NFL Evaluators Need to Avoid Peak Stupidity in Judging Eric Bieniemy

Don’t pay attention to the football pundits. The Commanders’ new offensive coordinator deserves the same chance to prove himself as anyone else.

In 2013, a Washington staff consisting of Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris and Chris Foerster led its team to a 3–13 record. And, ultimately, the record did not impact these coaches’ escalator-like ascensions to the top of the league’s coaching hierarchy.

The rest of the football world treated its time in D.C. the way we might hope someone treated a college spring break in Cancun—wild and regrettable things were going to happen given the locale and lack of supervision, but the point is, they survived.

So why is it that we’re already trying to make Year 1 of the Eric Bieniemy regime in Washington an ultimate referendum on the chicken-or-the-egg question that has been hounding the offensive coordinator’s bid for a head coaching job over the past four years? That was the theme of this somewhat newsless week in football media, which often forces the fillers of airtime to reach into their bag of tricks to grab someone’s attention whilst sitting in an urgent care waiting room. (Where else would one watch Skip Bayless?)

Now that the former Kansas City Chiefs staffer has a chance to run his own offense, some are doing exactly what the owners who ignored him for head coaching jobs have done: Turn this into a binary set of circumstances. While Bieniemy was a rising star in the coaching business, he was either a product of Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes and coach Andy Reid, or Mahomes was a product of Bieniemy, and only one of those answers would ultimately be acceptable. Underlying all of this was the fact that a good number of coaches, who were white and perhaps better connected across different cabals of the coaching fraternity, received opportunities for head coaching jobs despite generating the same questions.

Now, either Bieniemy, who is Black, is a success because he can pilot the Commanders to a successful offensive season, or he isn’t and proves his detractors right. Conveniently left out of these discussions are that Washington is flying into the season at full speed with Sam Howell as its current starting quarterback and the third-best set of skill position players in a division that produced three playoff teams this past season. 

After robbing Bieniemy of grace for the past half decade, the time to give it back would be now. After failing to check whatever personal assumptions or biases that may have led people to that point, the time to become aware of them is now.

In case you missed it, LeSean McCoy, who was a Chiefs running back for all of—checks notes—nine games and whose livelihood now depends on saying interesting things on television, decimated the case for Bieniemy on some daytime debate show that we all watched when it was shoved down our throats during an accidental trip to Twitter. I’ll spare you the details, but it seems like McCoy, over the course of a few weeks, determined the way in which the Chiefs have operated for the duration of Bieniemy’s tenure with the franchise and said he had little to do with their success. He doesn’t have input on the offense. He doesn’t deal with Mahomes. Therefore, he cannot be a great head coach. Yada, yada, yada.

I don’t see why aspects of the Bieniemy argument can’t be true at once. Let’s say—even though Reid has denied it—Bieniemy had nothing to do with the implementation of the offensive game plan (again, a tough ask given that Mahomes is constantly seen talking to him during games and, as I’ve personally confirmed, Bieniemy shares in the creative process that unearths some of Kansas City’s most creative offensive looks). That doesn’t automatically mean he is going to be a horrible head coach. Look at Reid, who became the Eagles’ coach without having a previous play-calling role in the NFL. John Harbaugh was never a play-caller. Mike Tomlin was a coordinator for one season. Kevin O’Connell was a non-play-calling coordinator. So was Nick Sirianni.

Conversely, let’s also say Bieniemy was the secret sauce behind all of Kansas City’s successes. Does that guarantee he can lead a team? Show me a list of brilliant play-callers who have become great head coaches, and I’ll show you a list of coaches who had to learn to delegate and shed their egos before any of their team successes was possible.

If Bieniemy ends up being a horrendous head coach, it’s no proof that those original negative theses were correct. Good head coaches fail all the time. Some of them have bad owners; some have no cap space or draft capital; some inherit late-career QB Russell Wilson.

And even if Bieniemy ends up struggling as an offensive coordinator, it doesn’t make him a bad offensive coordinator. It means he is like every other offensive coordinator Washington has had since the turn of the millennium.

Current Giants offensive coordinator Mike Kafka once worked behind Bieniemy in Kansas City and left for a similar opportunity to the one Bieniemy has now—to unquestionably lead his own offense. His candidacy for a head coaching job improved dramatically, in my pseudo-expert opinion, by taking a wayward Daniel Jones and turning him into a serviceable, top-15 type player. It looked nothing like the Chiefs’ offense, and that’s what made it more appealing for potential employers.

Bieniemy deserves that kind of intellectual runway—the same gritty look at progress that may not be overtly evident and conditional on other factors—and then some. He deserves a gray area. He deserves a broad perspective when we look at the situation under which he took this job and the personnel with which he has to operate.

This is an awfully long way of asking you, the football-viewing public, to not overreact either way. There is a time and a place to shape the legacy of Bieniemy as a leader, play-caller and developer of talent. It’s not a year from now, barring some wildly transparent Hard Knocks–ian situation in which we are presented with naked facts undisguised by bias, or by some middleman with an agenda. The time is now.

The only thing worse than never knowing Bieniemy’s true potential would be to fill in our gaps of knowledge with our own personal animus, the kind of nonsense that has already complicated Bieniemy’s journey to this point.