The coaching carousel will spin to a stop, whenever the Texans finally hire a coach. The job surely won’t go to Buccaneers offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, who didn’t even get an interview in the 2021 hiring cycle.
His current boss believes Leftwich should have gotten consideration for a head-coaching job.
“I can’t say enough about the job [Leftwich] has done,” Bucs coach Bruce Arians told Rich Eisen on Tuesday, via JoeBucsFan.com. “I mean, it’s just remarkable.”
Arians made it clear that he has delegated the offense to Leftwich.
“You know, Tom [Brady] is such a great, great player, but having left that system after 20 years, and ours is lot different how we do things, Byron’s been the middle guy that’s just done all the work,” Arians said. “I mean, people give me way too much credit because I don’t do sh-t, really. He does it all. He calls the plays. I’m really upset he didn’t get a head-coaching interview. . . . Byron didn’t even get a call, and I think people give Tom Brady and Bruce Arians way too much credit and not enough credit for Byron Leftwich.”
It’s not too late for the Texans to do their due diligence with Leftwich. They interviewed Josh McCown, a player with no college or pro coaching experience who entered the NFL as a player one year before Leftwich arrived as the seventh pick in the 2003 draft.
Again, it’s not a knock on McCown. He did nothing wrong by accepting an opportunity to learn how to interview for NFL head-coaching jobs. But Leftwich has the experience and the credentials to deserve a sit down with the Texans, and with every other team looking for a head coach.
So it will be “maybe next year” for Leftwich to get an interview. And then it quite possibly will be an annual string of “maybe next years” until he gets hired.