There’s No Such Thing As A Secure NFL Coaching Job

The thing about "unprecedented events" is that they rarely are. Something weird or unusual that you just saw has almost certainly happened before, usually within about four years, and in pretty much the same form. This isn't to say that strange and new-seeming things aren't happening all the time, but of all the things that human beings are good at, doing the same thing over and over is among the top three, even if it's not by design. People, including those rich enough to own NFL teams, are people.

And so it is with the current NFL coaching mudfight, in which ten teams, some of them quite successful, have decided that the person in charge of that success must lose their gig anyway, either because the team owner wants something else out of disappointment, boredom, or personality defect. Sean McDermott's firing two days after the Buffalo Bills performed their annual postseason flameout seemed unusually precipitous, at least until you remembered that John Harbaugh got fired and Mike Tomlin quit despite having better career records and a bejeweled hubcap where their ring finger usually stands during their tenures with Baltimore and Pittsburgh, respectively.

Also, "unusually precipitous" depends on what you think is unusual. The league abruptly losing three coaches with 500 combined victories and a winning percentage of .619 will catch the untrained eye because it dismisses history for the more kneejerky "what pissed me off today?" methodology of the modern owner. And let's be honest (as opposed to the myriad of times when we just baldfaced lied to you), that's what a firing often is. We know what type of person owns NFL teams, by this point. There's no reason to act surprised when that kind of person does the kind of thing that kind of person does.