Josh McDaniels

The most damaging coaches in NFL history rarely announce themselves as disasters. They come in trailing a resume, speaking the language of process and discipline, wearing the borrowed credibility (and hoodies) of a dynasty they helped build elsewhere. Josh McDaniels arrived in Denver in January 2009 with all of it — Bill Belichick's fingerprints, a Super Bowl ring from New England, a reputation as the next great offensive mind in the league. He left 26 games later having traded away the franchise's most exciting player, alienated half the locker room, and set in motion a personnel collapse that would haunt Denver for half a decade. He did not earn a farewell press conference. He earned this.

The 2009 season started 6-0 and generated a genuine belief — briefly — that something was being built. It wasn't. Denver went 2-8 the rest of the way. The collapse was total, sustained, and illuminating. A team that had beaten the Chargers, the Cowboys, and the Patriots in October was getting blown out in December. The talent hadn't changed. The culture had. McDaniels had run off players who didn't fit his vision of what a team should look like, imported Patriots discards who fit better, and by midseason had lost the locker room so completely that it barely made the news when he was finally fired on December 28, 2010.

The Cutler trade is where most people start, and it's where we'll start too. In March 2009, McDaniels traded Jay Cutler — a 25-year-old franchise quarterback who had thrown for over 3,600 yards the previous season — to the Chicago Bears. The return was Kyle Orton, two first-round picks, and a third. The historical analysis of whether Cutler became what Denver hoped he would is beside the point. The point is that McDaniels engineered the departure of his starting quarterback within months of being hired, after a miscommunication so fundamental that Cutler demanded a trade rather than play for him. The franchise lost years of development on the most important position in football because the new head coach and his quarterback couldn't get a basic conversation right.

The spying incident gets less attention than it deserves because the Cutler trade overshadows everything else. But consider what it tells you about the culture McDaniels was building. His director of video operations, Steve Scarnecchia — the same man named in the original New England Spygate investigation — filmed the San Francisco 49ers' walkthrough practice before a game at Wembley Stadium in October 2010. Scarnecchia acted without authorization. The NFL investigation confirmed McDaniels didn't order it. What McDaniels did do was learn about it and wait over a week before self-reporting to the league. Both he and the organization were fined $50,000. Scarnecchia was fired. The charitable read is that McDaniels failed to act. The less charitable read is that a head coach who watched his former employer get sanctioned for the same category of offense — and who had Scarnecchia on his staff regardless — created the environment that made it possible.

What separates McDaniels from the merely bad coaches in Denver history is the combination: the volume of damage, the speed with which it was done, and the arrogance that animated it. This was a man who arrived believing his system was so superior that the existing infrastructure was an obstacle rather than an asset. He treated a franchise with a 49-year history as a blank canvas and the people who had built it as liabilities. He was wrong about all of it, and Denver paid for the correction for years after his departure.

He went back to New England. He won another ring there, as an offensive coordinator, insulated from the consequence of decisions he didn't have to make. He resurfaced as the Las Vegas Raiders' head coach in 2022 and was fired after one season, having gone 6-11 and having his star receiver publicly demand a trade within months of the season beginning. The pattern held. The execution didn't.