Football is famous for its platitudes, with none more prevalent than the phrase, “If you have two quarterbacks, you really have none.”
We can now add another one to the lexicon: If your head coach is also your general manager, you definitely don’t have a GM.
The Houston Texans fired Bill O’Brien after an 0-4 start to the season, but it wasn’t really his coaching that got him canned in the end. O’Brien won four AFC South titles with the Texans and oversaw a perennial playoff squad. Last year’s team led the eventual Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs 24-0 at halftime of the AFC divisional game before Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes decided he’d seen enough. It was actually O’Brien’s off-the-field moves as GM that eventually led to his ouster and, with it, the death of the combination head coach/GM.
O’Brien’s teams had some on-field success, but as far as managing football franchises go, O’Brien may go down in history as one of the worst to ever do it. This spring, in a move that baffled observers around the league, he traded away perhaps the league’s best wide receiver in DeAndre Hopkins for an aging running back, David Johnson, and a second-round draft pick. And that may not have even been his worst move. O’Brien’s first attempt at wheeling and dealing ended with him shipping discontented pass rushing star Jadeveon Clowney to the Seattle Seahawks for a third-round pick and some backup defensive players. He could have gotten more value if he had asked Clowney to sign some footballs to put up on eBay before he left. The Texans don’t have a first-round pick in 2020 or 2021 due to his awful trade deals, and in one of his final flourishes as GM, he agreed to bloated contracts for quarterback Deshaun Watson and left tackle Laremy Tunsil. The Texans’ current roster cost a league-leading $250 million to build and has yet to win a game this year.
But make no mistake — paying one man to do two jobs isn’t only a horrible idea when you’re hiring a dud such as O’Brien. Even the greatest football coach of all time has failed at being both a GM and head coach at once.
Bill Belichick isn’t listed as the New England Patriots’ GM, but he’s got complete control of the team’s football operations in everything but name. In the past two years alone, the NFL’s greatest coaching mind traded a second-round pick for a wide receiver he ended up cutting just one year later and passed on both D.K. Metcalf and A.J. Brown in the 2019 draft for N’Keal Harry, who is already a level below both players. It’s genuinely shocking to know that under Belichick’s all-encompassing tutelage, the Patriots have not had a first-round pick make a Pro Bowl since 2012. The last time it happened, Miley Cyrus was Hannah Montana.
The Patriots’ roster misses are widely known, but Belichick the coach is just so good that he consistently saves Belichick the bad GM from any real consequences. But if, like O’Brien, you’re not one of the best coaches in football history, trying to coach a team and manage a franchise at the same time is likely to get you canned.
It takes a Herculean, round-the-clock effort to be an effective head coach in the NFL. There are only 32 of them in the entire world, making it one of the toughest jobs to get and hold onto. Adding the duties of an entirely different, yet just as important, position only stretches coaches thinner and exacerbates their weaknesses.
O’Brien had plenty of weaknesses as both a coach and a general manager. Combining the two jobs is like watching the Atlanta Falcons run up a comfortable lead — you know it’s going to end in disaster, but it’s going to be morbidly entertaining to watch the collapse.
So, if your head coach is also your GM, you definitely don’t have a GM. Luckily for the Texans, not having a GM may be better than having the one they just fired.
Cory Gunkel is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
