NFL Head Coach Rankings

In anticipation of the NFL season beginning on Thursday, I decided to rank all of the head coaches in the NFL. I have no way to rank the first time head coaches, so they will appear at the end of the list. The remaining coaches are organized in and within tiers.   

The Hall of Famers 

1. Bill Belichick

2. Jim Harbaugh

3. Sean Payton

4. Tom Coughlin

5. John Harbaugh 

In 13 years as the Patriots head coach, Belichick has won 72.6% of his games, 3 Super Bowls, been to 2 others. The Patriots have had 1 losing season—his first. In two years, Jim Harbaugh transformed the roster that Mike Singletary ran into the ground into a Super Bowl team. He has demonstrated smart and aggressive play calling and turned Alex Smith into a competent QB. Payton’s aggressive offenses consistently rank among the league’s best. The Saints have won 13, 11, and 13 games in Payton’s last three seasons as the head coach. With Payton back on the sidelines this year, the Saints should return to double digit wins. Coughlin has led the Giants to two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots. Yet every year the New York media speculates that the Giants will fire Coughlin because the players “quit” on him.* Yet every year the Giants remain in the playoff hunt. John Harbaugh has led the Ravens to the playoffs in all five seasons as head coach, culminating in winning last year’s Super Bowl. 

The Very Good

6. John Fox

7. Mike Tomlin

8. Mike Smith

9. Gary Kubiak

John Fox reached the Super Bowl with the Panthers and rearranged his offense in Denver to accommodate Tim Tebow’s QB skills (or lack thereof). He remains one of the better coaches in the NFL. Tomlin has won a Super Bowl, been to a second one, and has won 63 games in 6 seasons. This will be an important year for Steelers to see if they can rebound after last year’s 8-8 campaign. Smith has won 56 games in 5 years. His conservative in-game strategy has hurt the Falcons in the playoffs. Kubiak took over the Houston Texans and led them to a string of 8-8 seasons before winning 10 and 12 games in the past two seasons. His zone blocking scheme has made the Texans one of the best running teams in the league every year. 

The Tenured 

10. Mike McCarthy

11. Andy Reid

12. Jeff Fisher

13. Mike Shanahan 

14. Marvin Lewis

These are coaches who have coached good, sometimes great teams for a long time, or have won a Super Bowl, but have lingering questions. McCarthy won Super Bowl XLV, but has a number of early playoff exits and has demonstrated Andy Reid-esque game management. I think we all know who Andy Reid is at this point. A very good coach who prepares his teams well, but fourteen year old Madden players manage the play clock and timeouts better than Reid. Fisher coached the Titans to a Super Bowl and for what seemed like decades afterwards.  His teams are never atrocious, but never that great either. Mike Shanahan won two Super Bowls in the 1990s with Terrell Davis and an aged John Elway, but hasn’t done much since. Marvin Lewis is a good coach, but not one that you sense is actively working, like a Belichick, Payton, or Harbaugh, to be ahead of the NFL curve.  

The Wait and See

15. Leslie Frazier

16. Greg Schiano

17. Joe Philbin

In his second full season as head coach, Frazier coached the 10-6 Vikings to a surprise playoff bid last season. The Vikings are due some regression after making a seven win improvement from 2011-2012. Philbin and Schiano enter their second seasons as NFL head coaches and did not leave enough of an impression to land definitively somewhere on this list. 

The Wild Cards

18. Pete Carroll

19. Rex Ryan

20. Jim Schwartz

Carroll’s career has had some of the biggest peaks and valleys out of any other NFL coach. After a disastrous year as coach of the Jets and a tumultuous tenure in New England, Carroll transformed USC into a BCS powerhouse before returning to the NFL.   He led the resurgent Seahawks to the playoffs last year, but only has a career .518 winning percentage. Ryan coached up the Jets defense to two AFC title games, dragging Mark Sanchez along the way. Ryan’s oversized personality and a ravenous New York media have contributed to circus like atmosphere that doomed the Jets last season. If the Jets management doesn’t think Ryan is their head coach for the future, they should have moved on at the end of last season. Leaving Ryan and Sanchez as lame ducks has fueled the media circus in a rebuilding year. Schwartz’s Lions’ teams have won 2, 4, 10, and 6 games. His Lions’ teams are most famous for their “toughness” and a proclivity for penalties, especially for unnecessary roughness. 

Counting Down the Weeks

21. Jason Garrett

22. Mike Munchak

23. Ron Rivera 

The farce that is the Dallas Cowboys and Garrett’s suspect game management will probably result in Dallas firing him by the end of the year. Firing Jerry Jones would be a better move. I can’t tell you much about Munchak, other than that the Titans are mediocre and have been for a long time. In a divisional game against Atlanta last season, Rivera’s Panthers had a 28-27 lead with 1:44 left in the game. They faced a fourth and 1 on the Atlanta 45 yard line. Despite having the best running quarterback in the league under center and two highly compensated running backs in the backfield**, Rivera punted the ball back to the Falcons, who promptly drove down the field and won the game. Get the one yard (with a running QB) and win the game or punt and give the Falcons a chance to drive for the winning field goal? 

The New Guys (no particular order)

24. Marc Trestman

25. Gus Bradley

26. Chuck Pagano (incomplete from last year)

27. Mike McCoy

28. Dennis Allen

29. Bruce Arians

30. Doug Marrone

31. Chip Kelly

32. Rob Chudzinski

*See http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/11144/the-annual-pursuit-of-quitting-on-tom-coughlin

** As Football Outsider’s Aaron Schatz pointed out, the outcome of the game was a failure of process and result. http://deadspin.com/5947937/was-the-panthers-fourth+down-decision-dumb-enough-to-change-the-nfls-punt+to+win-philosophy