Football
Related: About this forumI don't understand the rotating head coach thing
Somebody loses a job as head coach after a terrible season... usually within a year he'll pop up somewhere else, and another place after that. Doesn't anybody ever just flunk out of coaching completely?

Walleye
(39,229 posts)Well I will be interested to see where McCarthy ends up. He wasn't a bad coach for the Packers.
BOSSHOG
(41,804 posts)He was an assistant there 20 years ago. Has a little history.
Walleye
(39,229 posts)There’s a line in a Dylan song that goes
“ you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way“
multigraincracker
(35,288 posts)I’m all for removing sports from school, other than within each school. We have enough tribalism in the world.
Voltaire2
(15,366 posts)In most cases the head coach did the best he could with a shitty dysfunctional team. But you can't fire the team, you can trade some of them, but that doesn't perform the symbolic sacrifice that firing the coach does. So 'off with his head'.
Redleg
(6,419 posts)just saying
milestogo
(20,118 posts)milestogo
(20,118 posts)Bears in 1986 and Packers in 2011. Mike Ditka got fired a few years later, so did Mike McCarthy. The job is only secure if your most recent season was good. And if it wasn't, somebody else will still hire you.
rsdsharp
(10,621 posts)“When you’re winning, no one can take your job. When you’re losing, no one can save it.”
Which doesn’t explain why the losers keep getting rehired.
milestogo
(20,118 posts)And the end comes swiftly. The game ends, and a few hours later there's an announcement. And sometimes the season isn't even over yet.
ProfessorGAC
(72,149 posts)Probably Nagy, & Josh McDaniels.
Not everyone gets a second chance, but it does happen a lot.
Morbius
(379 posts)Fewer than half have a proven head coach, which I define as a guy with a winning record after at least three seasons. Part of the reason for the high failure rate of new head coaches is that the top candidates tend to be successful coordinators, either offensive or defensive, and head coaching requires a different skillset than play-calling. Sometimes successful college coaches move to the NFL; this has had mixed results.
Mostly, guys who fail as head coaches return to be coordinators, or go down to the college ranks. It's rare for a head coach to get another opportunity if he's unsuccessful in his first try. Generally, the few who do get a second opportunity are excellent play callers, whether on offense or defense.