https://www.si.com/nfl/2022/02/08/maqb-lovie-smith-houston-texans-surprising-choice • I have a theory that I think is a little more than just a theory by now, on why Patriots alumni sometimes struggle in new locales. The standard in Foxboro is set very high, it’s kept there relentlessly and Bill Belichick has the program in place to sustain it—stocked with people who grew up in it and wholeheartedly subscribe to it. So sometimes when these people go other places, and work with people who don’t keep the same standard, frustration can fester and boil over, and issues follow. That brings me to what’s happening in Houston. Part of the reason David Culley is now gone relates to this. Missteps in game management were an issue for the 2021 Texans—there were two, in particular, we cited in the Jan. 17 MMQB column—and that, because of his upbringing, was always going to be an issue for Caserio. That’s why, to me, it doesn’t make much sense that Houston’s next coach, Lovie Smith, is coming off of Culley’s staff. And to be clear, I really like Smith. He’s a good dude and a good coach. I just don’t see where this is a match, at a time when, it seemed, the whole idea was for Caserio to get one. Especially with matches available. Brian Flores is one. I’d heard those two might’ve had concern over whether their strong personalities would mesh, but they had a solid relationship in Foxboro and would align philosophically. If said concern and Flores’s lawsuit were too much? Patriots linebackers coach Jerod Mayo was another really good, like-minded option, and he brought the ex-player element Josh McCown did, to boot. At the very least, the Texans just interviewed and subsequently hired an internal candidate who first came on the team’s head-coaching radar a full four weeks after their season ended, and who just worked under the head coach that was fired. That alone makes this one a head-scratcher, to put it mildly. The one thing I’d keep my radar up for is the potential that McCown goes on Smith’s staff as assistant head coach, positioned to eventually succeed him. I’d get that, wanting McCown, but not thinking he’s ready, and putting him with Smith to get him ready. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard for me to wrap my arms around the hire.
Brian Flores saved the Texans . He’s the hero HC the Texans deserve but don’t need …take your 3-4 defense and no OC baggage away. Thanks but no thanks …
15 years ago today, Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy made history and inspired so many at Super Bowl XLI. #BlackHistoryMonth https://t.co/pbafai7HEY
Haha, to be fair though, I bleed Rockets' red and am pretty sad about the team... since... well... Yao and Scola. But if that gif had two waves of bad Texans' news, it would be pretty accurate.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id...it-nfl-teams-alleging-racism-hiring-practices Flores' attorneys allege in the amended complaint that the Texans "retaliated" against Flores by removing him from consideration for their head-coaching vacancy "due to his decision to file this action and speak publicly about systemic discrimination in the NFL." In the amended complaint, Flores' attorneys write that on Feb. 4 it was widely reported that the Texans had narrowed their candidates for head coach down to Flores, Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon and Josh McCown. After it was announced that Gannon, who is white, was no longer in consideration, the decision was down to Flores or McCown, who also is white and does not have any NFL coaching experience. The complaint states that the "Texans were rightfully concerned that if it hired Mr. McCown over Mr. Flores, it would bolster Mr. Flores' allegations of systemic discrimination against Black candidates, particularly given that the team had just fired Black Head Coach David Culley after only one season. As such, later on the very same day that it was announced that the Texans had narrowed its search down to only two candidates, it also was announced that the team had decided to give an initial interview to its own Coach Culley's Defensive Coordinator, Lovie Smith, for the Head Coach position." The Texans ultimately hired Smith, who also is Black, for their head-coaching job. The complaint applauds the Texans for hiring Smith, who "is more than qualified for the role," but says it is "problematic" that Flores was passed over because he filed his lawsuit. "Upon information and belief, either the Texans made this retaliatory decision on its own or the NFL -- through the Commissioner's office and/or other member teams and/or surrogates from the NFL or its member teams -- pressured the Texans not to hire Mr. Flores to be its Head Coach after he filed this lawsuit, or some combination thereof," the lawsuit states. In a statement, the Texans said that their "search for our head coach was very thorough and inclusive. Due to his previous success as a coach in the NFL, Brian Flores was among the first candidates we held a formal interview with for the position and he remained a candidate until the very end. We have a lot of respect for Brian both personally and professionally; he has been a competitive coach in the league for a number of years and his resume speaks for itself. We enjoyed our multiple conversations with Brian regarding his vision for our organization, which included an in-person meeting with the McNair family and General Manager Nick Caserio. In the end, we made the decision to hire Lovie Smith as our head coach and we believe he is the best fit for our team moving forward. "It was a very fluid process that allowed us to spend time with a number of quality candidates. We are proud of our decision and will vigorously defend our process."
What’s everyone’s opinion now? Daboll went for the win. O’Connell looks good. I’m not sure they could have gotten either guy. I think like everything the Texans went conservative over winning with the Smith hire.
Daboll was my first choice, O’Connell my second. I like Lovie, he will have the guys playing above their level, but he’s never going to be an aggressive coach. It’s just who he is
https://theathletic.com/3612253/2022/09/22/nfl-josh-mccown-coach/ Assuming you drive like a Texan, Rusk High School is about two and a half hours from Houston, where Josh McCown last played in the NFL. It’s also two hours from Dallas, where McCown began his college career at SMU. And it’s about 15 minutes away from Jacksonville High School, where McCown was named East Texas Player of the Year 25 years ago. McCown coaches quarterbacks at Rusk, which has roughly 600 students. He also helps wash, fold and hand out players’ jerseys. He tightens facemasks on helmets. He gets in the huddle to encourage the freshman B team. Riding a golf cart through the stadium, he picks up trash. He is very much in his element here, but next year, there’s a good chance McCown will be somewhere the spotlight burns much hotter. After the 2020 season, when McCown was still a quarterback on the Texans roster, he interviewed for Houston’s head coaching vacancy. The Texans hired David Culley instead, then asked McCown to be associate head coach. It was an enticing opportunity, but his squiggly-line football career had already demanded too many sacrifices of his wife, Natalie, and their children, Bridget, Owen, Aiden and Aubrey. McCown needed to prioritize his family and get his shoes back on the red dirt from which he came. He told the Texans no thank you and signed up at Rusk, where he coached Owen last year (he’s at the University of Colorado now) and now coaches Aiden, both senior starting quarterbacks. After firing Culley this past offseason, the Texans interviewed McCown again. He met with them twice, spending time with general manager Nick Caserio, executive vice president Jack Easterby and owner Cal McNair. Longtime Houston NFL writer John McClain, plugged in with the hometown team, reported McCown was the favorite for the job. Then recently-fired Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL alleging racial discrimination in coach-hiring practices. The Texans were widely criticized for considering McCown, with no NFL coaching experience, ahead of qualified African American candidates. Houston ended up promoting defensive coordinator Lovie Smith. Other NFL teams have made runs at McCown over the past two years. The Jaguars interviewed McCown before they hired Doug Pederson. The Colts, Eagles, Vikings and probably others have tried to entice him to join their coaching staffs. In 2023, there is a chance he could be the first person to essentially go straight from being an NFL player to an NFL head coach since Norm Van Brocklin did it 61 years ago. He is sensitive to the perception that he’s trying to cut in front of others who have paid their dues in a traditional manner. But McCown is not trying to jump the line. He’s been standing in it for decades. The first person who told McCown he should think about coaching was Bill Parcells. As the Dolphins’ executive vice president of football operations in 2008, Parcells traded McCown to Carolina before he ever threw a pass for Miami. He thought McCown had a more promising future in coaching than playing. “I had been in football all my life and could recognize people that genuinely love the game,” Parcells said. “With Josh’s persistence as a player and the way he approached his job, I could tell he was very passionate about football — he loved football. Then you consider he’s a bright guy, and he’s been with a lot of different coaches. All of that could serve him well in coaching.” When Parcells had that talk with him, McCown was in his eighth year of what would become a 19-year quarterbacking odyssey. Hanging in his home office in Rusk are 13 jerseys he has worn going back to high school. Two more are waiting to be framed. In his garage, McCown keeps bins of old playbooks the way most people store holiday decorations. … “Life takes you a bunch of places, and those experiences develop skill sets that you can sit on, or you can pass on and maybe try to bring more good into the world that way,” he says. “Coaching in the game of football is a way for me to do that, to pass that forward and have an influence the way some of these good men have had in my life.” McCown was a backup for most of his career, a coaching advantage he has discussed with Colts head coach Frank Reich, another longtime backup. “When you are a starter, there are so many things you don’t see because you are so focused,” McCown says. “When you are a backup, you have this wider lens because the pressure of playing is not necessarily at the forefront. You may notice the starting nickel having a bad day. Something is going on with him. You see how it’s handled as an organization, or how you can step up and encourage somebody.” Eagles general manager Howie Roseman says McCown helped him do his job better by communicating what he saw on and off the field. When Marinelli was the Bears’ defensive coordinator, he left notes in McCown’s locker to inspire him about coaching. He told him to read Bill Walsh’s “The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership,” and literature about Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy. Chris Ballard, then a member of the Bears front office, would seek out McCown in the weight room. Knowing McCown wanted to influence people, Ballard told him his impact could be more significant as a coach than player. “There’s no doubt I saw a future in him,” Ballard says. … Former teammate Joe Haden said he saw McCown make a 360-degree dunk. His greatest gift in sports, though, seems to be his ability to connect. For the wayward, McCown offers the kind of therapy you’d typically get in rocking chairs on a wraparound front porch over a pitcher of sweet tea. It’s no mystery why he was paired, at one point or another, with JaMarcus Russell, Colin Kaepernick, Jay Cutler, Johnny Manziel, Robert Griffin III and Deshaun Watson. Cutler, as easy to get close to as a rose bush, had little in common with McCown. Their relationship, however, can only be described as a bromance. “He’s one of those people you just enjoy being around,” Cutler said on his “Uncut” podcast. “He brings you up. He’s got great advice. … He helped me through some times in my life, and he’s always been there for me.” During the 2020 football season, McCown was on the Eagles roster but spent most of the week coaching Owen and Aiden in Rusk. Late in the season, when starter Carson Wentz slumped and the team started to struggle, Pederson asked McCown to stay in Philadelphia — not to replace Wentz but to counsel him. “He was able to pull things out of me in an encouraging way, which bodes well for him to be a successful coach,” Wentz says. “Coaches can demand a lot, but they can do it with a sense of love and encouragement. I can see that from him. In this league, a loss can feel like the world is going to end, but he always reminded me how fun this is and how much of a blessing this is. He is a really good friend I look up to as a man, not just a football player.” McCown says he has seen coaches lose credibility with front-line players because of the way they treat others on the back end of the roster. But showing everyone respect never has been an effort for McCown, who was voted the “good guy” award winner by the media in three cities. Ballard says McCown reminds him of Reich in the way he can make people around him believe, even through adversity. The 2012 Bears had a 7-1 start before losing five of their next six. Ballard credits McCown’s leadership for keeping the team together and enabling Chicago to win its final two games and finish 10-6. McCown is the rarest of leaders — one who can drive the car from shotgun. “When you’re around Josh, you see his ability to relate with everyone on the team and help your culture,” Roseman says. “He makes your organization better.”
Every week during the season, McCown walks into a 138-year-old building that houses the Cherokee Parcel Post in the County Courthouse Square in Rusk. He prints about 150 pages, give or take, laminates and collates them into 10 playbooks. Back at the high school, he gives one to each quarterback and receiver. To McCown, a significant component of coaching is transferring information. And if the information doesn’t get through, he will tell you it’s the fault of the transferer. So he tries different methods. For the playbooks, he draws out pictures. High school players don’t have time for post-practice meetings, so McCown records practice plays on his phone. Then he posts the clips on Snapchat and gives his players coaching tips on the app — he knows they will see it that way. He tries to be a sounding board for Aiden the way he was for Cutler, Wentz and so many others. And he acts as a conduit between Aiden and Rusk head coach Thomas Sitton. McCown wants to know what plays Aiden believes in and what routes he likes to throw — he is sure players have a better chance of being successful when they feel they have an ownership stake in the game plan. According to Sitton, McCown simplifies the game for his players and builds their confidence with consistent encouragement. To McCown, it’s just “loving on kids.” “He’s got a great servant heart, always putting others before himself,” Sitton says. “He’s an unbelievable asset to our staff to us coaches and to our kids. He’s one of the top people I’ve met in my entire life, and I love him to death. We’re blessed and honored to be coaching with him.” McCown could be happy doing what he’s doing where he’s doing it for the long haul. He’s not looking much beyond Friday night. But after this year he will be out of sons to coach. McCown tries to study two to three NFL games a day from a variety of teams. He keeps current on college and high school trends as well. He talks football with Ballard, Reich, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland and Texas-San Antonio coach Jeff Traylor, one of McCown’s coaches at Jacksonville. He will tell you that if he ever became a head coach, his offense would be based on West Coast principles and his defense would include elements he opposed in practices on units run by Fox, Smith and Bowles. “There is something unique about the competitive greatness of the NFL and the demand of the excellence that’s exciting and challenging,” he says. “Working with the elite athletes and finding out what they are capable of doing is really neat. Whether it’s high school, college or the pros, I’m probably more open now than ever to whatever level. But I’d be remiss to say there’s not an eye on the NFL because that’s where my history is and it’s what I know.” He has picked the brain of Steve Nash, the longtime NBA star who became the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets in 2020 without ever having coached at any level. “Their world is a little different than ours, but hearing his thoughts on making that jump was interesting,” McCown says. “It’s going to happen for some guy in the NFL.” That doesn’t mean McCown diminishes the value of experience. He acknowledges there is much he cannot possibly know about being an NFL head coach. But he was older than his quarterbacks coach in five of his NFL seasons. If he were a head coach in the NFL this year, he would be older than 10 others. “I think the preference would probably be to get some applied experience in terms of coaching in a position room,” Ballard says. “But look, if anybody could make the jump and do it, he could. If he was successful doing it, I wouldn’t say that’s a shock. Josh is a really special guy.” Sitton points to McCown’s vision, his ability to think outside the box and grasp the big picture and says he has no doubt McCown could be a phenomenal head coach at any level. When it comes to being a head coach in the NFL, some are born ready, and some are never ready. There aren’t many in between. But McCown is not angling to be a head coach next year. He says he’d be receptive to any NFL job. “I’ll clean toilets if it’s the best thing for the organization,” he says. “It’s about bringing value to a team.” Someday soon, McCown may bring value to a team on a Sunday afternoon by leading it through a tunnel and into a stadium he played in when he was an NFL quarterback. But for now, he needs to sweep the equipment room floor.
Damn you Brian Flores The hiring of McCown would of been unorthodox out of the ordinary and we would of been daring to be different. Hope he can be our next HC
