Let's take a ride on the 2025 coaching carousel with Conor Orr + the rise of Kevin O'Connell with Jourdan Rodrigue and Alec Lewis
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2024
⏱️ 103 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 2025 coaching carousel has been spinning since the Jets surprisingly fired Robert Saleh in October. Since then, the Bears and Saints have officially hopped on board, and we know at least three or four more are going to join them. Who else might be looking for a coach after the season? What should we expect from Bill Belichick, Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn? Who might be the surprise candidates that emerge in January? Conor Orr from Sports Illustrated joins Robert Mays to break down the upcoming coaching cycle on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Then, The Athletic's Jourdan Rodrigue and Alec Lewis discuss with Robert a recent success on the coaching carousel: Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell.
Rundown
- Head coach openings
- Potential surprise openings
- Good job or bad job?
- Bill Belichick
- Ben Johnson
- Aaron Glenn
- Brian Flores
- Mike Vrabel
- Liam Coen
- Todd Monken
- Joe Brady
- Off-the-beaten path candidates
- First-time coordinator candidates
- The rise of Kevin O'Connell
Host: Robert Mays
With: Conor Orr, Jourdan Rodrigue and Alec Lewis
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:05.7 | Brought to you by Thursday Night Football only on Prime Video. |
| 0:08.7 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:09.8 | It's Coach's Day on the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:12.8 | We've done this for the last couple years. |
| 0:14.3 | I always love digging into the pool of coaching candidates with our buddy Connor |
| 0:17.9 | or from Sports Illustrated. |
| 0:19.1 | He does a fantastic job, just doing all the |
| 0:21.7 | legwork on the possible guys who get hired in these cycles. There are 27 names for head coaching |
| 0:27.5 | candidates on the list that he does for SI. So we dug into not all 27, but the guys near the |
| 0:32.8 | top of that list and what their candidacies might look like in this cycle. As kind of an extension of this conversation, we also had Jordan Rodriguez, two of our |
| 0:41.2 | fantastic writers at The Athletic On, to discuss the piece they wrote earlier this season about |
| 0:45.3 | Kevin O'Connell. |
| 0:46.0 | As we think about archetypes that NFL teams, NFL organizations are going to be chasing, |
| 0:50.8 | Kevin O'Connell is going to be one of those names that consistently comes up. |
| 0:53.5 | So I wanted to talk to them about what makes Kevin O'Connell a special coach and what are some |
| 0:58.9 | of those traits that might be worth seeking out if you're a team in the market for one of these |
| 1:03.4 | guys. So very excited to get to both of those conversations. Let's get to it. |
| 1:16.2 | Well, we've been dancing around this for the last couple weeks. The last time Connor was on, we alluded to the fact that we did this, or we were going to do this, |
| 1:19.5 | and then on Sunday night, I alluded to the fact that we were going to do this this week. |
| 1:22.9 | But I always love talking to our buddy Connor or about the coaching cycle. He does fantastic work on it. |
| 1:28.5 | I think it's an area that we both have a particular interest in. |
... |
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