6 NFL coaches on the hot seat for Black Monday

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For 18 teams, the 2026 NFL season begins once Week 18 ends. For a select few, that means leaving losing coaches behind and starting fresh. While there are always a handful of firings across the course of the season — this year that included Tennessee Titans play-caller Brian Callahan and New York Giants former NFL coach of the year Brian Daboll — there's no worse day to be a struggling NFL coach than the day after the season is finished.

Black Monday is the scourge of underperforming playbook architects. It will claim a handful of careers to ring in the new year January 5, opening the door to coaching interviews and new hires that will energize fan bases across the world — though whether that's a good thing or bad thing will hinge heavily on the candidate. So who could be the recipient of bad headlines the first day after the 2025 NFL regular season ends?

6. Aaron Glenn, New York Jets

Glenn should be at the top of this list, but New York's reported insistence it will keep him suggests he's safe barring an absolute disaster in Week 18. We cannot rule this out, because absolute disaster has been a hallmark of Glenn's first season as an NFL head coach.

He started his tenure with seven straight losses. Somehow, the four-game losing streak in which he's currently mired feels worse; his Jets have been outscored by an average margin of just under 27 points per game — and that includes showdowns with sub-.500 teams like the Dolphins and New Orleans Saints. Injuries and trades have depleted both sides of the ball, but you'd be hard pressed to find anything New York does well in 2025.

Justin Fields, Glenn's flier QB addition, has been either injured or terrible this fall. Garrett Wilson's injury turned the receiving corps into a host of replacement-caliber players. None of the team's three starting wideouts in Week 17 began their season on the Jets' active roster. Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams were traded in-season. Qwan'tez Stiggers, Dean Clark and Jarvis Brownlee have all made multiple starts in the secondary — a group that has yet to record an interception this fall.

Keeping Glenn suggests owner Woody Johnson is chalking a brutal 2025 up to an undermanned depth chart and some bad personnel decisions. Still, it's tough to look at the Jets defense and its massive regression from Robert Saleh's peak and think Glenn has the ability to map out a cogent plan as the season wears on and the world changes around him.

He's set to get another try with multiple first round draft picks and more than $90 million in salary cap room for 2026. Failing there could set the Jets up for another generation of regret.

5. Kevin Stefanski, Cleveland Browns

Stefanski is Cleveland's Sisyphus, only if management stepped in to give him a larger, heavier boulder after he'd cleared the halfway point of his mountain. The coach who guided Baker Mayfield to the franchise's first playoff win since 1994 and won 11 games by making Joe Flacco the NFL comeback player of the year (in just six games) has been constantly hamstrung by his franchise's inability to find a viable quarterback.

Cleveland traded three first round picks before handing Deshaun Watson a fully guaranteed $230 million despite more than 20 accusations of sexual misconduct and what the NFL itself described as "predatory behavior" dating to his time in Houston. For the privilege of blocking the team's most obvious pathways to roster improvement, Watson has played 19 games in four seasons and been the NFL's 48th-best quarterback when on the field.

His absence has cleared the way for the Browns to improve from 32nd in scoring offense last season to... 31st. The offensive line, once a strength, has devolved into one of the league's worst units. Bright spots remain thanks to Quinshon Judkins and Harold Fannin Jr., but there may not be a coach alive or dead who could coax this team to a respectable record.

After that playoff win in his debut, Stefanski has had a losing record in four of the last five seasons. He deserves better. Cleveland firing him could clear him up to actually receive it. Expecting the Browns to do better with his replacement, however, is a tough ask.

4. Raheem Morris, Atlanta Falcons

Morris got the Atlanta job over Bill Belichick. While he's been better (and less of a circus) than the nine-time Super Bowl winner has at North Carolina, he hasn't inspired confidence. Somehow, remarkably, Morris found a way to beat the Buffalo Bills but lose to the New York Jets — threading a needle that completes the world's tackiest jacket.

Quarterback play has been an issue, with Michael Penix Jr.'s injury giving way to a diminished Kirk Cousins and spurts of inspiring play cropping up like islands in a sea of mediocrity. Atlanta has a galaxy of high level skill players, but thanks to injury and ineffectiveness ranks only 22nd in expected points added (EPA) per play this fall. Pouring draft capital into the pass rush has improved the defense, but that unit has gone from 20th in EPA allowed to... 19th.

Outside help will be difficult to find. Releasing or trading Cousins would shave up to $35 million from the team's 2026 salary cap — useful, considering it's already over the estimated spending limit next fall — but may not be practical with Penix recovering from his third ACL tear. The team's first round pick is owed to the Los Angeles Rams as a result of the trade that made James Pearce a Falcon (he was drafted with the 26th overall selection. Atlanta's pick is shaping up to land in or around the top 10. It's not ideal!).

That could give Morris one more chance to clean up the mess he's maintained for the past two seasons. If he can fix the defense and lean on guys like Drake London and Bijan Robinson on offense, it could be enough to rise to the top of the NFC South's shallow pool. The help will have to mostly come from within the franchise. With a still-young core, the opportunity for a turnaround will persist. So far, Morris has proven incapable of seizing it.

3. Shane Steichen, Indianapolis Colts

How much of the Colts' injury-related crashout will be heaped at the feet of Steichen and general manager Chris Ballard? Indianapolis was once 7-1. Now it's at risk of finishing 2025 with a losing record.

Steichen and Ballard came into the year on the hot seat, emerged as potential award winners over the first half of the season and then shrank from the spotlight as things went sour. Injuries to Daniel Jones and Anthony Richardson didn't help, but that doesn't explain a defense that ranked 10th in expected points added (EPA) per play allowed in the first half of the season slid to 23rd in the second half. Sure, a rise of three-and-outs from an offense eventually commandeered by a 44-year-old Philip Rivers didn't help. Even so, that's a dramatic backslide for a team that held three opponents to 14 points or fewer through Week 8 and has held a single opponent to fewer than 20 points in the nine weeks since.

The Colts are heading into their first full offseason without former owner Jim Irsay at the helm in four decades. Current principal owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon and her sisters have been raised in a football world and understand the big swings he took to make Indianapolis great for a long stretch (and bad-to-mediocre for a longer one). Would they opt for a clean break to start fresh this January? Or did Jones' revival and subsequent injury create enough plausible deniability to run it back next fall?

2. Jonathan Gannon, Arizona Cardinals

Arizona Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon looks onto the field during a NFL game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Arizona Cardinals, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2025, at Paycor Stadium in downtown Cincinnati.

Injury luck has been unkind to Gannon, certainly. But it doesn't excuse the fact he's won 30 percent of his games in Arizona over nearly three full seasons. With Kyler Murray shut down for the season (officially due to a foot injury, but unofficially because he was uninspiring and lacked the efficiency and consistency of, big sigh, Jacoby Brissett), the Cardinals have lost eight straight games. Despite a 3-13 record, they may not wind up with a top-three draft pick from it thanks to the league's hardest strength of schedule.

Even without a top-two pick in a two-quarterback draft (we'll see how the spring workouts shake out for Ty Simpson et al), we may have seen the end of the Murray era in Arizona. The former first overall pick has played more than 11 games only once in his last four seasons. His 0.084 EPA per dropback ranks 23rd among 53 quarterbacks to play at least 500 snaps in that stretch, which isn't terrible but also hasn't resulted in success. The Cardinals haven't had a winning season since 2021.

Trading away Murray would create more than $35 million in salary cap savings and a clean slate for a team unable to get out of its own way. Would Arizona trust a new franchise quarterback to the head coach who engineered a top-three offense in Philadelphia to get the job, then built the league's 17th-best offense in the three years that followed? While Gannon coaxed another forgettably solid year out of Brissett, his lack of wins suggests the ceiling for another veteran QB wouldn't be much higher in 2026.

1. Mike McDaniel, Miami Dolphins

McDaniel has been able to make more from less, turning around a team that looked absolutely cooked to start the season (1-6) en route to a .500-ish record. That's happened without Tyreek Hill in the lineup and followed the benching of Tua Tagovailoa. Rookie seventh round pick Quinn Ewers may not be the team's future, but McDaniel installed an offense around him that allowed him to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Week 17 to further dim the Bucs' Super Bowl hopes.

That's all encouraging. It does not change the fact McDaniel failed to make Tagovailoa more than a fantasy football star, an 0-2 playoff record or a 9-14 record in December or later. The unconventional head coach has done a great job adding a slick layer of sheen atop his franchise that begins to flake apart under modest scrutiny. He's had one season with a top 20 scoring defense. He hasn't cracked the top 20 in scoring offense either of the last two years.

Like Gannon above, McDaniel's franchise is on the verge of swapping out a once-touted, highly paid and since-benched quarterback in service of a fresh start. But Tagovailoa's contract, injury history and the smoldering crater his 2025 play created makes him considerably more difficult to trade and there's nearly $100 million worth of dead salary attached to the $212 million extension he signed in (deep exhale) 2024. Miami isn't bad enough to land a top prospect on an inexpensive salary in the draft. Its best option may be hoping for a Sam Darnold or Baker Mayfield-type revival from a journeyman veteran.

That could benefit McDaniel, who supercharged Tagovailoa just long enough to be an albatross around the team's neck and just won a game with a seventh round rookie behind center. McDaniel's place in Kyle Shanahan's coaching tree suggests a special appreciation for getting the most out of flawed passers. But four seasons of underwhelming returns and no playoff success to speak of may shuffle him back to the coordinator ranks for a few years instead.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: 6 NFL coaches on the hot seat for Black Monday

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