Predicting the future in the NFL is often an exercise in futility ... or maybe hilarity.
For every forecast that pans out -- the Chiefs were pretty smart favorites going into the 2023 season -- there are plenty that look less prescient than preposterous.
Remember how the Bengals were supposed to vie for Super Bowl LVIII ... until quarterback Joe Burrow missed the second half of the season with a wrist injury? (They ended up missing the playoffs instead.) Or how elite the Eagles looked last midseason ... until they collapsed to lose six of their last seven games, including a lopsided wild-card defeat to the Bucs?
This league has a way of confounding those who peer into the crystal ball. But still, that doesn't mean we can't pick up on patterns that tend to be correlated with teams' successes and failures.
To that end, we examined the things that might predict how favorable a situation each new NFL head coach is walking into based on variables including the team's quality last season; its roster age on offense, defense and special teams; the age and track record of its quarterback (based on a weighted average of his approximate value over the past three seasons) and more.
For all seven coaches taking over a new team -- Raheem Morris (Falcons), Dave Canales (Panthers), Jim Harbaugh (Chargers), Jerod Mayo (Patriots), Mike Macdonald (Seahawks), Brian Callahan (Titans) and Dan Quinn (Commanders) -- each factor was plugged into a statistical model that looks at expected wins over the next five seasons.
Note that we didn't include Antonio Pierce of the Raiders because the historical data was based on teams with coaches who hadn't coached the team at all the previous season. Though Pierce still had to formally interview for the permanent job, he coached more games for the 2023 Raiders with the interim tag (going 5-4) than Josh McDaniels did to start the season (he went 3-5).
Because each new coach will exert his own influence on the franchise going forward, think of these rankings less as forecasts and more as a quantification of what these hires have to work with going forward. Everything that happens from there, good or bad, will be determined by how much they make of the situation they were handed.
Let's run down each of those from most to least favorable, starting with the new youngest coach in the NFL.
1. Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks
Expected 5-year wins: 41.8
Starting QB: Geno Smith (11.9 weighted AV per season; age 34)
2023 Elo: 18th | Offense: 17th | Defense: 25th
2023 average age: 26.9 (18th youngest)
Key stat: Seattle ended the 2023 season with the highest Elo rating by far (1499) of any team that changed coaches.
This isn't earth-shattering insight, but the most important statistical factor for predicting a team's future success is its current quality -- and no team with a new coach finished 2023 in better shape than the Seahawks, who missed the playoffs on a tiebreaker. That bodes well for Macdonald, who will also begin his tenure with an established, effective quarterback in Smith, who helped lead the highest-scoring offense (21.4 points per game) of any team with a new coach.
While Smith is getting a little long in the tooth -- he turns 34 on Oct. 10 -- the age of the Seahawks' overall roster is around league average, with an offense that was actually younger than the NFL norm. Macdonald eventually must sort out the transition from Smith to a longer-term future QB, but he inherits from Pete Carroll a team primed to be competitive right away.
2. Jim Harbaugh, Los Angeles Chargers
Expected 5-year wins: 40.4
Starting QB: Justin Herbert (12.6 weighted AV per season; age 26)
2023 Elo: 26th | Offense: 21st | Defense: 24th
2023 average age: 26.7 (16th youngest)
Key stat: Los Angeles was tied with Carolina for the biggest negative differential (minus-2.4 wins) between its actual record and what we would expect from its point differential.
The Chargers would be No. 1 on this list if they had finished the 2023 season better than 26th in Elo -- though that finish comes with an asterisk considering that Herbert missed the final four games with a broken finger. That's why L.A. has the highest upside of any team that changed coaches, especially given Harbaugh's track record in both college and the pros.
When healthy, Herbert has shown he can be one of the best quarterbacks in the league, and he's 26 years old. He lost top target Keenan Allen to the Bears, but Herbert will provide an intriguing base for Harbaugh, who usually had above-average offenses during his previous tenure with the San Francisco 49ers, to rebuild the offense. And after another year of "Chargering" -- see the key stat above -- we would expect a normal franchise to show sizable improvement through simply having better luck. Since 1970, the average team that underperformed its point-differential-predicted record by roughly the same amount as the 2023 Chargers improved by nearly three wins per 17 games the next season.
3. Raheem Morris, Atlanta Falcons
Expected 5-year wins: 40.1
Starting QB: Kirk Cousins (9.4 weighted AV per season; age 36)
2023 Elo: 28th | Offense: 26th | Defense: 18th
2023 average age: 26.7 (14th youngest)
Key stat: Atlanta had the fifth-youngest average offensive age (25.5) of any team last season.
Unlike the Chargers, the Falcons were probably worse than the 7-10 mark they produced last season under Arthur Smith. The Falcons finished 28th in the Elo rankings after losses in four of their last five games against a string of mediocre opponents.
That tempers some of our expectations for Morris, though there are reasons to think Atlanta has upside going forward. The Falcons' young offense was led by the league's co-youngest 900-plus-yard rusher (Bijan Robinson, 21) and second-youngest 900-plus-yard wide receiver (Drake London, 22). Cousins will drag that average age upward for as long as he is the starting QB, but he is also an established veteran with the potential to instantly improve an offense that struggled last season.
4. Dan Quinn, Washington Commanders
Expected 5-year wins: 37.5
Starting QB: Jayden Daniels (0.0 weighted AV per season; age 23)
2023 Elo: 31st | Offense: 25th | Defense: 32nd
2023 average age: 26.4 (10th youngest)
Key stat: Daniels, last year's Heisman Trophy winner, is coming off the fifth-best college QB season since 1956, according to schedule-adjusted points above replacement (193.5 PAR).
If the top three are in a tier in which each has a credible case for No. 1 -- Macdonald for Seattle's stability, Harbaugh for Herbert's upside (and the potential end of Chargering) and Morris for his team's young offensive weapons -- we're now reaching a point where the future potential is less tangible, and therefore less predictable.
Quinn has a decent track record on defense, and he'll have some newcomers (Bobby Wagner, Dorance Armstrong, et al.) to work with in fixing the league's worst PPG defense from a season ago. But the biggest reasons the expected wins formula might be underselling the Commanders' potential are the possibility that Daniels hits as a superstar QB (good luck predicting that), and something even less quantifiable -- the impact of new owner Josh Harris after decades under Dan Snyder.
5. Jerod Mayo, New England Patriots
Expected 5-year wins: 35.3
Starting QB: Jacoby Brissett (3.8 weighted AV per season; age 32)
2023 Elo: 30th | Offense: 31st | Defense: 15th
2023 average age: 27.1 (27th youngest)
Key stat: Of the seven coaches who have replaced predecessors whose tenures went 20-plus years, five lasted five seasons or fewer.
In some ways, Mayo has the most unenviable of all coaching tasks, replacing Bill Belichick -- regarded by many as the greatest ever -- in the place where he won a record six Super Bowls. That kind of pressure is why most long-tenured coaches' replacements tend to have brief, forgettable stints. But Belichick's final season in New England was so disastrous that the expectations are lower than they might otherwise be, at least in the short term.
Mayo, a former standout defensive player, gets to work with a defense that was better than average last season ... though defenses are unpredictable from season to season, much less five years out. The larger selling point is the potential of rookie QB Drake Maye, the No. 3 overall pick. Maye wasn't quite on Daniels' level as a college signal-caller but owns the best-ever adjusted PAR season (131.0 in 2022) at North Carolina, the program that has also produced current NFL quarterbacks Mitchell Trubisky and Sam Howell.
6. Brian Callahan, Tennessee Titans
Expected 5-year wins: 35.1
Starting QB: Will Levis (3.6 weighted AV per season; age 25)
2023 Elo: 27th | Offense: 27th | Defense: 16th
2023 average age: 27.0 (24th youngest)
Key stat: Former coach Mike Vrabel had the best winning percentage (.545) of any coach for this franchise since Jack Pardee in 1990-94.
Though the Vrabel era was the Titans' most successful since the days of Jeff Fisher, Steve McNair and Eddie George, Callahan will inherit a team that has missed the playoffs in consecutive seasons and saw its defining player, running back Derrick Henry, leave for Baltimore in free agency. But the Titans seem to be forsaking a full rebuild based on their offseason moves, which included the additions of running back Tony Pollard and wide receiver Calvin Ridley.
Like several other coaching situations on this list, the desirability here mostly comes down to whether Levis is an actual franchise quarterback. The expected wins reflect what we might think a team coming off a mediocre season with an older-than-average roster and a heavy reliance on what an unproven second-round pick at QB will produce.
7. Dave Canales, Carolina Panthers
Expected 5-year wins: 31.7
Starting QB: Bryce Young (3.6 weighted AV per season; age 23)
2023 Elo: 32nd | Offense: 31st | Defense: 29th
2023 average age: 27.0 (23rd youngest)
Key stat: Young had the seventh-worst adjusted net yards per attempt (3.68) for a qualified, rookie No. 1 overall pick in NFL history. (But it's not as bad as it sounds -- see below!)
In a vacuum, the situation Canales walks into looks rough. The Panthers went 2-15 with a league-low 1283 Elo rating -- the worst end-of-season mark in franchise history -- and they did it with an older-than-average roster. Relative to league average, they had one of the 40 worst offenses of the Super Bowl era (since 1966). The Panthers haven't had a .500 record or a positive point differential since 2017. And the quarterback they traded up to draft first overall had a historically bad rookie season. Of course, Carolina is going to rank last on this list.
The silver lining might be who ranked behind Young on that list of bad rookies: Terry Bradshaw, Jared Goff, Troy Aikman, David Carr, John Elway and Matthew Stafford. Carr ended up being a bust, but the rest of the list is littered with current or future Hall of Famers (plus a Pro Bowler in Goff), an indication that one bad season doesn't necessarily doom a young passer -- or the new coach taking over his team.