How the Dolphins should — and shouldn’t — let Sean McDermott’s firing impact the final stretch of their coaching search
Should the Dolphins pump the brakes with Sean McDermott on the market?
The NFL’s head coaching landscape simply will not quit. The New York Giants and Tennessee Titans got a jump on their head coach searches by firing coaches in-season this fall.
Then came the Atlanta Falcons, Las Vegas Raiders, Arizona Cardinals, and Cleveland Browns, who quickly joined the ranks at the end of the season. Next came the first stunner: the Baltimore Ravens. The Miami Dolphins quickly fell thereafter. After the wild-card round, the Pittsburgh Steelers joined the club. Now it is the Buffalo Bills’ turn.
Sean McDermott’s dismissal in Buffalo marks the 10th head coaching change. And it also throws a curveball at the Dolphins’ seemingly rapid work of a head coaching search. Because if anyone knows what McDermott teams are capable of, it’s the Dolphins. He’s 16-3 as the head coach of the Bills against Miami. How much should, or shouldn’t, McDermott’s presence on the market on Monday change how the Dolphins approach their looming hire?
How the Dolphins should approach the final stages of their head coaching search with Sean McDermott’s firing
I mean, the Dolphins definitely need to make the phone call. Any team that’s in the market for a head coach should. McDermott helped turn the Bills into a perennial contender, doing so as a defensive-minded coach who got his hands on a raw quarterback in Josh Allen back in 2018.
They developed him into a Monstar. That in and of itself is admirable work. Yes, McDermott’s teams appear to have hit a glass ceiling in the AFC playoff field, and their 33-30 overtime loss to Denver is as painful as any season-ending defeat the team has endured since “13 seconds.”
You win this much for this long, you will have a line out the door of people who are waiting to talk to you.
But this development feels eerily similar to the John Harbaugh situation to me. Miami has committed to advancing its team-building with the hire of Jon-Eric Sullivan as the team’s general manager. And that move comes pre-packaged with alignment with one of the more highly coveted coach candidates on the market: Jeff Hafley, the Packers’ defensive coordinator, who appears to be a finalist for at least three jobs and was on the short list for a fourth had the Falcons not closed Kevin Stefanski over the weekend.
Sean McDermott’s NFL head coaching
career by the numbers
- 98-50 regular season record
- 8-8 postseason record
- Has won at least one playoff game every year since 2020
Miami gets the first crack at Hafley with an in-person interview Monday afternoon ahead of the Titans on Tuesday and the Raiders on Wednesday. How much faith do the Dolphins have that if they let Hafley out of the building, they could ring him up and close the deal later in the week as he pursues other interviews? Maybe they could. But maybe they couldn’t.
And, of course, McDermott is brand new on the market. There’s no guarantee they’d close him, either — not with openings like Pittsburgh and Baltimore still available.
The question for Miami should ultimately come down to this: how deep is the pool of candidates you are comfortable with as a final answer to your head coaching search? If the answer when you woke up this morning was “one” and his name is “Jeff Hafley,” then you probably need to place the phone call to McDermott and gauge his interest in the job versus the market, ensure he’s not an “instant yes” for Miami, and be ready to offer Hafley the head coaching job on Monday afternoon.
If the answer is three or four names deep, then you should absolutely wait for a chance to speak to and gauge the interest McDermott may have in the program. He’s got a track record of all the things that Dolphins fans are hungry to get with their own franchise.
And even if he doesn’t land in Miami, the domino effect of him heading elsewhere could push free another candidate the Dolphins like as insurance, so they don’t get spurned in their interviews by “getting greedy” and letting Hafley out of the building to wait out McDermott. This only works if you’ve got more than a couple of candidates you like, though.
One thing I don’t get? The angst comes from the idea that the Dolphins are hiring Sullivan as the general manager and then choosing someone he’s familiar with to build the franchise. I’ve seen it called nepotism, bad process, and lazy.
These coaches are all individually highly qualified, and you can ask any team builder what the most important elements are of a successful build: they’ll tell you it’s cohesion, trust, and collaboration in the player identification and development process with the power players within the organization.
That exists with Hafley and Sullivan — any coach candidate who trumps it would need to offer special skills while not compromising the collaborative nature of the Dolphins’ new front-office vision.
That’s not a guarantee of success. But it is a good process and gives you perhaps the best chance of success. The results themselves will ultimately boil down to the execution. But you know how the Bills built the brain trust that eventually earned them all of this success? McDermott, as the head coach in Buffalo, helped lead a general manager search after his first offseason there. His choice? His old buddy from Carolina, Brandon Beane. And 98 wins later, the duo has split as the pressure to win splintered the trust and collaboration that helped bed them a winning nucleus nearly a decade ago.
McDermott is good enough to risk that page in the playbook for a candidate to pair with Sullivan — but only if he’s highly interested in the Dolphins and Miami’s depth of candidates that it likes runs deeper than just Hafley.
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