Albert Breer’s NFL Takeaways: Why the Steelers Played it Safe With Mike McCarthy

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Pittsburgh Steelers
Philip Rivers
Cleveland Browns
Baltimore Ravens
Miami Dolphins

It’s conference championship Sunday, and I’m in Denver for the AFC game. Let’s get started with some early takeaways posted live as the games kick off …

Pittsburgh Steelers

This is a very, very different hire by the Steelers. Mike McCarthy, a native son, is coming home, and completely breaking the Rooney mold for hiring a head coach. Just consider …

• Chuck Noll was hired at 37 years old in 1969. Bill Cowher was 34 when he came aboard in ’92. Mike Tomlin was 34 when he was hired in 2007. McCarthy is 62.

• Noll, Cowher and Tomlin were all defensive coaches by trade. McCarthy’s background is wholly on offense.

• Noll, Cowher and Tomlin arrived without a single game of head coaching experience at any level. McCarthy has, including the playoffs, 310 games of experience as an NFL head coach, served over 18 seasons with two franchises.

The Steelers hired McCarthy even with qualified candidates on their list that fit their tried-and-true formula. Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula is 39, a strong leader, and shares a side of the ball with the three aforementioned Steeler coaches. Nathan Scheelhaase doesn’t, but has their presence and youth at 35 years old. Both were expected to get second looks from Pittsburgh this coming week.

Instead, the Steelers played it uncharacteristically safe.

Let me be clear: McCarthy’s a way better football coach than people make him out to be. His record is very similar to Sean Payton’s and John Harbaugh’s, even if public perception doesn’t reflect that. He deserves credit for maximizing the end of Brett Favre’s career, rebuilding Aaron Rodgers’s mechanics and helping to develop him into a four-time MVP, and getting the best out of Dak Prescott. He won 12 games three times in Dallas, made the playoffs eight consecutive years in Green Bay and won Super Bowl XLV.

That said, it’s more than fair to question why the Steelers strayed from their old methods. Seven of the team’s 22 starters from the wild-card playoff loss to Houston were 30 or older, and another four were 28 or 29. The quarterback, if McCarthy can get Rodgers to come back, is 42. The highest-paid player, T.J. Watt, is 31. The team’s third-highest-paid player, Jalen Ramsey, is also 31.

Now seems like the time for a roster reset and a chance to start over. But, this feels like a move made to keep the team competitive now.

Of course, there’s no need to indict anyone for something that hasn’t happened yet. The new coach is certainly capable of onboarding draftees and leading a youth movement. Micah Parsons, CeeDee Lamb, Trevon Diggs, Osa Odighizuwa, Tyler Smith, Jake Ferguson and DeMarvion Overshown all came into the league on McCarthy’s watch and grew into cornerstone players for the Cowboys.

Maybe the Steelers will get going on that now. They need to. Last year’s signing of Rodgers was their swing at trying to put an aging core over the top. It didn’t work out, but it was a worthy swing. And if fans are worried that hiring McCarthy is another swing at making what’s already on hand competitive, then I’d understand the concern.

We’ll see if that’s the case.

Philip Rivers

Philip Rivers interviewing for the Bills’ head coaching job isn’t as ludicrous as you think. And it also isn’t the manifestation of some lifelong dream, as far as I can tell.

In the summer of 2019, near the end of Rivers’s decorated 16-year run with the Chargers, I sat with him, and he took me through his timeline for retirement. He acknowledged that when to hang up the cleats isn’t always up to a player. But he also had a personal deadline that he planned to adhere to.

“I know what I’m gonna do when I’m done, which I think I’ve told you—I wanna coach high school football,” he said. “And my oldest boy is gonna be a fifth-grader, so I certainly have a little bit of time. And I don’t really see that as one of those—All right, he’s a 10th-grader, I gotta go right now. I’m not gonna run it right up to that. But he’s a fifth-grader, that leaves you not quite a handful … I really don’t know. I feel great. I love it. I love playing.”

Rivers was on the doorstep of his final season with the team that drafted him. He spent one more year in the NFL after that, as a Colt, and then became the head coach at St. Michael Catholic in Fairhope, Ala. Gunner, his oldest son, was a seventh-grader then. He’s now a junior at St. Michael Catholic, heading into his senior year as the sixth-ranked quarterback recruit nationally in the Class of 2027, with dad as his coach. Rivers has another son, Peter, who’s 14 and could play for his father soon as well.

So why dive back into the NFL as a coach now, were it to happen? A couple of reasons.

First, because his career ended (the first time) amid the COVID-19 season, Rivers never really got a send-off. He was playing in mostly empty stadiums, marking the end of his final memories of the league. Conversely, this year, when he came back to try to save the Colts’ season, he felt the energy of pro football again, and it got his blood flowing. He got to play in a prime-time game against his friend John Lynch’s team. He got to see the reaction of his family and friends. He got to lead an NFL locker room again.

All of this led him to believe he could make it work. He’d been a head coach, albeit at a much, much, much lower level, the past five years. In his later playing years, he served more or less as a coach, imparting his knowledge of the run game and protections. He was at the point where he helped the staff run blitz meetings. All of that applies to the job and would help bridge the preps-to-pros gap with the head coaching experience he does have.

Second, there’s the job that he agreed to interview for, after getting feelers from a few teams. The Bills’ job was different, given the challenge of taking a really good team and making it great (a hump he couldn’t clear as a player), and also because of Josh Allen. Rivers and Allen share an agent, and Allen worked with Rivers, both in the classroom and on the field, in spurts ahead of the 2018 draft. They’ve maintained a relationship, and over that time, it’s become clear what kind of player Allen is.

So Rivers’s hat is in the ring. The next big question will be staffing, but he’s been working on that for a while. He has guys he’s close with from playing (Frank Reich, Chris Harris, Nick Hardwick, etc.), and head coaches he’s stayed in constant communication with (Shane Steichen, Nick Sirianni).

All that said, it’d be a big leap of faith, particularly for a Buffalo team that’s on the cusp.

But, as I see it, this is not the Colts’ Jeff Saturday situation of a few years ago. And if this Bills nibble doesn’t lead to a job, I think there’s still a good chance it’ll eventually happen, because it sure seems like Rivers’s fire for pro football is back.

Cleveland Browns

The Browns are certainly doing things their own way. So my buddy Tom Pelissero created a stir during his spot—which was right on—with our mutual friend Rich Eisen.

The news was that the Browns are handing out preinterview tests to coaching candidates.

I figured I’d dig a little more into it to give everyone an idea of what Cleveland’s done here, which is part of the overall effort the team has made, over the past decade-plus, to become more and more data-driven. And this particular piece of it, which sitting GM Andrew Berry actually went through when he was hired in 2020, is to try to make what’s generally qualitative information from an interview a little more quantitative.

The Browns phased it in during the 2019 and ’20 hiring cycles, in large part because what came across in home run interviews with Hue Jackson and Freddie Kitchens simply wasn’t translating on to the field.

There are three phases to it. There’s a cognitive test. There’s a personality test. Then (and this part is new this year), there are a half-dozen questions relating to the role of the head coach, some general ones about the candidate himself, some specific to the Browns. The questions require more than just off-the-cuff thought, and serve as the foundation for the first interview, which under the current rules has been a three-hour Zoom for Cleveland.

There’s logic to it, too. The head coach might wind up making $50 million or $75 million on his first contract with the team, with as much as $20 million per year committed to staffing for that new boss. Obviously, that’s a massive investment for an organization to make. And when the Browns started doing this, there was an obvious question they were trying to answer: Why is it that guys like Mike Tomlin and Andy Reid only got one interview request before landing their first jobs? What was everyone missing?

Kevin Stefanski actually wound up being like that, too, only getting an interview with the Browns before landing that job, in 2020, as was Nick Sirianni with the Eagles in ’21.

Now, I get the skepticism. I also understand where, if a coach had eight or nine interview requests, and was still in the playoffs, he could view having to go through this extra step as a put off. But you can also see where they are taking the path less traveled, with a less conventional list—Bengals OC Dan Pitcher, Seahawks DC Aden Durde and Jaguars OC Grant Udinski all got their first head coach interview requests from the Browns this month.

The other reason to be cynical, of course, is the track record. The current ownership group’s list of hires, before Stefanski, looked like this: Rob Chudzinski, Mike Pettine, Jackson and Kitchens. But the market for Stefanski would indicate that they did get one right there (as would his two Coach of the Year trophies) and at least allow for the possibility that the process that really got going with his hire will turn up another diamond in the rough.

One thing’s for sure: How this is perceived will be dictated by the numbers in the left column versus those in the right column. If the Browns’ next coach wins, it’ll look innovative and like a product of thinking outside the box. If he loses, it’ll be seen as same-old Browns.

Baltimore Ravens

The Ravens hit a home run. And as I see it, they knocked it out of the park by acting decisively when they needed to—with even the hint that they could lose Jesse Minter.

Minter, who was then the Chargers’ defensive coordinator, interviewed on Tuesday with the Raiders in the exclusive Indian Creek neighborhood of Miami, where Las Vegas minority owner Tom Brady resides. Minter hit it off quickly with the future Hall of Famer and Raiders GM John Spytek. Both are Michigan football alumni and, as such, were familiar with Minter’s work under Jim Harbaugh over the past four years (the first two in Ann Arbor, then in Los Angeles).

Vegas wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger, but Brady’s gravitational pull—a pull that Ben Johnson felt last year before taking the Bears’ job—was there as Minter flew to Baltimore on Tuesday night. The Raiders could see him as their head coach. He knew it.

And then Minter was home again, in the Ravens’ facility, where his NFL life began as a quality control coach on defense in 2017 under John Harbaugh. When John Harbaugh was let go a couple of weeks ago, we ran a column on the learning lab that he and Wink Martindale birthed to reinvent their defense, with Minter, Mike Macdonald and Zach Orr as star pupils.

Minter’s four years there were formative, as he rose to assistant secondary coach in 2019, then secondary coach in ’20, before going to be Clark Lea’s DC at Vanderbilt in ’21, and then replacing Macdonald as Michigan DC in ’22. Jim Harbaugh knew what he had, joking at the time that Macdonald and Minter were his defensive answer to what Washington once had in Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan. Since then, it’s kind of played out that way.

So there Minter was, going through the interview Wednesday with GM Eric DeCosta and his crew, with both sides checking boxes. Afterward, he didn’t know he was getting the Baltimore job, but had a feeling either the Ravens or Raiders were the place for him. So he called the Browns, canceled an interview scheduled for Thursday (he was scheduled to visit the Cardinals on Friday), and decided to stay the night in Baltimore.

The Ravens interviewed Bills OC Joe Brady (who, interestingly enough, could very well become Minter’s OC in Baltimore) on Thursday morning, knowing of the Raiders’ interest in Minter. And after sitting down with Brady, whom they’d liked, they moved on Minter.

Familiarity helped, for sure. But it wasn’t just that. Through the interview, and their own experience with him before that, Minter clearly showed himself to be smart, creative, a really good leader (like Macdonald, in his own way) and capable of building lasting relationships with players and staff. And the Ravens very clearly also liked his plan for constructing that staff—something that’s always key for coaches with defensive roots.

Anyway, sometimes the obvious hire is the correct one.

This looks like a great example of it.

Miami Dolphins

Jeff Hafley put a lot of thought into not only keeping Bobby Slowik, but promoting him to offensive coordinator. To be clear, I don’t think it was an easy choice for the new Dolphins coach. Mostly because he was also considering Packers offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich, whom Matt LaFleur likely would’ve let go for a play-calling opportunity in Miami.

In the end, the call, in large part, came down to Hafley’s offensive philosophy as a defensive-rooted coach. And I’ve always been interested in that topic—how guys from one side of the ball view the other when they become head coaches.

So I called Hafley on Sunday morning, and we dove into it. A few things I got from our talk …

• Yes, familiarity with guys such as Slowik and Stenavich helps, but it’s more than that. “It has a lot to do with the people I’ve been around, and then people I’ve defended,” Hafley said. “There’s certain schemes that I think are really hard to defend. Then there’s certain play-callers that I’ve been around, that have a system and a belief of what they run, and it’s all tied in together. And I really saw that with Kyle [Shanahan] in San Francisco, and then I saw it again with Matt. I was around two really good play-calling coaches. And obviously Bobby has been influenced by those guys. He’s got the pedigree. And that really was my starting point with Bobby.”

• How Shanahan prepared Slowik—starting him on defense—really appealed to Hafley. It also helped that Hafley was there for that, as the 49ers’ defensive backs coach in 2017 and ’18. “It was really me, Bobby and [Robert] Saleh, the three of us together constantly,” Hafley said. “Bobby was in my office half the day working with me. So I got a really good working relationship with Bobby—brilliant mind, incredible human. And then I leave to go to Ohio State, and Kyle steals him to go on offense, which I’m guessing was Kyle’s plan the whole time. Bobby is Kyle’s type of guy. Fast processing, highly, highly intelligent. And I could see he was setting it up, ‘All right, learn the defenses, learn the rules, and then I’m going to bring it over to offense and train you to be my next guy.’ It was really cool to see.”

• As for what Hafley specifically likes about the Shanahan offense, it’s not too complicated. Every look gives a defense a handful of things to worry about. And what looks complex to the defensive players is relatively simple for the offensive guys. “Everything is set up. Everything is set up,” Hafley said. “And the plays all play off of each other. So you run this, and it sets up a play pass off of it. You run this, and it sets up a keeper off of it. You run this, and it sets up a screen off of it. And the formations and the balance of the run in the past game, the play-action pass game, they do such a good job of creating. Like the way I look at it, think about defenses in terms of levels. Like level one at the line of scrimmage, level two, your linebackers, level three, your safeties. It creates a huge separation between the second and third levels, and it creates holes because the run action gets the backers down. And then there’s a huge separation between your linebackers and your secondary, and that’s where they hit plays that lead to explosives.”

And then there’s how involved he’ll be. In Green Bay, Hafley says, “Matt let me do my thing. I think it’s important that I let Bobby do his thing, but I also think where I can help is I can give him thoughts and ideas from a defensive perspective.”

The best part is he’s not guessing how it’ll fit together. He saw the schemes work hand in hand in San Francisco between Shanahan and Saleh—ditto for him and LaFleur in Green Bay.

There’s a proven formula there. Now, we’ll get to see how it works with the head coach on the other side of the ball.