Senior Bowl week, and 2025, is here for 30 of the NFL teams. The other two are bound for New Orleans. And we’re covering it all here in the Tuesday Notes …
• The Washington Commanders, after a disappointing end to the season on Sunday, have already scored their first win of 2025—keeping Kliff Kingsbury on Dan Quinn’s staff for another year.
And Quinn and GM Adam Peters deserve a ton of credit here for creating the sort of program that people don’t want to leave. My understanding is Kingsbury’s love for coaching, after a tough finish in Arizona and a year back in college ball, was rekindled in a very big way in Washington this year. He gets to work with the quarterback there, and call plays, and just focus on coaching football in a place where the energy is always high.
To all that, I’d say good for the 45-year-old coordinator, valuing what he has over where his next shot at being a head coach might come.
The other big factor here, as I see it, is Kingsbury’s affection for Jayden Daniels. From the start, Kingsbury was smitten with his quarterback in D.C.—and it was more than just what type of player he is. It was also what kind of person he is. Which, as I see it, sets the two of them up for quite the encore to Daniels’s historic rookie year.
• Rumors have circulated for a couple of weeks now that Tony Boselli serving as a consultant to Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan on the team’s coaching search would be a precursor to the Hall of Famer taking on a prominent role in the organization.
At Monday’s press conference introducing Liam Coen, Khan confirmed as much.
“We’re going to have a position [for Boselli],” Khan said. “We’re checking with the league, what the rules are, what we have to follow, and then we’ll take it from there.”
The model here, I’d think, would be the role Chris Spielman serves in Detroit, in helping ownership set the table for Dan Campbell, Brad Holmes and Mike Disner to build and run the team.
• Want to know how Patrick Mahomes’s game-clinching throw to Samaje Perine came to be on Sunday? Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy took me through it—and how and why the team felt so comfortable going for the win there, rather than just running the ball into the line and bleeding more clock. It turns out, the plan for it was far from spur of the moment.
“One of the things that I think we do a really good job of communicating with everybody together on is talking through situational football,” Nagy said. “Pat and the quarterbacks, coach Reid talk through situations. Then, we make a menu. As we go through those plays throughout the game, we talk in-between series, O.K. where are we at? Once we knew the game was getting down to that point, we knew we'd need a third-down call, we talked about it prior to the series, so that when we get into that moment, it's Boom.
“It's Click—you know what to go to right away. There's full conviction with it. [Mahomes is] the guy, so we want to have a menu of plays off of how they're playing. We want to give him a chance to say, Let's go with this. We talk through that. We give him the menu, give him some options, feel it out. We want to make sure he feels good about what we're calling.”
And in this case, as explained in the MMQB on Monday, they felt like they’d get man coverage, and Mahomes felt like this particular man-beating call—which would send three receivers lined up on the left side of the formation over to the right, creating traffic that made it impossible for the linebacker in coverage, Terrel Bernard, to get to Perine in the flat—would be right. Turns out, they were right to think that.
• Want another example of smart roster-building in Philadelphia? It was pretty sharp of the Eagles to stock up on offensive linemen with position flexibility.
The late Cam Jurgens injury would’ve caught a lot of other teams off-guard—losing your center that close to kickoff is obviously not good, considering everything that goes into playing that position. But three-time Pro Bowl guard Landon Dickerson played center for a year and a half at Alabama after starring at guard before that for both the Tide and Florida State. So sliding over a spot in a pinch wasn’t a big deal for him.
So what could’ve been a killer for another team was still a problem for Philly, but a manageable one.
• I like the hire of Matt Eberflus to support new Dallas Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer. It not only adds a superior defensive coach to run that side of the ball, but also gives the new man in charge a resource, and sounding board, in a guy who’s walked in those shoes.
That said, there is a projection in the relationship part of the equation, and this is a rake that Jerry Jones has stepped on before in filling out a coaching staff.
Jones has habitually made head-coaching hires with the idea that he can take care of one side of the ball with that hire, while bringing in a strong voice to captain the other side of the ball. On paper, these things oftentimes look good. But the chemistry part of the equation can be an issue when you, more or less, subcontract out the side of the ball opposite the head coach’s area of expertise. So that is something to watch.
That said, Schottenheimer’s got a well-earned rep as a good guy who’s easy to work with, which should help he and Eberflus work out a collective vision for the team.
• After the New England Patriots hired Mike Vrabel a couple of weeks ago, Browns coach Kevin Stefanski described Vrabel’s 2024 role in Cleveland to me, via text, as being a “human resource.”
The implication was he helped in every which way. He helped Tommy Rees with the tight ends, Andrew Berry in personnel, Bubba Ventrone (his former teammate) with the special teams and Stefanski himself with team and game management. He was integral in developing young tight ends and offensive linemen. He had a rapport with defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz, too, since Schwartz worked for him in Tennessee.
That’s why I think it’s interesting seeing the makeup of his staff in New England, with a lot of experience baked in—for starters, Josh McDaniels and Doug Marrone have been head coaches for multiple NFL teams, Thomas Brown was an interim head coach and Terrell Williams was thrust into a head-coaching cameo in Tennessee by Vrabel himself. So there are going to be a lot of ideas there, but also a head coach who’s gained experience and knowhow in each phase of the game, both as a player and coach.
How it comes together will be interesting—and expect new VP of football operations and strategy John Streicher to be a big part of synthesizing the whole thing into a singular vision.
• While we’re there, one thank you that Robert Kraft did give Bill Belichick on his way out the door was ensuring that Belichick’s sons, Stephen and Brian, would have an opportunity to stay on Jerod Mayo’s first staff in 2024. Ultimately, Brian accepted an offer from Mayo, while Stephen chose to go to the University of Washington as defensive coordinator instead. A year later, Brian Belichick, who had family reasons for staying in New England, is out too.
It's fair to note, along those lines, that things between Bill Belichick and the Krafts have gotten worse, not better, over the past year. Maybe time will heal the wounds there. But it’s certainly not going in that direction right now.
• Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis said Monday, in describing the role that Tom Brady will have in the organization, that he believes the future Hall of Famer will create stability that the team has lacked since losing Jon Gruden, adding, “His head was chopped off. We were put in a really bad position as an organization.”
That’s really the first time we’ve heard Davis address the Gruden email situation in such a manner—and it reflects how the Raiders felt about that going the way it did (with their interests taking a backseat to the war waged between Dan Snyder and the league office).
It’s also a public declaration of Brady’s influence there.
• Los Angeles Rams pass-game coordinator Nick Caley is a hot name on the market right now. He’s near the top of the New York Jets’ OC list, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers interviewed him for their OC job on Monday night, and the Houston Texans plan to have him in Thursday.
I do know Caley has really valued his experience in L.A., and he’s become one of Sean McVay’s most trusted assistants. But the opportunity may be too much to pass up this time around.
• More and more, I’ve heard there are two prospects in this year’s draft class seen as being above the rest—Penn State edge rusher Abdul Carter and Colorado Heisman winner Travis Hunter. There’s a lot of time left, of course, but the feeling I’ve gotten is, for now, the top tier is those two, with a dropoff thereafter.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Commanders’ Rebuilt Culture Helped Keep Kliff Kingsbury in D.C..
