The 5 most fireable NFL coaches of Week 12

Not all losses are created equal — several come against the Browns. Not all losses to the Browns are created equal, either. On Sunday, Marvin Lewis drilled down to bedrock on the latter.

While the final score might say 35-20, anyone watching Sunday’s intra-Ohio showdown knows that 15-point deficit is merely shorthand for what could have been a 50-point loss. The Browns rolled out to a 28-0 lead before the first two-minute warning, scoring more first half points in a game than they had since 1991 in the process.

That leaves the Bengals at 5-6 after a 4-1 start and slowly circling the drain due to a confluence of injuries and awful defense. With Andy Dalton now on injured reserve and the offense in the hands of Jeff Driskel and Tom Savage, this spiral may have just begun.

That made Lewis an easy choice to make this week’s list. So who’s joining him?

The Bengals were trending downward before Jackson came on board as special assistant to Lewis, a title that inspired countless Dwight Schrute jokes and a growing feeling of malaise in southwestern Ohio. Cincinnati offered Jackson an opportunity to exact revenge on the team that fired him Sunday, but limped off the field at Paul Brown Stadium with their playoff hopes thoroughly derailed.

One lifeless performance made a game against the Browns a bigger embarrassment than blowout defeats to the Chiefs and Saints. So was Jackson brought in as a potential succession plan for a departing Lewis? Or is he just the fall guy who gets axed at the end of the year so that Lewis’s streak can live on? And if those are two real options, how much does it suck to be a Bengals fan right now?

The Eagles were in danger of dropping to the bottom of the playoff pool Sunday when a 3-7 Giants team slapped them around en route to a 19-3 second quarter lead. Saquon Barkley, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, had carved up his NFC East rival, scoring a pair of touchdowns and gaining 128 yards in the process.

The Giants had the lead and the opportunity to burn off wide swaths of clock. It stands to reason Barkley, the most effective piece of the New York offense, would see the ball even more than his 15-touch first half. This is a line of reasoning Shurmur resisted.

Of Barkley’s five second half touches, one came on a 5-yard crossing route intended to set up the team’s last-ditch Hail Mary effort. He had just 18 second half yards as the Giants scored only three points while watching the Eagles rally to doom New York to another loss and push the franchise one step closer to its destiny of another top five pick at the NFL Draft.

On the plus side, at least Shurmur’s son had one hell of a performance embarrassing Tennessee the day prior.

Todd Bowles knows the Patriots. He was 1-6 against Bill Belichick’s team as a head coach going into Week 12, so he was intimately familiar with just how dangerous New England can be.

But despite understanding his team would need to score early and often to upset the AFC East leaders, Bowles played a painfully conservative game that allowed the Patriots to escape New Jersey with a road win. His second drive of the contest ended with a punt after facing fourth-and-3 from the New England 42. The Jets’ defense laid off the blitz all afternoon, failing to sack Tom Brady even once despite some sloppy play up front from the Patriots’ offensive line.

But Bowles’ most egregious mistake may have been accepting a penalty against the New England offense. The Pats were set to face fourth-and-2 from the Jets’ 24-yard line when Bowles accepted an offensive pass interference that pushed Tom Brady back to the 34 but gave him another chance to light up the New York defense.

Guess how that ended.

Bowles’ gambled to give Brady an extra down. The reward was turning a 42-yard Stephen Gostkowski kick — a range from which he hits about 79% of his attempts — into a 52-yard try, a distance from which he’s historically made 71% of his kicks. In his quest for eight extra percent, Bowles lost seven points.

No player has churned through Jets coaches quite like Tom Brady, and after Sunday Bowles could be next.

Aaron Rodgers has been downgraded from great to good this fall. It turns out a good quarterback isn’t enough to overcome the Packers’ offensive shortcomings and Mike McCarthy’s single-page playcalling.

On Sunday night we finally got the chance to see McCarthy roll the dice and go for it on fourth-and-short in a high pressure situation. Unfortunately for Rodgers, his decision was to run face first into a defensive front that looked like this:

This came just one down after Aaron Jones was stopped on third-and-one.

For the 11th straight year, McCarthy has a generational talent at quarterback who can make plays no one else in the league can. And for the 11th straight year, McCarthy is forcing him to work with a 1992 playbook borrowed from the Scottish Claymores.

That’s something that can work when you’ve got prime Jordy Nelson, Randall Cobb, or Greg Jennings in the lineup to take advantage of Rodgers’ improvisation when plays stagnate. It’s a lot less effective when you’ve got a double-teamed Davante Adams (who is good) and a pair of late-round rookies who are unable to take the defensive focus from the team’s top target.

Or, as Geoff Schwartz put it:

Mike McCarthy’s offense is bland. It’s boring, predictable, and worst of all, it doesn’t use Aaron Rodgers’ talent to the full extent. His offense has been passed up by new, exciting, vibrant and more creative offenses.

Those offenses — and I’ll acknowledge that not every team can be the Chiefs, Saints or Rams — use formations, motions, shifts and personnel groupings to get receivers open and make for easy throws, easy pitch and catch style throws. The Packers should be using those too, especially with injuries and young, inexperienced receivers.

So what is the Packers offense?

The Packers line up in static formations with receivers spread out along the line of scrimmage. They use motion sparingly and don’t often get into stack or bunch formations to make things easier for their wide receivers.

They rely on their wideouts to get open rather than designing plays that get them open. This is why you see Rodgers holding the ball so long — no one is open. They often don’t have a rhythm to their offense, and it shows.

The Packers have a Lamborghini in their garage. Mike McCarthy, however, is perfectly content to ride the bus.

While the Eagles have underwhelmed, no team has crashed to earth harder in 2018 than Marrone’s Jaguars, who are now 3-8 after being one quarter from a Super Bowl berth last winter. That eighth loss came at the hands of Josh Allen — a rookie quarterback who All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey described earlier in the year (and possibly on the field) as “trash” — and the Buffalo Bills.

Some of the elements of Week 12’s loss were out of Marrone’s control. He couldn’t have planned for Leonard Fournette’s ejection from a game in which he’d scored Jacksonville’s only points. And he mitigated yet another awful Blake Bortles performance (127 yards, two interceptions) by running the ball 39 times and passing only 23.

Marrone was also the architect of an offense that turned a post-brawl first-and-goal opportunity from the 1-yard line into a missed 42-yard field goal. He knew he’d have limited scoring opportunities with a fourth quarter offense led by Bortles and Carlos Hyde. Still, faced with fourth-and-4 at the Buffalo 42 with 9:20 to play, trailing by seven points and with a defense that had held the Bills to 20 yards or fewer on seven different drives to that afternoon, he gave up on his best chance of tying this game by punting the ball back to the home team.

Marrone’s job is still intact after Sunday. Bortles and former offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett weren’t as lucky.