4 NFL coaching candidates teams should avoid: Is Robert Saleh just Gus Bradley 2.0?

Robert Saleh will be a hot name this offseason. Here's why he shouldn't be.

Black Monday has taken its toll on the NFL coaching landscape, and the dust hadn’t even settled yet before rumors linking candidates to jobs started flying. The Redskins didn’t waste any time and have reportedly picked Ron Rivera as their next coach.

Things are moving fast! It’s time to get some takes off.

It’s always hard to judge these candidates, especially if they’ve never held NFL coaching jobs before. But that won’t stop me from doing so anyway. Here are four popular coaching candidates that I’d stay away from if I were hiring a new coach this offseason.

1. Matt Rhule, Baylor head coach

I’m not going to lie: I didn’t know much about Rhule’s coaching philosophy before his name started popping up in these coaching searches, which forced me to do some research. And this quote, in particular, raised some major red flags:

“Run pass option has been my deal with the devil,” he said, via Football Scoop. “We won a couple games, but it wasn’t played the way I wanted it to be played. I want the game to look a certain way, with a certain brand. Run pass option has been a bridge for me a way to win. We want to be tough. We believe in full gear, weightlifting, the Oklahoma drill. All the people tell us to be careful about doing, I believe that’s exactly what we need to do.”

Now, Rhule does deserve some credit for being willing to adjust and employing more spread concepts but ignoring the benefits of this schematic shift and wanting to get back to his own “brand” of football because that’s how he thinks the sport should be played is. well, troubling. That’s not how great coaches think.

He’s been successful everywhere he’s been — most recently at Baylor, where he inherited a program in shambles — but building up a mid-level college football team doesn’t necessarily require the same skill-set as building up an NFL team. Maybe Rhule turns out to be Jim Harbaugh, who shared a similar offensive philosophy, but we saw how quickly things went south after the 49ers started losing talent.

2. Robert Saleh, 49ers defensive coordinator

The track record for defensive coaches from the Pete Carroll tree is not very good. Dan Quinn is the closest thing we have to a success story, and it was the Falcons offense that drove his most successful teams. That doesn’t bode well for Saleh.

Based on his three years in San Francisco, Saleh appears to be a non-factor as a coach. He won’t actively hurt your team; but he won’t make it any better, either. When the 49ers defense lacked talent, it ranked in the bottom third of the league. In 2019, the roster is loaded and Saleh has turned in good results. But he won’t be bringing all that talent along with him to his new coaching job, so it’d be foolish to expect him to replicate those results.

Saleh gives me some serious Gus Bradley vibes. Bradley worked under Carroll in Seattle and was seen as a motivator. The Jaguars hired him to recreate Seattle’s defense and build a similar culture in Jacksonville. The result was one of the worst coaching jobs in NFL history. Will another team make the same mistake?

3. Mike McCarthy, former Packers head coach

The NFL Network recently did a feature on McCarthy, who has apparently spent this sabbatical studying new offensive schemes and diving headfirst into analytics.

Yeah, I’m not buying the “changed man” routine. McCarthy was one of the more conservative coaches in the league during his time in Green Bay and his offense hadn’t evolved since the mid-2000s. It’s easy to talk about how you’re going to be bold, but in the heat of the moment, people typically revert back to what makes them most comfortable. For McCarthy, that’s calling a million slant-flat route combinations per game and punting on every fourth-and-short.

While I do think McCarthy is capable of taking a good roster and turning it into a playoff team, that’s not necessarily what those ready-to-win teams are looking for. They want a coach who can get them over the hump and into Super Bowl contention. I don’t think McCarthy is that guy.

4. Greg Roman, Ravens offensive coordinator

I know, I know. The Ravens have the league’s best offense. It’s also fun as hell to watch. But I just don’t know how efficient Roman’s run-first approach is when you don’t have one of the best offensive lines in football and/or Lamar Jackson orchestrating things from behind center.

This is the first season of Roman’s career as a play-caller that he’ll finish with a top-10 scoring offense. After a good start in San Francisco, his offenses declined every season from 2012 to 2014 when he was fired. He coached the Bills offense to a good finish in 2015, but he was fired in September the following season and the offense didn’t regress under Anthony Lynn. While those Bills and 49ers teams could always run the ball, Roman’s passing game left a lot to be desired. And if you don’t have Lamar running behind an elite offensive line, can you really rely on a running game to carry your offense? Not in this economy.

If Roman was willing to take John Harbaugh’s aggressive, analytics-based philosophies with him to his new team, I’d be much more optimistic, but we don’t know if that’s the case. And I don’t know if this Lamar-centric scheme is enough to get me excited about Roman’s prospects as a head coach.