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NICE NO/MEAN NO: JOSH MCDANIELS

THE FOOTBALL POPE TOUCHED HIM SO LET'S HIRE HIM

RN: Think about all the things you have done since 2001. You might have graduated from high school or college or graduate school. You might have gotten married or had a kid. You might have bought a house, or sold it, or moved, or changed careers. But I am willing to bet one thing most of you did not do was work in a college football program at any level in any capacity. And neither did Josh McDaniels. So I'm going to take the extreme position that someone who hasn't worked in the college game since 2000 (and was then only a grad assistant) probably isn't best equipped to take the reins of a major FBS team.

SH: Holy shit. No. Jesus in a golf cart made of cow shit, no, no, no.

RN: Nor was McDaniels a particularly successful head coach in the NFL, canned by the Broncos before he even finished his second season. This was Denver's quarterback depth chart at the start of the 2010 season:

And none of that was inherited or forced upon McDaniels. He traded for Orton and Quinn, and he moved up in the draft to grab Tim Tebow absurdly early. This was the outcome he chose for himself. The resources an NFL team has to identify and evaluate talent far, far exceed those of any college program and, even if they weren't, it shouldn't be hard to see that Orton/Quinn/Tebow is a tremendously shitty plan.

SH: This is an agent just humping this through the system, right? Turning a few favors in, maybe promising a few down the road, maybe throwing out some free rounds of golf he has at Burntdick Acres or whatever the hell you call a country club to reporters who like that kind of stuff. Because no rational human being could look at the vast acreage of available coaches, prune all that back, and look at the ragged, unbeloved weed of Josh McDaniels' career and go: this is my show rose.

He is a Belichick assistant no one likes who has already been fired from a major job. If we wanted that, you could hire LITERALLY ANY OTHER BILL BELICHICK ASSISTANT EVER. Fun fact! Eric Mangini was a PR guy for the Patriots before he was on their coaching staff, i.e. Bill Belichick could probably make Asimo into a competent special teams coach, and then trade him for three first-rounders to some poor team that sucks at everything like the Chiefs.

God, I wish college teams could trade coaches. We could have gotten a nice new fax machine for Zook.

RN: Let's also talk about part of the reason why the Broncos fired McDaniels. In October 2010, Denver's director of video operations taped a 49ers walkthrough during the week before the Broncos were scheduled to play San Francisco in London; a month later, the NFL found out, the video director was fired, and the league fined Denver and McDaniels $50,000 each.

What makes this so very stupid is not that it happened just a few years after the same Spygate controversy took place in New England. The stupid part is that the video director - who McDaniels hired - was one of the people involved with the original Spygate. I am fully confident that, given enough time and rope with which to hang himself, Josh McDaniels will get into some of the stupidest NCAA trouble you can imagine.

SH: Oh, if Josh McDaniels were let loose under pressure to succeed in an NCAA environment the damage and stupidity would boggle the mind-- and that's after you get past him hiring family members, as he did when he was the head coach for a professional football franchise. In need of a quarterbacks coach in 2009, McDaniels opted to hire Ben McDaniels, his 27 year old brother who came fresh from his job coaching high school football where his resume boasted extensive experience in "being related to a current NFL coach."

And that's all if you can get past another fact: he knows Tom Brady. The number of coaches capable of wringing huge paychecks out of that time when once, on a blessed overcast day in New England, they had the good fortune to trip over Tom Brady's sainted dick? The number may be innumerable by the time he retires, both in terms of direct hires and the indirect runoff to worthless assistants forgotten in the resulting buyouts and secondary regifting of coaches to clueless institutions who thought no, this time: this time they'll work out here. Scot Loeffler knows Tom Brady! We should blow another four years of our lives on him, because once he sat back and said "You got this, Tom. I'll be over here printing out game charts for you to look at after this touchdown. I put them in plastic sleeves and everything, because I am a professional."

RN: Seriously? Josh McDaniels? Did we not learn anything from the damn Charlie Weis experiment? Is it possible that the mere act of working with Bill Belichick does not make you some magically anointed head coach? Isn't Nick Saban the exception and not the rule?

Let's just hire anyone even vaguely associated with Belichick, then! Go find the guy who drove him to the airport that one time and make him the running backs coach. Put his mailman in charge of special teams. Hey, guy who handed Bill Belichick a glass of white wine at an ESPYs party! You're the new defensive coordinator, because you have been TOUCHED BY THE SUPER BOWL POPE!

SH: Here, let's put it this way, Jeremy Foley. You want a young NFL coordinator with Florida ties? One who trained at the feet of the master himself, Steve Spurrier, and who then went forward to commandeer offenses for teams that went to the playoffs? Someone who literally has NFL bloodlines?

Someone who knows that a champion tucks shirts INTO the team-themed track pants, and has successfully gone .500 or below with Jeff Fisher on numerous occasions? BRIAN SCHOTTENHEIMER. He carried the clipboard for victory once, Jeremy Foley, and he'll do it again, provided you give him somewhere between three and twenty years to let random chance get him to a ten win season. (Mike Shula and Will Muschamp did it. So can he.)