From time to time, but not very often, former special-teams coordinators become NFL head coaches. When it happens, there’s usually some other gig that the coach has performed before making the next step, like John Harbaugh spending a year as defensive backs coach in Philadelphia before becoming the Ravens head coach in 2008. Or Joe Judge serving as both special-teams coordinator and receivers coach in New England for a season, before becoming head coach of the Giants.
Yes, one of those worked out and one didn’t. But isn’t that how it usually goes for offensive and defensive coordinators who become head coaches?
Special-teams coordinators often get the interim label when the head coach is fired. They rarely end up as the permanent head coach — even when they deserve the job, like Rich Bisaccia did after taking the Raiders to the playoffs after Jon Gruden left the Raiders during the 2021 season.
So why aren’t special-teams coordinators more regularly in the mix for head-coaching jobs? I posed that question to the latest special-teams coordinator to become an interim head coach, Darren Rizzi of the Saints, after his team upended the Falcons in his debut.
“I honestly believe that the number one reason is that organizations, GMs, owners, they want to win the press conference,” Rizzi told me by phone after the 20-17 win. “They want to make a splash, get the fans excited and it’s hard to get the fans excited — I mean, you saw what Joe Judge went through right but for every Joe Judge there’s a John Harbaugh and Bill Belichick.”
Yes, Belichick spent nearly a decade as a special-teams coach. But he then became an excellent defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells with the Giants from 1985 through 1990, which resulted in his initial head-coaching job in Cleveland.
The problem is that the introduction of the new coach is temporary. What happens next means a lot more.
“You and I both know the initial press conference is going to be over and then there’s work to do,” Rizzi said. “I think more GMs and owners get tied up into that stuff you and not realizing that special teams guys might be the best.”
It’s an interesting point. And it finds validity in the fact that the media tends to focus on the offensive and defensive coordinators of the best teams in any given season. Who gets the sideline closeups during games? Not the special-teams guy. Who gets promoted on TV and radio shows? Not the special-teams guy.
Special-teams coordinators have important experience in dealing with offensive and defensive players. They’re not so caught up in one side of the ball that they lose sight of the other, essentially focusing on the function that got them there and throwing the keys to the other coordinator. Remember when Sean McVay first became the head coach of the Rams? When the defense was on the field, Wade Phillips basically ran the show while McVay was figuring out what to do the next time the offense had the ball.
It’s not a criticism, and it’s hardly unique to McVay. Successful coordinators play to their strengths. And they sometimes fail to properly manage the entire team. Special-teams coordinators will be more inclined to do that.
Even if they remain closely connected to the special-teams units, it’s not nearly as involved as concocting offensive or defensive game plans.
As Rizzi tells it, the status quo will change only when owners and General Managers believe that hiring a special-teams coordinator will create the requisite excitement at the time of the hire. As a practical matter, that requires the media to focus not as heavily on the up-and-coming offensive and defensive masterminds but on the folks who are grinding away in relative obscurity at skills that might be more easily transferable to running the entire team. Unless and until that happens, it requires those who hire coaches to resist getting caught up in the notion that only an offensive or defensive coordinator can create the kind of buzz that will get the fans behind the hire.
And, at some level, it requires the special-teams coordinators and their agents to work on finding ways to build the buzz when it’s not naturally going to emerge.
Until that happens, special-teams coordinators won’t get a chance to show that they can do the job at the next level. If/when more of them do, then more of them will be considered in the future.
