If Josh McDaniels Can't Validate Bill Belichick's Tree, Who Can?

Josh McDaniels is probably the last Patriots assistant with a shot at growing a healthy branch on Bill Belichick's cursed coaching tree.

Josh McDaniels took arguably the best available head coaching job in the NFL on Sunday, much to the surprise of the lay NFL world who last checked in with the Patriots’ offensive coordinator when he backed out of the Colts’ job in 2019, leaving a mostly assembled staff in the lurch while he scampered back to the league’s ready-made coaching factory.

We’re not here to criticize. McDaniels’s reasoning for not taking the job has since filtered out through various surrogates. Maybe he and current Colts general manager Chris Ballard weren’t in as much a lockstep as they originally thought. Maybe there were granular philosophical differences that ended up being a deal breaker. Even if it had nothing to do with operations squabbling, we are all humans working for a living. Family comfort, school quality, proximity to other loved ones, that feeling in your gut when you walk into the front door of a place for the first time; all of it becomes a factor. If people aren’t still talking about Eli Manning refusing to work for the Chargers, we need to let this McDaniels thing go.

But it is interesting, especially in the current state of coaching affairs. McDaniels left the Colts, ultimately, because he knew he could. He knew that his time would come again because of the league’s unending desperation to replicate New England’s two-decade stretch of success. McDaniels upset many powerful people across the league, but the ultimate truth is that no owner is immune to the idea that if they place the right number of Patriots assistants and executives together in the same place, they’ll start to glimmer like the rings in Captain Planet and summon some superhero from the depths of earth to solve all their problems.

The Lions kicked out a coach who actually took their team to the playoffs to try this. The Texans are alienating the entirety of their fan base and possibly hiring a head coach with zero head coaching experience to try this again. The Browns tried it twice in a row, and failed. Outside of Bill O’Brien in Houston, every single attempt at this has been an unmitigated disaster. O’Brien is actually the gold standard of Patriots assistants, with Brian Flores a distant second.

It begs the question: Are we really this unoriginal? This is a league full of imaginative coaching. This is a sport so astoundingly peppered with talent and creativity. Sit in the bleachers of a high school football game one night and you might see something that, a few iterations later, becomes a trick play stolen by every head coach in the NFL. We are in the midst of a great solution void when it comes to the head coaching position. We are regularly acting out the definition of insanity.

Eric Hartline/USA TODAY Sports

McDaniels may be one of the last Patriots coaches with a chance to prove us wrong. Without Tom Brady, the Patriots will probably remain competitive but could ultimately fail to replicate the feverish success of the past two decades. They may eventually become the Steelers, which is a perfectly fine thing. But when was the last time when we saw someone pilfer the Steelers’ head coaching tree?

Raiders owner Mark Davis, who regularly takes gargantuan swings on his myriad head coaching hires, wouldn’t have pulled the trigger without visions of grandeur simmering in his head. And there is a good chance it works out. The Raiders are in good shape when it comes to the salary cap. They have a veteran quarterback playing some of his best football. Derek Carr is also incredibly affordable, much like the quarterback McDaniels had so much success in New England with over the years. There are some solid defensive players on the roster, even if the secondary might need to get flapped out like a dusty rug. McDaniels also learned from some of his mistakes in Denver and will give off less of a freewheeling, Corporate Ryan kind of vibe.

Las Vegas sure hopes so, anyway. So does any owner who goes down this route. This is especially true for Davis, who has dislodged the one coach from New England who knew Belichick better than anyone else.

He is operating on the same promise that fueled McDaniels’s privilege to walk away from a head coaching job, allow the storm to pass and reemerge again only when conditions seemed truly perfect for him. If Vance Joseph, Hue Jackson, Jim Caldwell or Steve Wilks backed out of a head coaching job, we would probably find them today hopefully vying for a special teams job at Valdosta State (no disrespect to the Blazers intended).

McDaniels doesn’t care about validating the Belichick tree, of course. And each of these people are individuals with their own ideas. They just all happened to come from the same coaching university that places each of its graduates in the front of the line for every head coaching vacancy. And it’s fair to wonder when those hires will start paying dividends—and when Patriots assistants will be subject to the same judgmental process as the rest of the candidate pool.