We know now, but didn’t when Albert Breer joined Grant and Danny on Tuesday, that Bobby Slowik has signed a new deal to stay in Houston as OC – a move Breer himself reported after his segment.
That leaves us with four defensive coaches as current finalists for the Washington HC job, and Grant has said that Dan Quinn, who Breer thinks might be the favorite, would be an “F hire” and would leave him any one of 23 different words describing sadness.
Here’s Grant’s thing in general, though, which came up after Breer said he’d look at Mike Vrabel if the Commanders do open up the search some more:
“My issue with hiring a defensive-minded head coach, and I think (Quinn) is a good leader of men and a good coach, is that the offense is going to be in flux every few years,” GP said. “If you hit on coordinator, a hotshot OC hire, awesome – but that guy gets a job in two year and leaves, now what? We've seen it with Vrabel, who’s out of a job for this reason, and Quinn, who became a .500 coach when Kyle (Shanahan) left – how do you fix that if you're hiring Quinn or Mike MacDonald or Anthony Weaver?”
Well, Albert Breer?
“You have to have a plan and that's part of the interview. I've talked to coaches about this and that's the way a lot of defensive coaches approach it now,” Breer said. “They'll go into the interview and they'll say here's my offensive coordinator and here's the next guy, and he's gonna be my quarterbacks coach or tight ends coach, my passing coordinator or whatever it is. There’s a way to do it. Is it challenging? Yes, sort of, but I would kind of classify that as like a champagne problem. If you get good enough play out of your quarterback in your offense that that's an issue, I'd say you're doing pretty well for yourself.”
The 2012 Commanders staff had a ton of future head coaches on it, so maybe there’s something to that, and as Grant said, “you have to be a great team to have good people in your building.”
“Right, and that’s part of it, too, is just how good a job you do filling your staff and developing people,” Breer said. “I'd argue that San Francisco, one of the big secrets to what they've done, is they've developed players at a really high level, but also developed like coaches and scouts at a really high level. They had Mike McDaniel, he leaves, so Bobby Slowik steps up; Slowik leaves, and they've got another guy by the name of Brian Fleury who I think will be a coordinator in the next year or two. That’s the way the best organizations are – even Andy Reid in Kansas City, had Doug Pederson, Matt Nagy, and Eric Bieniemy back-to-back-to back; they've always had answers. Now, I know that guy's not calling the plays, but that’s a good line of offensive coaches. They were always ready with the next one, and so I think that's part of the job in any case – and if it's a defensive coach, that one becomes a little bit more important than if the guy who is running the show is also running the offense.”