Coach-hiring season often brings a surprise or two. Usually, the surprise comes in the firing of a coach. This year, the surprise comes from Liam Coen’s clunky exit from Tampa.
If, as it appears, Coen will soon be named head coach of the Jaguars, his departure included more odd twists than a Coen brothers film.
As a general matter, coaches have the absolute right to leave one team as an assistant and join a new team as a head coach. No contract can stop that from happening.
When it comes to coaching, teams do what’s right for them. And the Buccaneers have a history of some eyebrow-raising decisions in the “best interests of the team,” from abruptly firing Jon Gruden and quickly promoting defensive backs coach Raheem Morris in 2009 to going outside the box for Rutgers coach Greg Schiano in 2012 to firing Lovie Smith in 2016 and promoting offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter at a time when other teams were interested in hiring Koetter to the late-March “retirement” of Bruce Arians in 2022 after the unretirement of Tom Brady. Coaches, in turn, can do what’s right for them, too.
There’s still a right way to handle it.
Based on multiple reports and things we’ve separately gathered, the Coen saga went like this.
Coen took an initial interview with the Jaguars at the express encouragement of the Buccaneers. Then, as he was poised to return for a second interview, he agreed to a new contract that would have made him the highest-paid offensive coordinator in the NFL. While perhaps not enforceable, the new deal was based on the understanding that he wouldn’t go to Jacksonville for an in-person, second interview.
When the Jaguars fired G.M. Trent Baalke, everything changed. Instead of signing the new contract, Coen “secretly” went back to Jacksonville without telling the Buccaneers, and folks with the Bucs suddenly couldn’t track him down.
Then there’s this, from Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times: “To be clear . . . Liam Coen contacted head coach Todd Bowles around 5 p.m. Thursday. He said he had been with one of his kids, who had taken ill, at a doctors office. He mentioned the Jaguars situation only briefly, saying he wanted to look back into it.”
Coen, by all appearances, was in reality back in Jacksonville, working on a deal to become head coach of the Jaguars.
Coen’s actions quite possibly flow from the notion that he got the new contract by agreeing not to take a second interview with the Jaguars. Maybe he thought that, if he did, the deal would be off the table. If he then didn’t get the job in Jacksonville, the new deal might have been rescinded.
He still could have signed it and then re-engaged with the Jaguars. Again, the Buccaneers couldn’t have kept him from going. But it would have flown in the face of the handshake deal that had gotten him the new contract — even if handshake deals aren’t worth the paper they’re not printed on.
While that outcome would have ruffled feathers in Tampa, his decision to ghost them, and then to offer up an apparently flimsy excuse for doing so, becomes a tougher look.
In the end, he’ll emerge with a contract that will pay him, we’re told, in the neighborhood of $12 million per year. But the NFL is a small shop, with only 32 distinct branches. Over the course of a career, most coaches go, in time, from team to team to team. Unless Coen becomes the long-term answer with a team that changes coaches more often than cars need new tires, the way he’s leaving Tampa could become a complication at some point down the line.
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