Jabari Young said it without blinking. I want the Pittsburgh Steelers job. I will beg and plead. I'm turning down every other interview.
That's a strong take from a guy who covers this league for a living. So I made him say why, and the answer wasn't what I expected. He didn't talk about talent. He didn't talk about the quarterback situation or the defensive depth or the salary cap. He talked about the Rooney family. He talked about time. He talked about the thing that almost no one in the media conversation about the coaching carousel is actually discussing — that the most valuable asset in an NFL head coaching job isn't the roster you inherit. It's the runway.
That's the whole episode. Stability isn't a byproduct of winning. It's the precondition for it. And the franchises that keep mistaking instability for accountability are going to keep finding themselves having this same conversation in five years.
What Tomlin leaving actually means
Mike Tomlin wasn't fired. That's the part of this story that got lost in the news cycle. He walked. After 18 years, one Super Bowl, and never a losing season — he decided he'd had enough of the circumstances and he left on his own terms.
Jabari's read on it was this: "I think it was a frustration thing. I don't think it was a pride thing." And when you look at what Pittsburgh handed him in those last few years — the Aaron Rodgers project that went nowhere, the Russell Wilson project that went nowhere, the musical-chairs quarterback situation with no real answer in sight — the frustration reads clearly. Tomlin is one of the best coaches in the history of this league, and they kept asking him to make chicken salad out of something that wasn't chicken.
The Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher lineage is real. Three coaches in roughly fifty years of football. That's not an accident. That's a philosophy. The Rooneys decided, at some foundational level, that you build something by not tearing it down every time the results disappoint you. Tomlin leaving doesn't invalidate the philosophy — it actually proves it. He left. They didn't push him. That's a meaningful distinction.
The question Jabari raised that I haven't stopped thinking about: does Tomlin come back to a sideline, or does he pull a Cowher and walk away for good? I don't know the answer. What I do know is that whoever gets that job next is inheriting an infrastructure that almost doesn't exist anymore in the NFL. A front office that won't micromanage you. An ownership family with no ego about being the smartest person in the room. A city that understands football at a molecular level. That's not nothing. That's almost everything.
The teams running from stability
Atlanta is the case study I keep coming back to because I've been there. I've seen what Arthur Blank has built away from football — the community investment, the infrastructure, the genuine commitment to that city. It's real. And then you watch the football decisions and it's like a completely different organization makes them.
Raheem Morris had something going. They fired him anyway. Now they've brought in Kevin Stefanski — a two-time head coach who, as Jabari pointed out, might have been better served going back to coordinator, reconnecting with what made him effective, and coming back in a few years with something to prove again. Instead he's walking into a situation where the organizational track record is: we will move on from you faster than you can build anything.
And the Matt Ryan piece. Jabari said it first and I'll say it again: I don't understand it. Not because Ryan wasn't a great quarterback — he was. Not because he doesn't care about that franchise — he clearly does. But caring about a franchise and being equipped to make roster decisions for it are two different things. You can't give someone a front office job because of what they did on the field, the same way you can't give someone a starting quarterback job because of what they did in a front office. The work doesn't transfer like that.
I played for a lot of different organizations. The ones that confused loyalty with competence — that brought people in because of what they'd meant to the franchise rather than what they could do for it next — paid for that confusion in years, not months.
PULL QUOTE: "If you don't have stability, starting with the number one person who's running your operation in the head coach, it doesn't make a difference." — Jabari Young
The Raiders problem is different, and worse
Las Vegas is a different conversation entirely, and not because of the obvious stuff. Jabari's concern about the city — the environment, the distractions, the headline risk of managing fifty men in the middle of Sin City — is real. But I think the deeper problem is structural.
Tom Brady is an ownership stakeholder now. I have enormous respect for what he accomplished as a player, and I think he's been genuinely good in the booth — better than a lot of people gave him credit for initially. But there's a difference between being a great analyst and being a great decision-maker for a football organization. Nobody knows yet which one Brady is, because he hasn't had the reps. And when you're a head coach walking into that situation, you're not just inheriting a roster problem. You're inheriting an authority question. Who actually runs this thing? Who has final say? If Brady has opinions — and he will always have opinions — where does that leave the head coach?
Pete Carroll coached one year there and they fired him. One year. That's not evaluation. That's performance art.
I said on the show that if I were taking either the Raiders job or Miami, I'd need a 10-year contract. Jabari looked at me like I'd lost my mind. But I meant it. Not because I want the security — because I want the signal. If an owner hands you 10 years, they're telling you something real about their intentions. They're putting their money behind the philosophy of patience. If they won't do that, they're telling you something real too, and you should believe them the first time.
Why the carousel spins faster every year
Here's what I think is actually happening, and neither Jabari nor I said it this cleanly in the conversation: the coaching carousel has become a way for ownership to feel like it's doing something when it doesn't know what to do.
The real problems — roster construction, quarterback development, cap management, draft philosophy — are slow, grinding, multi-year problems. They don't have a face. You can't fire the problem. What you can do is fire the head coach, and at least it looks like action. It looks like accountability. It gives the fan base something to react to. It creates a news cycle.
It doesn't fix anything. It usually makes things worse, because now you've added a transition cost on top of the underlying problems, and whoever comes in next has to spend a year just figuring out what they inherited before they can actually start building.
I think about this in terms of how I look at investments now. The analogy isn't perfect, but it holds: when a portfolio company has a bad quarter, the instinct is to change the leadership team. Sometimes that's right. But a lot of the time what the company actually needs isn't new leadership — it needs the current leadership to have enough runway to execute the strategy they've articulated. The impatient version of accountability — the version that swaps people out before they've had time to prove or disprove anything — destroys the very thing it claims to be protecting.
Stability is not the opposite of accountability. Stability is the environment in which accountability actually works.
What I'd actually do, running one of these franchises
Three things, in order, that I think separate the organizations that use the carousel from the ones the carousel uses:
- Decide what you are before you hire who you want. The Steelers have always known they're a defensive organization with a certain kind of quarterback. That clarity is what allowed them to hold the line for fifty years. Before you write the offer letter for a new head coach, the ownership and front office need to agree on something foundational: what is this team? What does it win with? If you can't answer that question before the hire, you're going to answer it inconsistently every two years when the results disappoint you, and each answer is going to come in the form of a firing. The franchises that have sustained success — Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Kansas City, San Francisco — all have a legible identity. You know what they are. You know how they think they win. That identity is the asset. The coach is the executor of it, not the inventor of it.
- Give your coach at least one full draft cycle before you evaluate. College programs get four years because everyone acknowledges that you need to see a freshman class become a senior class before you really know what a coach is building. The NFL moves faster, but the underlying logic is the same. You cannot evaluate a head coach on a roster he inherited in year one, or a roster still being transitioned in year two. The fair window — the one that actually tells you something — is year three or four, when the players he recruited to his system are the ones playing in it. Every organization that has fired a coach before that window has either gotten lucky with the replacement or paid for the impatience for years. Most have paid.
- Separate the roster problem from the coach problem before you do anything. Pittsburgh's recent struggles were quarterback struggles. That's not a Tomlin problem. That's a front office problem, a cap problem, a scouting problem. Atlanta's struggles have not been a head coach problem — they've gone through enough of them to rule that out as the variable. When results are bad, the discipline is to diagnose honestly before you act. Which part of the system failed? Is it the scheme? The personnel? The culture? The quarterback situation? If the honest answer points somewhere other than the head coach, firing the head coach doesn't solve it. It just resets the clock without fixing the machine.
The best organizations in this league aren't the ones with the most compelling stories about change and reinvention. They're the ones that are boring in a specific way — boring because they've decided who they are, found people who execute that identity, and refused to panic when a single season tells them something they don't want to hear.
That's not glamorous. It's not a news cycle. But it's the difference between an organization and a revolving door.
The carousel keeps spinning because not enough owners understand that.