Right now, the favorite to win the NFL Coach of the Year award seems to be Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions.
In 2021, he took over a Lions team that was moribund, and he quickly remade it into a very good team that may even have a shot at reaching the Super Bowl if enough goes right.
That turnaround began as soon as last season when Detroit won eight of their last 10 games after starting 1-6.
However, Nick Wright said on his podcast that he has a very interesting candidate of his own: Jonathan Gannon of the Arizona Cardinals.
His reasoning is that the Cardinals were supposed to be awful and tank for University of Southern California quarterback Caleb Williams, but instead, Gannon has gotten his team to abandon a tanking mindset — even without QB Kyler Murray.
.@getnickwright thinks Arizona Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon should get Coach of the Year consideration. 🤔
He explains: pic.twitter.com/P3PlGezEVI
— What’s Wright? with Nick Wright (@WhatsWrightShow) November 9, 2023
Murray has been out since late last season with a torn ACL, and thus the forecasts for Arizona this season have been grim.
They have won just one game this season, but that one win came against a good Dallas Cowboys team, which Wright claims seemed to convince Gannon that his squad is too good to tank.
Wright did say that Arizona’s best bet the rest of the way is to have Murray return to form so that he would be worth a first-round draft pick on the trade market while still losing enough games to get the No. 1 pick.
It seems extremely unlikely that Gannon, who is in his first year as an NFL head coach after two years as the Philadelphia Eagles’ defensive coordinator, will actually take home the Coach of the Year award, as the award just about always goes to a coach whose team had some reasonable amount of success.
#Analyst #Suggests #Shocking #Candidate #NFL #Coach #Year