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Neil Paine
Predicting the future in the NFL is often an exercise in futility … or maybe hilarity.
For every forecast that pans out — the Chiefs were pretty smart favorites going into the 2023 season — there are plenty that look less prescient than preposterous.
Remember how the Bengals were supposed to vie for Super Bowl LVIII … until quarterback Joe Burrow missed the second half of the season with a wrist injury? (They ended up missing the playoffs instead.) Or how elite the Eagles looked last midseason … until they collapsed to lose six of their last seven games, including a lopsided wild-card defeat to the Bucs?
This league has a way of confounding those who peer into the crystal ball. But still, that doesn’t mean we can’t pick up on patterns that tend to be correlated with teams’ successes and failures.
To that end, we examined the things that might predict how favorable a situation each new NFL head coach is walking into based on variables including the team’s quality last season; its roster age on offense, defense and special teams; the age and track record of its quarterback (based on a weighted average of his approximate value over the past three seasons) and more.
For all seven coaches taking over a new team — Raheem Morris (Falcons), Dave Canales (Panthers), Jim Harbaugh (Chargers), Jerod Mayo (Patriots), Mike Macdonald (Seahawks), Brian Callahan (Titans) and Dan Quinn (Commanders) — each factor was plugged into a statistical model that looks at expected wins over the next five seasons.
Note that we didn’t include Antonio Pierce of the Raiders because the historical data was based on teams with coaches who hadn’t coached the team at all the previous season. Though Pierce still had to formally interview for the permanent job, he coached more games for the 2023 Raiders with the interim tag (going 5-4) than Josh McDaniels did to start the season (he went 3-5).
Because each new coach will exert his own influence on the franchise going forward, think of these rankings less as forecasts and more as a quantification of what these hires have to work with going forward. Everything that happens from there, good or bad, will be determined by how much they make of the situation they were handed.
Let’s run down each of those from most to least favorable, starting with the new youngest coach in the NFL.