The Preseason: Coordinators Aren’t Safe

Yes, the Turk has been shown the turk.↵↵Pro Football Talk is reporting Bills offensive coordinator Turk Schonert is gone from the team, joining the Chiefs Chan Gailey and Buccaneers Jeff Jagodzinski as offensive coordinators who’ve been axed during this preseason. That’s more than were fired during all of last year.↵

↵↵The trio of dismissals is sure to have reverberations next year, as coordinators now have to worry about results in the preseason, instead of just fine tuning specific points of the offense. The first unit is going to have to put up points, lest the coordinator lose their job. It seems as though these moves are done to appease the knee-jerk sports radio community, which emits panic in local markets if a first team offense didn’t show sufficient dominance when they had the ball. Obviously, every team wants to put on a good showing and feel like they’ve created some momentum going into the season, but isn’t one of the main themes of the preseason not tipping your hand on the extent of your playbook and how you’re actually going to run your plays? This change of focus will force coaches out of fear to abandon necessary situational reps for the sake of useless stats in the preseason, and that’s to the detriment of the team when it matters. ↵

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↵↵That three of these moves have happened within the span of a month is surprising, though the fact that two of them have occurred under the rein of first-year head coaches makes it slightly less so. There are bound to be false starts they want to correct. However, here we have a veteran head coach in Dick Jauron, one not particularly noted for his boldness, showing the guy in charge of his offense the door. That’s gonna make some people take note.↵

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