NFL Head Coaches as Cagefighters: Who Would Reign Supreme?

We’re about five months too early to be rolling out any sort of bracket, but curiosity knows no season. This is something I wanted to sort out before the regular season became too heated to think about anything other than football. So, you are getting it now. I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not really sorry.

I might be testing your patience by going back to the Jim Schwartz-Jim Harbaugh handshake as inspiration for another post, especially since that altercation was not a fight so much as impassioned shoving and yelling (watch the video and notice an unidentified 49er laughing as the whole thing went down). But let’s suppose that it WAS a fight, and that it was so AWESOME of an exchange that Roger Goodell immediately instituted a single-elimination cagefighting tournament and ordered all 32 head coaches to participate.

Let’s take a second to discuss how this would be formatted. This is not ‘Nam. There are rules:

• Every head coach will be ranked first-through-32nd, based on his perceived ability to whoop ass. Factors such as age, height, weight, playing experience, temperment and general zest for violence will be considered.
• Since New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton just got out of leg surgery, assistant head coach Joe Vitt will take his place.
• Fights can be won via knockout or submission. Andy Reid will get two timeouts, but it is okay, because he’ll have no idea how to use them.

One of the great things about being a pro football coach is that you can really get as fat as you want. Cardiovascular endurance is just a luxury one could do without at that point, and the NFL coaching heavyweights like Rex Ryan, Andy Reid, and even Ron Rivera are free to eat whatever they want. The only downside is that when you start losing, you are a fat loser, not just a loser. Of course, our tournament does not feature weight classes, and unfortunately for them, they all wound up in the same “region”. I have Rivera coming out of the Cholesterol Regional, just because the guy frightens me with his calmness (the best way to frighten somebody, for my money), but also because Andy Reid surely would have been carted off to a hospital after three fights. 

I’ve said this before, but Jack Del Rio looks like he only stopped playing football about 15 minutes ago. It’s funny, because he coaches that way, too. Even in this age of NFL parity, Jacksonville is haplessly awful, like Kansas City Royals awful. The city has massive campaigns going to get people into the games. They are playing in an upcoming Monday night game and it might get blacked out. How does that happen? Del Rio, however, is not burdened by the realities of economics in this particular affair, and he will blow through a Rather Badass regional with relative ease.

I had John and Jim Harbaugh ranked 10th and 11th, respectively (I had Del Rio as No. 1, by the way). The coaching brothers are renown for the toughness that each brings to his respective teams. The only surprise of Jim joining the NFL is that it did not happen sooner. I had John emerging from the Grumpy Gus regional after a showdown with Tom Coughlin that would surely be one of the best fights in this tournament.

John’s brother, however, would not advance quite as far. Jim would face the wily genius Bill Belichick in the second round, and be eliminated accordingly. I realize that coaching professional football is something that Bill has been doing his entire life. However, I’m reminded of the Sun Tzu quote, “From doing one thing well, do many things well,” and I’m led to believe that Belichick could do anything as well as he coaches NFL football, whether it’s running a body shop or mashing Raheem Morris’s face into applesauce. Wow, that sentence probably needs another period in there someplace.

That gives us Del Rio, Rivera, John Harbaugh and Belichick in our final four. And of course the winner is Belichick. The guy wins at everything. It probably helped that he wears perfect cage attire on the sideline every week. You can outdress a guy like that, but you can’t outsmart him. Maybe we should do this again next year, if only to see who draws the honor of snapping the arms off of Sean Payton in the first round.