The coaching business answers back

Podcast · transcript

The Triple Option

Posted 6:00 a.m. ET Monday, September 21. The segment runs a little over nine minutes and Rob Stone asks four questions in it.

Meyer has been off a sideline since December 2021. Trimmed at both ends, not in the middle.

STONE: You watched it.

MEYER: I watched it. First half live, then I got up Monday and went back through it with a pen. And listen, I’ve never met him. Not once. Everybody I’ve talked to who’s been around him says he’s terrific. Bright, respectful, looks you in the eye.

STONE: Okay.

MEYER: And that was a whipping. If you want to tell me the other team was bad, fine, the other team was bad, you still have to go take it.

STONE: So what’s the—

MEYER: But that’s not the job. Rob. That is not the job. That’s three and a half hours. The job is the other hundred and sixty-four, and nothing in this man’s life has put him near the other hundred and sixty-four. It’s a Wednesday. Third Wednesday in November, your starter has a new baby and hasn’t slept in four days and your backup thinks he should be playing and happens to be right. And you walk in at seven-fifteen and you set the standard. Not talk about it. Set it.

MEYER: In any organization it’s ten, eighty, ten. Ten percent are elite. Elite. You don’t coach those guys, you get out of their way. Eighty go wherever the wind is going that morning. Ten are killing you and half of them don’t know it. Your whole job is that bottom ten, because the eighty are standing there watching you do it.

STONE: And you’re saying he can’t.

MEYER: I’m saying he’s never done it. Not one time. Not with a professional team, not with a high school team, not with fourteen-year-olds in July. He has never stood up in a room full of professionals and told one of them he isn’t good enough anymore, and then coached the other fifty-two on Thursday like it never happened. That’s the job.

STONE: You’ve sat in an NFL building.

MEYER: I’ve been in a couple. Let me tell you a story. 2006 — no. 2005. Fall camp. We had a strength coach at Florida, and that man came into my office in August and told me my two best players were finished. Finished. He’d been in there at six in the morning with them for three weeks and I had not, and I hated every word of it, and he sat down and made me listen. And he was right. And where I’m going with — the point is he’d been in a building eleven years before anybody let him talk to a head coach that way. Eleven years of getting there first.

STONE: What did you make of the second quarter?

MEYER: Outstanding. They quit playing man, they put people over the top of everything, and then they made him throw underneath it for two hours, and he did. That is elite in-game work. I’d love to know the name of the man who did that, and I’ll bet you anything he’s fifty-some years old and has had his family in five states and you have never heard of him. Somebody in Cleveland is a heck of a football coach.

STONE: Is any of this about him, though? Personally.

MEYER: It’s not — okay. Some of it is. I’ll be honest with you, some of it is, and I don’t love that about myself. At some point a man has to look at what’s in front of him and say, do I belong in this chair. He didn’t say it. He took it. He took both of them. There are four hundred men in this country tonight who’d have done that job for nothing, who paid for the right to, who moved their kids in the middle of a school year twice, and not one of them got a call.

STONE: Do you want to see him do well?

MEYER: Sure. Of course. That city deserves a football team and I hope they get one. But this is not how it works. It just isn’t.

STONE: We’ll take a break.

Television · transcript

NFL Live, ESPN

Monday, September 21. Louis Riddick, asked whether Sunday changed anything for him. The answer ran ninety seconds longer than the desk had left.

RIDDICK: Let me start where I have to start, which is that I have nothing to say against this young man. Nothing. Every time somebody puts a microphone in front of him he answers the question, he doesn’t hide behind anything, he takes the hits that are his. That counts for something and I’m not going to sit here and act like it doesn’t.

RIDDICK: Now. Let me walk you through Sunday the way it happened in that stadium, because I have stood in that spot. Not that one. One like it. You’re down fourteen, your boundary corner has been beaten twice, and there is a decision to be made in ninety seconds on a headset. That decision does not come from one man. It comes from a defensive coordinator and a defensive backs coach. Mike Rutenberg. Brandon Lynch. They change the shell, they disguise it, they make Baker Mayfield hold that football and then they take it from him. Beautiful work.

RIDDICK: So when somebody tells me, look at the adjustment, look what the head coach did — I don’t know what the head coach did. Neither do you. Nobody who wasn’t on a headset in Tampa knows. A coverage change out of a coordinator is a coverage change out of a coordinator. And it’s two games. Two. Against a Jacksonville team that has not won and a Tampa team that has not won. I have been on staffs that started 2-0 and staffs that started 0-2, and from the inside those two buildings looked the same to me in September.

RIDDICK: What I can’t get around is not him. It’s the room he was hired in. That ownership group brought in men who had spent twenty-five years getting ready for forty minutes. I have had that forty minutes. I’ve had it four times. You sit in a hotel conference room with a binder you started in March, they hire somebody else, and Monday you start the binder again. In Cleveland they ran the whole search and did not hire one person who was in it. They hired a man who was in that building that day to talk about somebody else’s job.

RIDDICK: That’s a message. It isn’t to me. I’m fine, I’ve got a good job and I like it. It’s to the kid in Kansas City tonight at one in the morning cutting third-down tape for a position coach who might remember his name in four years, because that is what he was told the door was. You just told him it doesn’t matter that he’s in there. So, no. Sunday didn’t move me. I don’t know what would.

Podcast · transcript

The Second Contract

Recorded live Monday afternoon. Jamar Whittle played nine seasons at safety, Tank Pellerin eight at defensive tackle for four clubs. Vic produces and is on mic.

WHITTLE: I’m not doing this one today.

PELLERIN: You are, though. We got eleven hundred people in here already and they didn’t come for the Chargers.

WHITTLE: (laughs) Alright. Fifty-four to fourteen.

PELLERIN: Fifty-four. And forty the week before. Forty!

WHITTLE: Let me say mine first, because you been sitting on this since yesterday, I can hear you sitting on it. My thing is not the football. The football is the football, they good right now, we’ll see. My thing is nobody in this conversation is talking about the men in that locker room. I played nine years. Nine. And every man who ever coached me, whatever else he was, he had been in a building. Some of them never played a down, I don’t care about that, that has never been it. My position coach in year four never played past high school and he is the best coach I ever had. But that man was in the league sixteen years before he stood in front of me.

PELLERIN: Sixteen.

WHITTLE: So when people go, oh, he never played — that’s not the argument, and it makes us sound stupid. The argument is he has never been in a room on the day they cut somebody. He’s about to walk up on a grown man with two kids in school in Ohio and tell him it’s over, and that man going to look at him and think, who are you.

PELLERIN: See, and that’s — okay. I been on one thing since yesterday. Cut day, 2019. I’m on my fourth team. Fourth. And I’m in the training room at like six-thirty in the morning because I did not want to be in that locker room when they came around, and my line coach found me in there. Found me. At six-thirty. He sat on the table across from me and ain’t said nothing for a minute, then he told me, then he sat there a while after. That man had his family in Jacksonville and he was living in Cincinnati and he had been doing it that way six years. And I hugged him. I’m not going to lie on my own show, I hugged that man. He had earned the right to be the one who said it to me.

WHITTLE: That’s it right there.

PELLERIN: And it ain’t about him neither, he seem like a nice—

WHITTLE: He seem great.

PELLERIN: My son watch him! My son sent me a video in like 2023, this man breaking down some receiver for twenty-two minutes, and I said who is this, and he said that’s Nick, like I’m supposed to know. That’s Nick. And now he running the Browns.

WHITTLE: (laughs) That’s Nick.

VIC: Sixty thousand subscribers.

PELLERIN: Had.

WHITTLE: Vic. Nobody asked you nothing.

WHITTLE: But nah, where I’m at is this, and I’ma be straight about it. They 2-0 and both them teams ain’t won a game yet. Tampa done gave up eighty-six already. Eighty-six! Worst defense in football and their head coach calling it himself. Baker threw four picks in an afternoon. So Cleveland ain’t beat nobody yet.

PELLERIN: They ain’t beat nobody yet.

WHITTLE: They did beat them bad, though. I’ma give them that. And that little receiver—

PELLERIN: Concepcion.

WHITTLE: He nice.

PELLERIN: He real nice, and the big one going up over people.

WHITTLE: Okay. And I’m still telling you the first time it get hard in that building, and it’s going to get hard, that room going to look up front and see a man who has never had one hard day in this league, and they going to know it. That’s just how a locker room work.

PELLERIN: And they going to be right.

WHITTLE: And they going to be right.

PELLERIN: Comments finna say we hating.

WHITTLE: They finna say we hating. I ain’t hating. I hope the boy do great, I mean that.

PELLERIN: You not going to like it if he do.

WHITTLE: (laughs) I’m not going to like it! I’m going to hate it. I’m going to hate every minute of it. Because then everything I—

PELLERIN: Nah. Don’t say that.

WHITTLE: I’m not saying it. Vic, cut that. Leave it, I don’t care. Chargers.

Column

The Monday File

Bill Kerrigan covered the NFL for three newspapers and a network site from 1995 to 2024, and has written this newsletter twice a week since.

What Cleveland said to the business, without saying it Bill Kerrigan · Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · Free post

In January the Cleveland Browns ran a head-coaching search. They hired a firm. They flew people in. They asked a group of men to spend a week of their lives preparing for forty minutes, and most of those men had spent the previous twenty-five years preparing for it in the larger sense.

Then they gave the job to somebody who had applied to grade other teams’ college players for them.

That is not a scandal. It may turn out to be defensible. It is also the loudest thing an ownership group has said to the coaching business in my working life, and it did not require saying out loud.

A staff is a queue. You take a quality-control job in your twenties, you cut tape past midnight, you make the coffee, you drive the visiting scouts to the airport. If you are good and lucky you have a room of your own at 35 and you coordinate something at 42, and by then your family has been in six towns, one of your children has attended four high schools, and you have been fired twice for things that were not your doing. Most people in that queue never get out of it. What was understood is that there was no other way in.

The Greysons broke no rule. There is no rule. They looked at a queue that exists to manufacture head coaches, concluded it had not manufactured one they wanted, and went around it. Owners may do that. The men in the queue have no standing to object and no way to say any of this with their names on it, which is why you have read very little of it.

Now the football, briefly, because it is being made to answer a question it cannot answer. In the first game the opponent stopped competing before halftime, which its own beat writers reported at the time. In the second the opponent leads the league in points allowed and its head coach declined to hire anybody to run that defense. Jacksonville is 0-2. Tampa Bay is 0-2. Mayfield threw four interceptions and is tied for the league lead.

None of that is evidence about a head coach, and none of it would be evidence if his name were Belichick. Cleveland changed a coverage in the second quarter and Tampa Bay did not score again. That was fine work by somebody, and the number of people outside that building who can tell you whose work it was is zero.

He is 28. He holds both jobs. There is no mechanism by which either one comes off him, and he cannot be fired for being unqualified, because he was hired that way.

A man I have known since 1999 was let go in January because a quarterback he did not choose could not play. He has not been interviewed for anything since. He watched Sunday’s game. He sent me one line about it that night. Then he asked me to keep it out of this, and I have.

The Monday File · Tuesday and Friday · Reply-all is off and I read everything anyway.

Reported · anonymous

‘It was well coached. I hate that I have to say that.’

Danny Ocampo, Yahoo Sports · Tuesday, September 22

I sent two questions to eleven NFL assistant coaches on Sunday night and Monday: whether Tampa changed their view of the Cleveland head coach, and whether they would take his job if it were offered tomorrow. Four answered for publication without their names. Three declined, one in a single word. One asked what the story was and stopped replying. One wrote back at 12:40 a.m. and an hour later asked that the message be disregarded. Two have not answered.

Secondary coach, AFC club · seventh NFL season

The zone pressure stuff after the first quarter was good. They gave him one picture before the snap and played a different one, over and over, and he never got comfortable again. It was well coached. I’ve watched it three times. I hate that I have to say that.

It does not move me one inch on anything else, and I’d appreciate you printing both parts.

Offensive assistant, NFC club · eleventh NFL season

I’d take it. Tomorrow. Anybody who tells you they wouldn’t is lying to you and you can print that too.

The install is real. I’ve had two guys tell me the teach over there is the cleanest they’ve been around, and one of them does not say things like that about anybody. I still don’t think it works.

Defensive assistant, NFC club · sixteenth NFL season

No.

The second question isn’t a real question. Nobody is offering me anything.

A fourth coach answered at 1:04 a.m. on Monday and gave permission for the message to be used as sent.

Mon 1:04 a.m.

Offensive line coach, sixteen seasons, five clubs: im not mad at the kid im mad that i believed what i believed for twenty years. thats probably a me problem. use it dont use my name

He wrote again Monday afternoon, asked whether he wanted to add anything, and this is the whole of it:

The same coach, Monday afternoon

You want the honest one. Every owner in this league watched Sunday. They did not watch the football. They watched one man do two jobs and win by forty, and they watched what that costs.

There are hundreds of us who have spent our lives building toward a job that could be worth half of what it was worth in January. We have no union. There is nobody to bring it to. My wife asked me Sunday night if I was okay and I told her I was.

Notebook

What the building says about it, which is nothing

Zac Jackson, The Athletic · Tuesday, September 22

BEREA, Ohio — The building this argument is about is the one place nobody has asked. Most of the men on Nick Mansour’s staff were working in this sport before he had any interest in it, and several are on their fourth or fifth organization. None of them is going to engage with any of it, and nobody has told them not to.

Travis Switzer coordinated a run game in Baltimore and took a coordinator title here knowing the head coach would call the offense. Mike Rutenberg spent two decades in NFL buildings before anyone made him a coordinator, and he had reasons to leave in February that he has never discussed. George Warhop has coached offensive linemen since the nineties, and Tytus Howard has twice named him, on the record, as the best coach he has played for. Nobody in that group has said a word about any of this since February.

Dom Capers is the senior defensive assistant. He is 75. He was the first head coach of the Carolina Panthers and the first head coach of the Houston Texans, he built both of those out of an expansion draft, and the defense he ran in Green Bay won a Super Bowl. He has not done an interview since he was hired here. He was asked for one this week, through the club, and the answer came back the same day and it was no.

He has been coaching in this league since before his head coach was born. He has not missed a practice.

Sunday: Carolina at Cleveland. Thursday, October 1: Pittsburgh at Cleveland.