Titans, Seahawks about to learn how difficult it is to find a good coach

The Tennessee Titans and Seattle Seahawks inserted themselves into the NFL head-coaching carousel this week and are about to find out that the grass is not always greener on the other side. By making the decisions to move on from Pete Carroll (Seattle) and Mike Vrabel (Tennessee) both teams are getting rid of successful, proven coaches who have mostly kept their teams competitive.

While teams, media and fans can become enamored with the rising stars in the coaching ranks, the success rate of recent head-coaching hires should give teams some pause when it comes to dumping the successful coaches they already have.

Seattle fans and ownership might have viewed the past few years of the Carroll era as stale and lacking in playoff success, but they were still competitive and almost always in the playoff race. 

Tennessee might have had two down years under Vrabel to end his tenure, but the Titans’ problems seem to go well beyond the head coach's office, especially given some of the roster decisions that were made over the past couple of seasons (specifically the decision to trade a star like A.J. Brown). 

Whatever flaws they may have had, they were still winning coaches in the NFL with sustained track records of success. It is not easy to duplicate that, and the recent track record of NFL coaching hires highlights that.

Between the 2019 and 2023 seasons, there were 35 new head-coaching hires across the NFL (not counting in-season interim hirings). 

The full list of names among that group: Kliff Kingsbury, Jonathan Gannon, Arthur Smith, Matt Rhule, Frank Reich, Matt Eberflus, Zac Taylor, Freddie Kitchens, Kevin Stefanski, Mike McCarthy, Vic Fangio, Nathaniel Hackett, Sean Payton, Dan Campbell, Matt LaFleur, David Culley, Lovie Smith, DeMeco Ryans, Shane Steichen, Urban Meyer, Doug Peterson, Brandon Staley, Josh McDaniels, Brian Flores, Mike McDaniel, Kevin O’Connell, Dennis Allen, Joe Judge, Brian Daboll, Adam Gase, Robert Saleh, Nick Sirianni, Bruce Arians, Todd Bowles and Ron Rivera.

Out of that group 16 of them have already been fired. One of them (Arians) retired. Eleven of them have coached just two years (or less) on their respective teams with very mixed results and still very much have the jury out on them. Several more (Eberflus, Saleh, Pederson and perhaps McCarthy and Sirianni depending on their playoff results this season) could find themselves already on the hot seat going into next season. 

From an objective numbers perspective, the results are even less encouraging. Those 34 coaches have combined for just 26 playoff appearances (out of 77 possible seasons coached by the group) over the past five years. Eight of those appearance belong to just two of them — McCarthy and LaFleur. 

Just for comparison, Carroll and Vrabel each made the playoffs in three of their past five seasons (60 percent success rate) and combined for just three losing seasons. 

Every recent hire mentioned above was at one time a hot name on the coaching carousel and considered a rising star in the coaching ranks. Very few of them matched that hype. Something teams should keep in mind if they already have a good coach on their sidelines like the Seahawks and Titans did. The chances of downgrading are probably way higher than upgrading.