Head coach-needy teams will wait longer to meet with candidates next year. The NFL has pushed back the window for interviews.
Teams cannot meet with HC candidates until after the wild-card round concludes. This only applies to candidates employed by teams, since the change is being made to accommodate assistants preparing for HC interviews and playoff games.
With the exception of the Raiders and Saints, every team that hired a new head coach this year met with candidates ahead of wild-card weekend. The competition committee received feedback the process felt rushed, per ESPN.com’s Jeremy Fowler, though teams have been free to interview coaches ahead of the wild-card round for years.
Six teams being eliminated during wild-card weekend will allow certain assistants the benefit of not having to prepare for interviews and a divisional-round game concurrently. This change will still leave the assistants on the teams still alive by the second round — often the more appealing candidates — in time crunches.
Pushing the hiring period back until after the conference championship round would give another wave of assistants separate windows to prepare for playoff opponents and interviews, though teams eager to assemble their staffs would be against this. Still, this week’s change will allow sought-after assistants to avoid bouncing between interviews and postseason preparation immediately after the regular season ends.
I don’t see an issue with just pushing back the entire interview/hiring process to after the Super Bowl. There wouldn’t be any other news “upstaging” the playoff games, and none of the candidates would have to worry about preparing for interviews and game plans at the same time.
This would give new coaches less time to build a staff and assess their roster, but the league could help by moving free agency and the draft back slightly too. There’s too much of a news gap from about May to August, so if you push the start of the offseason back a little, it means the league will be in the news for a longer part of the year (which they seem to care about).
The reason most teams want the head coach and coordinators done before the Super Bowl is for the senior bowl. Where they scout the players and hire the assistants at.
Coaches and coordinators are rarely involved in scouting. Teams hire a director of player personnel that generally has that responsibility. The senior bowl is a relevant game but a college players entire body of work will determine how high he goes in the draft.
Agreed with Michael. it’s always felt odd to distract coordinators or other staffers during the postseason. let’s just wait.
My thinking is that if a person can’t handle the distraction of a simple job interview, I probably don’t want to hire him anyway because dealing with distractions is a big part of being an effective coach or coordinator.
Keep pushing it back. Head Coach interviews should start two days after the Super Bowl.