The idea of elevating him last year was to try and align the coaching and scouting sides of the organization. With Callahan as coach, and a GM job to fill, Brinker now has a chance to do that with a new person.
If Kansas City Chiefs assistant GM Mike Borgonzi views that job as a full-on GM role, he’d be way up the list. So, too, would Green Bay Packers vice president of player personnel Jon-Eric Sullivan. Both have relationships with Brinker. Each would thrive in a model that resembles the Los Angeles Rams’s setup, where Kevin Demoff oversees things, Tony Pastoors runs football operations, and Les Snead is in a traditional GM role, leading the personnel department.
Chicago Bears assistant GM Ian Cunningham will be there, too, as a guy with ties to Brinker. The Titans could also consider someone from Cincinnati—such as Mike Potts, Trey Brown or Steve Radicevic—that Callahan knows.
Regardless, the pressure is on Strunk, Brinker and Callahan to get this right with the first draft pick in their back pockets, and a new stadium opening in 2027.
• The New England Patriots interviewing Byron Leftwich and Pep Hamilton less than 48 hours after firing Jerod Mayo should raise eyebrows. With all due respect, both candidates have done good work, but have been out of football for multiple years and would have trouble finding coordinator jobs in 2025.
The Rooney Rule, for those who don’t know, requires teams to do two in-person interviews with diverse external candidates. The tricky part is that anyone actively working for a team is prohibited from doing an in-person interview until after the divisional round is complete—a week from Monday. So to satisfy the Rooney Rule before then, teams have to find external candidates who aren’t working for NFL teams.
Say New England hires Vrabel on Thursday or Friday. I believe it’d be an excellent hire, to be clear. But it would also, more or less, be a team that hasn’t run a coaching search in 25 years turning back the clock, well, 25 years, to when the Rooney Rule didn’t yet exist. It’d be the Patriots thumbing their noses at the progress made, and the league’s work on it, days after firing a Black coach after a single season.
So there’s that. Then, there’s the fact that this is a team that needs to go through a process like this. Over that quarter-century, they won and won and won. They also didn’t get much of a chance to see how the rest of the NFL was doing business. That was a good thing, of course, for a time, because they were doing business better than anyone else—until they weren’t.
On Monday in the Takeaways, we detailed how they’ve fallen behind. A quarter-century of doing things your way, which worked spectacularly for 20 years, and then crashed and burned the past five, will do that to a team. Last year, in hustling their hire of Mayo through, they waived the opportunity to see how everyone else does it. This year, if they rush it, it’ll be the same story again.
And if I were Vrabel, or Ben Johnson—guys with options who have interviews lined up—that would loom as a major red flag for me. That would indicate that an organization that’s gotten its comeuppance on the field over the past couple of years isn’t taking it as such. That’d have me worried that if I struggled with a broken roster over the next year or two, then my story could end the same way Mayo’s did.
I do think the Patriots have started to make progress in some areas, including building out their operation, and modernizing things within their building. The Krafts are very smart people and good owners. But running a sham interview process because you’re desperate to get a certain guy, doesn’t show strength. Rather, it shows weakness.
Last year, from the start, Jim Harbaugh was the Los Angeles Chargers’ guy. Still, they interviewed 15 candidates for their head-coaching job (including Vrabel and Johnson), and nine for their GM position. The Spanos family would tell you the process informed them on so many things that now are helping them support Harbaugh and GM Joe Hortiz. Los Angeles, by the way, is playing Saturday after an 11-win regular season.
The Patriots couldn’t be further away from that reality than they are right now.
• There are little details that are pretty cool about the Washington Commanders’ turnaround, and Marcus Mariota’s role in it is one.
Brought in as a fit for Kliff Kingsbury’s offense, coach Dan Quinn and GM Adam Peters knew the second pick from the 2015 draft was going to have to be more than a good player—he had to be the right kind of person to put in the room next to last year’s No. 2 pick.
It’s fair to say Mariota’s been all of that and then some for Jayden Daniels, and the entire team, which is why Terry McLaurin told me it was significant for everyone to get him the win on Sunday in Dallas.
“I love playing with Marcus,” McLaurin says. “Since he’s got here, he’s been a great leader for us. He’s one of the most selfless players I’ve ever been around. He’s done nothing but give his best for the team, whether he’s taking reps or he’s sitting on the sidelines coaching us up. When he goes in the games, the few times he has, in Carolina and this one, I feel great. I feel comfortable. He’s played a lot of football, and he knows how to come in.
“He just has a calm demeanor about him that makes everything O.K. For him to come in and execute the way that he did with his legs, with his arms, that’s what it’s about. That speaks to our culture where no matter who’s in there, quarterback, receivers, line, defense, the standard is the standard. We all take pride in upholding that. For us to connect in that last play, I know he’s going to come to me. He threw a great ball in the back of the end zone.
“I just wanted to come down with it. Him and I haven’t gotten a whole lot of reps at that, but the one we missed on the two-point conversion we had to talk about on the sideline right after that. Next opportunity, we came and connected. Shout out to the O-line for giving him enough time when he needed it most. Great job by Marcus orchestrating that drive for us.”
To me, that says everything about Mariota, and the culture Quinn has built.
It also speaks volumes about the job that Peters has done in his first year—one that very well could end with an Executive of the Year award. The roster has improved. His first draft class has been dynamite. And more than just that, the job he’s done has reflected his roots. To paraphrase the old saying that former Patriots exec Scott Pioli used to say about roster construction in New England, he’s not just assembling talent, he’s building a team.
That much is apparent throughout his and Quinn’s roster, from Dorance Armstrong to Frankie Luvu to Jeremy Chinn, and even guys like Mariota, who may not play as much, but have made an impact in their own way.
• While we’re in Washington, I thought it was worth getting McLaurin’s thoughts on breaking the tie for the franchise’s single-season touchdown-catch record that he was lodged in with Ricky Sanders, Charley Taylor, Jerry Smith and Hugh Taylor. Sunday’s game-winner was his 13th.
“To be honest, there were more people bringing it up to me than I was thinking about it,” he says. “The coaches and my teammates were like, We’re going to get it for you. You’re going to get it. When you put a lot of pressure on things, it makes you a little tight. I came into this week with a mentality of just wanting to put my best foot forward and I want to put good habits on tape, so I can take this momentum into the playoffs, and be the best version of myself.
“I couldn’t have imagined it was going to come down to the last play. I’m humbled to be etched in history with so many great players, especially receivers that have come through this organization. To have a part of that in this season with a win going into the playoffs, 12 wins, you can’t ask for anything better.”
(It’s fair to say he might have something else—a new contract—coming his way soon, too.)
• The Tyreek Hill thing is a problem for Miami. The Dolphins moved money around to give him a massive extension before the season. As such, his number for 2025 is over $28 million in cash, and all of it is guaranteed. So he might want out, but the Dolphins can’t just cut him, unless he’s willing to walk away from all that money (and I’d guess he isn’t).
Would someone pick up that guarantee in a trade, with Hill turning 31 in March and coming off his least productive season since his rookie year? Maybe, because his brand of speed is very hard to find. But I don’t know that it’s a certainty.
• The Dallas Cowboys’ dance with Mike McCarthy is interesting. Do they give him permission to interview for jobs, and then try to get him back at their number? Do they look around themselves? And what about his staff, with virtually everyone on an expiring deal?
Jerry Jones has his own way of doing business, that’s for sure.
• The Minnesota Vikings need to pay Kevin O’Connell whatever he wants. And if I’m another team, I’m calling him in case Minnesota doesn’t. There aren’t a handful of coaches in football I’d take for the next decade over him.
• Seeing Ezekiel Elliott as a Charger is so interesting to me. Here’s why.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Jaguars’ Decision to Retain Trent Baalke Follows a Familiar Pattern.