Hiring a new head coach is one of the highest-variance changes an NFL team can make. With largely the same offensive line talent, for example, the Arizona Cardinals went from 31st in rushing DVOA in 2018 to second in rushing DVOA in 2019. Kyler Murray being a running threat at quarterback helped, sure, but the main change here was bringing in Kliff Kingsbury. We have much left to discern about Kingsbury's future as a coach, but one thing we know is that he coached a different brand of offense than former Arizona offensive coordinator Mike McCoy did -- one that worked much better in today's NFL.
Let's look at how each team changes under new management. If we have statistics that matter from their coaching careers, we'll use them. Keep in mind that many coaches are really in charge of managing just one side of the ball, and they leave the other side of the ball to their head coordinator. We'll take a look at that as well.
Jump to a team:
Panthers | Browns | Cowboys
Giants | Washington
Carolina Panthers
Outgoing head coaches: Ron Rivera/Perry Fewell
Incoming head coach/important staff: Matt Rhule, Joe Brady (offensive coordinator), Phil Snow (defensive coordinator)
Rhule is certainly the most fascinating coach to project to the next level, and by far the biggest hire he made is former LSU passing game coordinator Brady. Brady coordinated an astonishingly good offense in Baton Rouge, where presumptive No. 1 overall pick Joe Burrow broke the NCAA record for completion percentage, and where the Tigers averaged 395.4 passing yards per game. Brady spent time with the Saints before jumping on to the Tigers' staff, and should give Carolina's lagging offense a real boost with an offense that excels at getting the ball to playmakers in space.
Defensively, Snow and Rhule have proved adaptable. They mostly scrapped the scheme that Rhule ran at Temple and focused instead on building around Iowa State's inverted Tampa 2. The disguises that this look allowed got Baylor to 29 turnovers, an average of 2.07 per game that ranked fourth nationally. They also allowed just 1.2 adjusted points per drive, ninth-best in the NCAA.
Impact talent will be the big question for the Panthers this season -- nobody knows what to make of Cam Newton's health, or how they will replace Luke Kuechly. But Carolina's coaching staff is essentially an all-star team of successful new-age college concepts, and they have a head coach who has demonstrated an ability to adjust. It's not hard to be optimistic about them making chicken salad out of ... well, Kyle Allen, if need be.
The read: Carolina is going from old school to new school. Short-term life for the Panthers will involve a lot of tough decisions and growing pains, but Rhule has demonstrated some learning patterns that should excite Panthers fans.
Cleveland Browns
Outgoing head coach: Freddie Kitchens
Incoming head coach/important staff: Kevin Stefanski, Alex Van Pelt (offensive coordinator), Joe Woods (defensive coordinator), Andrew Berry (general manager)
We list Berry here because the buzzword in Cleveland is about unifying behind a grand analytical approach. That is trickier in reality than it is in theory, but let's run with it for a bit.
Kitchens devastated Cleveland's offense last season after a promising second half of the 2018 season. The Browns ran away from successful play-action concepts that worked with Baker Mayfield, and Odell Beckham Jr. played the entire year with a sports hernia injury. The good news is that nobody got more from less than the Vikings did with Kirk Cousins last season. Stefanski's offense -- he was the coordinator for Minnesota in 2019 -- majored in play-action, using it on 30% of their passes and averaging 8.7 yards per play, according to Sports Info Solutions. Nick Chubb is terrifying to defenses, so the threat of a rush is always there. Mayfield has shown flashes of the aptitude he'll need to succeed in the shotgun to the extent that Cousins has. Drop timing is key for Mayfield, and you can probably be optimistic that a staff full of statisticians knows not to use him the way that Kitchens did in 2019.
Woods will be tasked with bringing San Francisco's defensive philosophy to Cleveland, and the 49ers make for a good blueprint for how the Browns can play. The possible return of Myles Garrett, along with Sheldon Richardson, Olivier Vernon, and Larry Ogunjobi, gives the Browns a front that should be able to create the havoc that San Francisco's front did in 2019. Woods' only experience as a coordinator came with the Broncos in 2017 and 2018, when they finished fifth (2018) and 10th (2017) in defensive DVOA, albeit with a unit with a ton of superstar-level contributors like Von Miller and Chris Harris Jr.
It's easy to be cynical about a team that keeps changing its approach, but it's probably better to flush something out that likely won't work earlier rather than later. The Browns have found a lot of solid pieces and coaches. Will they be unified, as they claim, or will it be 2019 all over again with an offensive coordinator who didn't even feel like he was on the staff?
The read: One of the problems with being an early adapter -- in this case, in making an analytics-forward organization from top to bottom -- is that your mistakes are amplified when you are going against conventional wisdom. It's going to be interesting to see what exactly the Browns are going to do differently than the Ravens. Can Mayfield rebound enough for an analytics-friendly offense built around the pass? Or can a Chubb-led running game be efficient enough to lead the way without a running-threat quarterback such as Lamar Jackson to fill in the gaps?
Dallas Cowboys
Outgoing head coach: Jason Garrett
Incoming head coach/important staff: Mike McCarthy, Mike Nolan (defensive coordinator)
One of the most interesting things about McCarthy's fit in Dallas will be just how much he and holdover offensive coordinator Kellen Moore run the ball. Dallas finished third in rush offense DVOA in 2019, just paid Ezekiel Elliott top-shelf money, and have an offensive line that can bulldoze opponents. The 2018 Packers finished third in rushing DVOA ... and they ran the ball just 333 times, the lowest amount in the NFL. Obviously, a lot of the scuttlebutt around Garrett's offense was that it was too conservative for the modern NFL -- but McCarthy may be the porridge that's too hot rather than the porridge that's just right. McCarthy's offense had stagnated around some very elementary principles (slant-flat) by the end of his tenure in Green Bay, but given how Aaron Rodgers did not empirically improve at all under Matt LaFleur, that may be related to quarterback decline as much as a coaching decline. We do have evidence that points to past coaching success being an important predictor of coaching performance in the future, and McCarthy was the safest choice for the Cowboys if you view things through that prism.
Mike Nolan hasn't coordinated a defense since 2014, spending his last three seasons as linebackers coach for the Saints. Nolan was actually McCarthy's boss for the 49ers in the late aughts. The 2014 Falcons finished last in defensive DVOA, and Nolan's best defenses were more solid than dominant. Nolan has had only one pass defense or rush defense unit in the top five in DVOA since he took the 49ers job: the 2010 Dolphins finished third in run defense DVOA. Nolan said in his opening remarks to Cowboys press that the No. 1 goal for a defense was getting turnovers and he has done that, with three top-10 takeaway seasons in his last six seasons coordinated.
The talent is there for Dallas to rebound in 2020, but the coaching staff has to prove that it isn't stuck in 2015.
The read: There were plenty of puff pieces about McCarthy embracing analytics and otherwise learning from his gap year. We'll find out in a hurry just how much all that mattered and just how much the decline of Green Bay's passing offense was about Rodgers or McCarthy.
New York Giants
Outgoing head coach: Pat Shurmur
Incoming head coach/important staff: Joe Judge, Jason Garrett (offensive coordinator), Patrick Graham (defensive coordinator)
Judge has never been a head coach or even an offensive or defensive coordinator at any level. The Patriots have had excellent special teams throughout Judge's tenure, but they did before him as well. Of course, the last special-teams-only coordinator to become a head coach was John Harbaugh, so that's promising to an extent. Judge's opening presser was a tour de force in which he promised to "punch you in the nose for 60 minutes" and "play every play like it has a history and a life of its own." He also noted that he wouldn't be the offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, or special-teams coordinator -- that his goal was to make sure the team was fundamentally sound and situationally aware. It seems likely that a lot of the Giants' success schematically is going to be dependent on the coaches below him.
Garrett has been Cowboys offensive coordinator/head coach for 13 years, and his offense has generally been fairly good, if conservative. Since DeMarco Murray's 449-touch year in 2014, Garrett's teams have finished in the top 10 in rushing attempts in five of six seasons, including top-five in attempts in three of those six. It's hard to see how that wouldn't be the basic game plan with Saquon Barkley and second-year quarterback Daniel Jones, who isn't remotely as accomplished as Dak Prescott was at this same point in their respective developments. Garrett's main goal will be to get the offense to keep the damn ball: The Giants turned the ball over two or more times in 11 of their 16 games.
Patrick Graham is essentially a blank slate. His only season of coordinator experience came with the Dolphins, and last season's Dolphins were one of the 10 worst defenses in DVOA history. On the other hand, that Dolphins team was essentially fielding expansion-caliber talent. The problem for the Giants is that while they're a step above that, there's not really any evidence to suggest that Graham is going to pull them out of the doldrums.
Hiring Garrett looks great for Barkley's fantasy football stock. The rest of this all looks like it's leading to the same sort of irreverent art house project impersonation of 1980s football as last year.
The read: The Giants are shackled to general manager Dave Gettleman's vision of their future. The best-case scenario is probably that Daniel Jones improves like Josh Allen did in Year 2, in particular a higher completion rate, but Pat Shurmur's offense was already giving him plenty of easy throws. The turnovers have to be cut.
Washington
Outgoing head coaches: Jay Gruden/Bill Callahan
Incoming head coach/important staff: Ron Rivera, Scott Turner (offensive coordinator), Jack Del Rio (defensive coordinator)
Taking the idea of previous coaching success being predictive, as mentioned above with Mike McCarthy, Rivera was clearly as qualified as anybody to get a second chance. The Panthers were somewhere between new-school and old-school, as Rivera integrated Norv Turner as offensive coordinator, with RPOs aplomb. While the Panthers had down years, they were never really bad as long as Newton played healthy. Rivera's Panthers finished in the top 15 in DVOA in every season from 2012 to 2018 except for 2014 and 2016, two years where Newton missed starts and played through injury.
Norv's son Scott gets his big break as coordinator -- who says nepotism isn't alive? The younger Turner has never coordinated an offense, but figures to bring over a lot of what happened with the Panthers last season. The good news is that shotguns and RPOs integrate a lot of what made Dwayne Haskins successful at Ohio State. The bad news is that Turner doesn't get to take Christian McCaffrey with him to Washington. Carolina finished 30th in pass offense DVOA last year, and while Haskins is bound to be better than Kyle Allen, he might not be a superstar right away. The 2019 Panthers were also extremely pass-happy (second in passing attempts as compared to 14th in 2018) so that might help buffer some of the downside.
Del Rio has been out of football since his 2017 firing by the Raiders, but he was an incredibly successful coordinator for the Broncos the last time he got to focus on defense full time. The 2014 Broncos finished fifth in pass defense DVOA and third in rush defense DVOA, and the 2012 Broncos were also top five in each. The Raiders years were less successful, but Oakland's defense wasn't exactly overflowing with talent once Khalil Mack was sent out of town.
I see this coaching combination more as a step toward a reasonable face-saving record for Washington than I see it as something with true breakout potential, but Rivera has generally been a solid coach and it's not like this division had a dominant team in 2019. Better results could be on the table if everything clicks.
The read: Washington has hired a good defensive staff that should improve things from the Greg Manusky years, but an offense that was little beyond Terry McLaurin and running the ball 30 times a game under Callahan has a long way to go without much in the way of proven coaching.