Tales from the hot seat
Vegas has Mike Zimmer as an odds-on favorite to be the first coach fired this year. Things usually get weird when a coach is on the 'hot seat'
By Matthew Coller
LOS ANGELES — Earlier this week, we got our first “hot seat” mention.
Sound. The. Alarms.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler and Dan Graziano penned a piece on ESPN.com naming coaches that could be in danger of losing their jobs and Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer was included.
Las Vegas agrees, by the way. Per Oddschecker.com, Zimmer is +325 to be the first coach to get the axe this year. The only guy with HC on his cap that is more likely to be chopped is Urban Meyer. Also among the favorites for the first coach to get tossed overboard are Joe Judge, Matt Nagy and Brian Flores.
Now it begins.
It isn’t difficult to figure out why Zimmer’s name would be atop the list. He’s the longest tenured coach in the NFL without a ring and his team has gone from being a game away from the Super Bowl in 2017 to winning 10 games of 25 since their last playoff win. They haven’t been above .500 for a single day during that timespan.
If this happened during a rebuilding period, nobody would bat an eye. But the front office shuffled so much money around on the salary cap last offseason that Enron would be proud. They essentially signed Zimmer a whole new defense to get back in the playoff mix in 2021. So heading into Los Angeles at 3-5, no matter how it happened, is enough to put any coach under fire.
One thing that’s mentioned in Fowler’s commentary about Zimmer is his .563 win percentage as a head coach. It might surprise you that his regular season mark is only .006 behind Bill Parcells and ahead of Marv Levy, Jimmy Johnson, Mike Shanahan, Tom Coughlin, Dennis Green, Tom Flores and Dick Vermeil. There’s some trivia for family night.
You would almost read that and wonder how it’s possible that the Vikings could be even considering a change. But it starts to make sense if we break his tenure into parts.
When Zimmer arrived, the Vikings were bad. They weren’t a club with some nice pieces that needed a new message. They had a super bad roster and it wasn’t even of the up-and-coming variety. No quarterback, no true receivers, two or three players worthy of starting on defense and they were playing in a college football stadium.
Think about a team that went from its only future parts being Adrian Peterson, Kyle Rudolph, Everson Griffen, Cordarrelle Patterson, Xavier Rhodes, Sharrif Floyd and Harrison Smith in 2014 to a club that would win the division in 2015 and come within a game of the Super Bowl by 2017.
Of course, there were times in between that felt like the ship was about to hit an iceberg. In 2016, specifically, there was “losing the locker room” talk toward the end of a wild season that included Teddy Bridgewater’s injury, Norv Turner quitting and Zimmer’s eye injury. But that went away when the Vikings bashed in the faces of the New Orleans Saints in Week 1 of the 2017 season. They ultimately saw the full potential of an elite defensive roster combined with Zimmer’s masterful game planning/calling on defense.
They won big games back then. In 2015, the Vikings went to Lambeau and clinched the division by stifling Aaron Rodgers. In 2017, they embarrassed Sean McVay’s No. 1 offense at US Bank Stadium and then suffocated a Falcons team that had just been to the Super Bowl.
The natural thing here would be to draw a line before and after 2017 but there’s a better argument to put the demarcation at 2019. Yes, everything past 2018 will be defined by Kirk Cousins’s time in Minnesota but the team was largely the same through his first two seasons at QB. They still had very good defenses and if you bought a jersey of a defensive player in 2015, odds were great he was still there in 2019. The top-notch receiving pair and Pro Bowl tight end were also in tact.
After the Vikings walked off the field in Santa Clara in January 2020, that’s where Zimmer’s team became something else. The core that had defined his time in Minnesota broke up. Xavier Rhodes, Trae Waynes, Linval Joseph, Everson Griffen and Stefon Diggs were all gone by 2020.
So, do it again, right?
But doing it again is hard. The 2017 team needed a fifth-round receiver and undrafted receiver to become elite. It needed a completely healthy defense with two of the universe’s best pass rushers and the most dominant nose tackle in the game. It needed an All-Pro safety and an “island” corner. It needed the 2015 draft, maybe the best in the NFL of the past decade, and it needed a backup quarterback to magically have every wild pass land in someone’s hands. It needed Aaron Rodgers to get hurt. It needed cheap/undrafted linemen to be good.
The Next Danielle never came. They drafted two corners to replace Rhodes/Waynes. One of them has already been cut, the other is a backup. They tried to replace Rudolph but Irv Smith Jr. got hurt. They couldn’t afford to keep Riley Reiff or make a good enough offer for Joe Thuney.
That’s not to say the roster is super bad again. But it’s DNA is different and its heartbeat is different. Terence Newman and Teddy aren’t here to lead the locker room. They tried two guys to replace Linval but it’s really hard to replace Linval. And while Justin Jefferson is a brilliant young star, he doesn’t burn with the fire of 1,000 suns like Stefon Diggs.
The run-and-play-defense approach that used to fit like a quarter-zip in Autumn isn’t so snug on this team. Neither is an inexperienced offensive coordinator with Zimmer.
Quarterbacks who were a little shorter on talent but bigger on guts/grit/heart were also more of Zimmer’s attire than a QB who once called himself a “CEO.”
When the clothes don’t fit anymore, all the imperfections show. The offense can score when the plays are scripted but the lack of identity is clear the rest of the game. The defense can make some tremendous plays like Anthony Barr’s interception of Lamar Jackson but they can’t hold on in the biggest moments like they old group did.
Zimmer has even said so himself: Back in the day, Vikings fans wanted their defense on the field with a three-point lead and two minutes left. Now they are shutting the TV off to go angrily blow leaves.
Whether any of this means Zimmer will get fired in-season or after this year is anybody’s guess. His teams have often fought back when the seat has grown toasty. Whether it’s rebounding from the 2016 season or winning the playoff game in New Orleans or getting back to 6-6 after a 1-5 start in 2020, the Vikings’ head coach has never let them fall into complete despair.
It’s possible this season will be the same and Sunday will start an unexpected streak through the NFC that puts them right back where they expected to be when camp broke. But this year feels different. Every time it seems like they’re going to turn the bus around, the Vikings take another hit. After putting up nearly 600 yards against the Panthers, they no-showed and lost to Cooper Rush the next week. After getting up two touchdowns against the Ravens, they allowed Baltimore to come back and win in OT. And along the way, they’ve had COVID issues, lost Danielle Hunter for the season and took on a massive distraction with a lawsuit that accuses Dalvin Cook of domestic abuse.
While there’s two hands worth of fingers to point at the head coach when it comes to the position the Vikings find themselves in, it’s also the circle of life in the NFL. If you don’t win the Super Bowl — and sometimes even when you do — eventually the NFL’s pressure cooker breaks you.
Think about the sheer number of coaches who had success and then found the walls collapsing around them. A few examples…
Doug Pederson was considered the champion of modern football after winning the Super Bowl with Nick Foles and his RPOs. Three years later, he was fired after being at odds with his quarterback and The Athletic reported that the team’s management treated him “like a baby.”
After two AFC Championship appearances in New York, things got so bad with Rex Ryan that he was questioned for attending his son’s football college football game on cutdown day. His defense fell apart and the breaking point came in 2014 when they lost by 30 to the Buffalo Bills in a game that was relocated to Detroit because of a snowstorm.
Speaking of Buffalo, Dick Jouron had won Coach of the Year in Chicago and he’d been competitive with the Bills but when they fell to 3-6 and Titans owner Bud Adams flipped double birds to Buffalo following a late-game collapse, it was over.
Marvin Lewis, maybe the closest comp to Zimmer, coached a game in Minnesota amidst reports that he would be fired. He coached another season before being let go.
Mike McCarthy was accused of skipping meetings to get massages.
Gary Kubiak was responsible for the turnaround of the Texans franchise but his team started 2-0 and lost 11 straight games in 2013 and he was let go. Bill O’Brien later lost a power struggle in Houston to a former team preacher.
Andy Reid was fired after the “Dream Team” went 4-12.
Conversely, Marty Schottenheimer lost his job after going 14-2.
The Vikings have some pretty strange stories of coaches on the hot seat. Following the 2003 collapse against Arizona, ownership let Mike Tice twist in the wind for days before allowing him to return as head coach. Two years later, with Daunte Culpepper injured, he went 9-7 but got fired anyway. In the locker room after the final game of the year, the team handed out a piece of paper to the media with a few sentences to announce the firing. There were rumors that the low-brow canning had related to comments Tice made in a meeting to a member of ownership.
In 2010, The Dome erupted with chants of “fire Childress” in a game against the Cardinals. The Vikings won and Zygi Wilf congratulated the players by saying “great heart” as they left the field. Childress was gone two weeks later when he released Randy Moss without telling the owners first.
Long story long, this is the nature of the beast. Things usually get tense or strange when a good coach’s tenure is coming to an end.
But if the Vikings continue down their current path and miss the playoffs, one thing the owners will need to think long and hard about is all the other coaches whose hot seats came much quicker than the likes of Marvin Lewis or Andy Reid. Like, say, Adam Gase, whose introductory press conference turned into a meme with his eyes following a taco.
Or Joe Judge, whose team might be running gassers as we speak.
Or Urban Meyer who tried to hire a racist strength coach and then hung back in Ohio after a road game to dance with college girls.
Or Matt Patricia, who withheld a previous sexual assault accusation upon his hiring and abused players until they all left Detroit.
Or Freddie Kitchens who wore a T-shirt saying “Pittsburgh started it” when Myles Garrett hit Mason Rudolph with a helmet.
There’s more. There’s a lot more.
Remember, things were so bad with the guy that followed Bud Grant that old Bud had to come back and straighten out the franchise.
So maybe these next few weeks will be the final days of Zimmer’s tenure with a franchise that he made relevant and then couldn’t drag back to relevancy again. Maybe Fowler and Graziano’s article will end up being the only one we see for years to come. Maybe they’ll move on and find their Sean McDermott, Sean McVay or Brandon Staley. Maybe they’ll end up with their Adam Gase instead.
Nobody knows what these hot-seated days will bring but you can bet your gjallarhorn they’re going to bring us something memorable.
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Whenever I think of a coach on the hot seat, for some reason this scene pops into my mind...Kind of describes the Vikings season pretty well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLaCqrisEac
With our luck they’ll fire Rick and Zimmer and we’ll get the next Adam Gase and Mike Lynn.