In with the old: NFL coaching carousel revisited the value of experience this season

At the NFL’s annual meeting in Arizona, Mike McCarthy and Todd Monken sat at nearby circular tables in the McArthur Ballroom at the Arizona Biltmore. The room is named for Albert Chase McArthur, who designed the resort more than a century ago. The setting supplied its own joke: Both men missed the hotel groundbreaking, but by NFL hiring standards, they were close.

McCarthy is 62 and beginning his third tour as an NFL head coach, this time with Pittsburgh. Monken was hired by Cleveland days before his 60th birthday and is getting his first opportunity. One is a known quantity. The other spent decades building a resume that kept getting him interviews but never the office.

If another call hadn’t come, McCarthy would have been perfectly content to stay home and be a father. The year away from football gave him family time he valued and refueled his NFL engine. The only question was whether the game still wanted him.

Monken had asked himself a version of the same question three years earlier. He loved calling plays at Georgia, where he helped win two national championships. Money was not the lure; Monken was better paid at Georgia than several NFL coordinators. But he still wanted to know whether he could become an NFL head coach. At 57, he called coaches he trusted and asked whether they enjoyed the job. Their answers convinced him to leave Athens for Baltimore and bet on himself, even when the league seemed to view him as a coordinator for life.

It didn’t take long for Monken to discover how different the top headset fits. Before even reaching his first regular-season game, he named Deshaun Watson the Browns’ starter, absorbed the fury of fans who booed Watson throughout the preseason, and then invited another round of criticism by acknowledging he hadn’t watched Watson’s previous Browns film.

This is the part of the job Monken spent years chasing: not merely choosing the quarterback, but owning the decision, the anger surrounding it and whatever comes next.

The NFL has spent much of the past decade trying to buy tomorrow before anyone else could. NFL owners entered every coaching search with essentially the same request: Find me the next Sean McVay. Preferably someone younger. If he once stood next to McVay in the lunch line, even better. 

Youth became shorthand for innovation. Experience became a polite way of calling someone stale.

Average head-coaching age fell from roughly 53 or 54 a decade ago to 47.7 entering the 2025 season. New hires over the previous decade averaged about 46.5. This year’s class averaged about 47.

The trend did not reverse. What changed was the willingness to look beyond the average and consider men aged 60 or older. This is the first time in the post-merger era that three coaches hired in the same cycle will begin the season at age 60 or older.

Youth had become a credential. Age came with evidence — every mistake, playoff loss and unhappy ending.

That’s what made this record-tying cycle of 10 hires so interesting. It was not necessarily an old-guy takeover, but it left room at the table for gray hair and experience. The Giants hired 63-year-old John Harbaugh. Pittsburgh hired McCarthy. Cleveland gave Monken one of the latest first chances in league history. Four of the 10 hires — Harbaugh, McCarthy, Kevin Stefanski and Robert Saleh — had already been NFL head coaches.

The league showed more flexibility around age than diversity, however. Ten jobs opened, and not one went to a Black coach — the fifth time since the Rooney Rule was adopted that an entire hiring cycle produced no Black head-coaching hires — leaving the league with only three.

Steelers coach Mike McCarthy’s file is thick. He won a Super Bowl in Green Bay, coached in Dallas, and has won 185 games, including the postseason. He has also been fired and was not retained by Dallas after his contract expired. (Mark Konezny / Imagn Images)

What happened the last time 10 jobs opened, in 2022, should have cured owners of believing anyone has solved the hiring process. That class was a disaster. Four years later, eight of the 10 coaches have already been fired; only Kevin O’Connell and Todd Bowles remain. The other eight combined to go 125-199-2.

Nathaniel Hackett and Lovie Smith lasted one season or less. Josh McDaniels made it through 25 games. Matt Eberflus went 14-32. It was not the failure of one archetype. The group included first-timers and retreads, offensive and defensive coaches, young candidates and old ones. It was a failure of certainty. The NFL does not know who will succeed, no matter how confidently a franchise sells a fresh face as the future. 

Stefanski and Saleh are not in the same age bracket as McCarthy, Harbaugh and Monken, but their hires belong in the same argument. Atlanta moved quickly on Stefanski after Cleveland fired him, valuing six years of experience and two Coach of the Year awards more than the ugly final season. Tennessee gave Saleh another chance after his failure with the Jets and a year back as San Francisco’s defensive coordinator. This cycle valued scar tissue, too.

Stefanski arrived in Atlanta and found — what else? — another quarterback dilemma. Michael Penix Jr. missed the entire preseason while recovering from a torn ACL, and Tua Tagovailoa struggled badly enough that Stefanski is carrying an open competition into September.

McCarthy and Harbaugh have enjoyed cleaner beginnings. McCarthy reunited with Aaron Rodgers, his old Super Bowl quarterback, and Harbaugh inherited Jaxson Dart as the Giants’ established young starter and spent August worrying more about protecting him than replacing him. Experience did not spare Stefanski from another quarterback problem. It merely made him uniquely qualified to recognize one.

Most coaches and executives I have spoken with across different sports believe they are better at their jobs when they are older. They have seen more situations, made more mistakes and learned which ones are fatal. They are often calmer, more comfortable delegating and less consumed with proving they are the smartest person in the building. Experience does not eliminate bad decisions. It should improve the process that produces them.

McCarthy’s file is thick. He won a Super Bowl in Green Bay, coached in Dallas and has won 185 games, including the postseason. He has also been fired and was not retained by Dallas after his contract expired. Yet Pittsburgh, one of the league’s most tradition-bound franchises, saw value in the whole record. McCarthy became the Steelers’ first head coach with previous NFL head-coaching experience since 1965. The Steelers had hired each of their previous three coaches in his 30s. This time they chose a coach old enough to know exactly what the job can do to a person and a family.

“I’ve been around the block a few times, and I’m very comfortable in my own skin,” McCarthy said at the Biltmore in March. “This opportunity, the way it came about, I had to come back. If there was ever a no-brainer opportunity in my lifetime, this was it.”

Monken’s case required a different imagination. He was not asking a team to forgive a failed head-coaching stop in the NFL. He was asking an owner to believe that someone nearing 60 could still be a first-time NFL head coach. He became one of the oldest men ever hired for that first full-time chance, in the neighborhood of Vic Fangio and behind only a few outliers such as David Culley and Bruce Arians. 

He had done nearly everything else: college head coach, NFL coordinator, national-championship play caller and architect of productive offenses in Tampa Bay and Baltimore. Harbaugh wanted Monken to follow him to New York. Cleveland offered the chair Monken had been chasing. The Browns were not hiring potential in the usual sense. They were betting that all those years had produced judgment, adaptability and a clearer sense of what the job actually is.

That bet is hardly guaranteed. Age is not wisdom in itself, and a long resume can contain stubbornness as easily as perspective. Plenty of retreads fail because they return as the same coaches who were fired the first time. Experience matters only when a coach is willing to use it — to change, adapt and recognize what he did not know before.

McCarthy and Monken represent opposite ends of the same argument. McCarthy has been around the block and knows exactly why he came back. Monken spent years waiting for someone to believe all those blocks had prepared him for the chair. One is trying to make a third act his best. The other is finally getting an opening night.

At 60, Monken is not trying to prove that an older coach can still succeed. He is trying to prove that readiness does not have an expiration date.