Super Bowl LIX: Ranking the Worst Coaches to Win a Super Bowl

• Coaches become stars if they win a Super Bowl
• There have been 35 coaches at the helm of the 58 Super Bowl winners
• The word “worst” is subjective

As Super Bowl LIX approaches, head coaches and the job they have done will come to the forefront. Judging their accomplishments and categorizing them is a purely subjective endeavor. However, some coaches like Andy Reid, Bill Belichick, Bill Parcells, Bill Walsh, and Vince Lombardi will be reflexively put on the NFL‘s Mount Rushmore. Other championship coaches landed in the right place at the right time and will be footnotes in the championship run. Let’s look at the *worst Super Bowl-winning coaches.

*”Least decorated” might be a better word, but “worst” gets more attention.

Super Bowl V: Don McCafferty, Baltimore Colts

McCafferty had replaced Don Shula as Baltimore’s head coach after the 1969 season when Shula fled for Miami. 1970 was the first year after the NFL/AFL merger and the Colts, a longtime NFL stalwart, shifted to the AFC.

After an 11-2-1 record, the Colts met Tom Landry’s Cowboys in the Super Bowl, ironically in Miami.

Both Colts quarterbacks, Johnny Unitas and Earl Morrall, were terrible. They combined to complete 10 of 24 passes for 235 yards. Dallas intercepted Morrall once and Unitas twice. Baltimore fumbled five times, losing four of them. It’s hard to blame McCafferty for his team’s performance, especially considering that they won 16-13 on a last-second field goal.

Landry’s Cowboys played worse.

The Colts fired McCafferty less than two years later when he refused to bench Unitas despite the team’s new ownership ordering him to do so. Detroit hired him and the team fell from 8-5-1 the year before he arrived in 1972 to 6-7-1 in 1973. He died of a heart attack in the summer of 1974.

Super Bowl XXX: Barry Switzer, Dallas Cowboys

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones handpicked Switzer to replace Jimmy Johnson after Jimmy and Jerry had their blowout in the aftermath of their second straight Super Bowl.

Switzer had resigned from the University of Oklahoma in 1989 after several off-field incidents including a quarterback being nabbed as a drug dealer and coach-player payoffs. Most large programs had these issues. Arguably, Joe Paterno’s downfall at Penn State and what caused it was way worse than Switzer giving his players a few bucks and not haranguing them to go to class if they didn’t feel like it.

He was an excellent college coach, but that Cowboys team could conceivably have won without a head coach. Some, like Troy Aikman, argued that it kinda did. They lost in the 1994 NFC Championship to the 49ers when the team seemed woefully unprepared. Deion Sanders signed as a free agent after that season and Switzer still nearly screwed it up with a ridiculous fourth-down try deep in his own territory in Philadelphia resulting in a Dec. 10 loss.

Today, there would be armchair experts saying he was right to do it. Somewhere, Brandon Staley was celebrating his 13th birthday that day (it was really his birthday) watching and saying, “Someday, I’ll be an NFL head coach and do things just as stupid.”

The Cowboys had been blown out during the regular season by San Francisco and would not have beaten them in the playoffs, but Green Bay did them a favor, bounced the 49ers and lost to Dallas in the NFC Championship. The Cowboys beat Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl LXV: Mike McCarthy, Green Bay Packers

It might seem counterintuitive to include McCarthy. He has amassed a 174-112-2 record and won a Super Bowl in 18 years as a head coach. But when breaking it down, did he win as much as he should have given the teams and players he had?

This is someone who had Aaron Rodgers in his prime and won only one Super Bowl. Worse, they had several years in which they were prohibitive favorites to win it again, but lost, never making it to another Big Game. The Giants bounced McCarthy on their way to two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots. The second was in 2011 after a Packers 15-1 regular season in which Rodgers won his first MVP.

Green Bay looked to be heading for another Super Bowl in 2014-15 when they blew a 19-7 fourth-quarter lead to the Seahawks allowing Seattle to score 15 points in 44 seconds with touchdowns at 2:09 and 1:25.

When the Packers hired McCarthy away from San Francisco, his boss at the time with the 49ers, Mike Nolan, was befuddled. They were 4-12 and had the worst offense in the league. His teams always fall short and that continued into his second job in Dallas from which he was recently removed.

Super Bowl LII: Doug Pederson, Philadelphia Eagles

Like McCarthy, Pederson was also recently removed from his second head coaching job in Jacksonville. The Eagles fired him three years after the Super Bowl win. Pederson managed to win a title with his backup quarterback, Nick Foles, but he beat Bill Belichick to do it.

Objectively, Pederson has been a mediocre head coach and his teams tend to collapse by the end of his tenure. It happened in Philly and Jacksonville. He had one big year as a head coach going 13-3 in 2017 and winning the Super Bowl. Apart from that, it was a series of 9-win years and a few 4-win seasons that got him axed.

How Do You Rate the Remaining Head Coaches?

Currently, the oddsmakers have the Eagles as the favorites (+185) to win the Super Bowl, which would immortalize their polarizing head coach Nick Sirianni. Next are the Chiefs at +210 under Andy Reid — in the argument as the best coach ever. The Bills are at +240 under Sean McDermott. And the Commanders are +725 with first-year head coach Dan Quinn.

So how do you rate head coaches and their contributions? As Super Bowl LIX approaches, they are under scrutiny with history in the balance for all four.

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