Ben McAdoo, Accidental Comedian, Dead At 40
NFL coaches don’t visibly inspire confidence. They are kind of supposed to but always flunk that aspect of their job performance. Some combination of the aesthetically agnostic culture of football, Nike’s robust line of pear-cut sideline gear, and the cosmetic effects of sinking ninety-plus hours a week into scheming for Julio Jones spits out, in place of what should be nigh unsettlingly inspirational men, a rainbow of weekend dads — here squintily scrutinizing a playcall sheet that dwarfs the scroll On The Road was written on and there aw-jeezing in the background of an interception return and over yonder rotund and flummoxed and fucking furious about it. The idea that gets pitched to us in the ad copy, that these are modern MacArthurs of baroquely overblown exercise, is pretty plainly undermined just by looking at them.
That so many coaches think of themselves as master strategists and peerless communicators makes for some awesomely douche-chillish comedy, if not much entertaining football. It maybe says something that Bill Belichick went full man-living-under-a-bridge over a decade ago. Most people don’t give a shit performatively, but he’s like a drunk that’s given up on hiding it. His garb and the way he carries himself betrays an uneasy and dyspeptic peace with the only thing that makes him fleetingly whole. Everybody else, in the shadowless beam of that honesty, is but a vain dweeb, quoting stuff dead presidents never said and bassing up their voices and weightily stroking their Van Dykes before using the word absolutely twelve times in one paragraph. The guys who are the most this way are the ones giving pressers after dropping to 2-and-9.
Ben McAdoo isn’t some perfect distillation of this genre of human being. He is, unique inability to find a haircut that fits his head aside, merely another unremarkable one of those dudes, barely distinguishable in most respects from Mike Shula or Dick Jauron or Eric Mangini. His determined, slightly vacant countenance didn’t change a whit as he followed the arc traced by hundreds before him, roughly summarized as:
Bout To Change The Game → Now Hold On, These Things Take Time → I’ve Figured Out The Problem; It’s All Pussy And Crab Legs From Here → Everyone Has Failed Me → Extremely Fired
He learned nothing as the Giants offense he was hired to supercharge failed to score thirty points at any point during his twenty-eight-game tenure. He took a permanently annoyed tone with the media, like they were hassling Copernicus, and made a habit of insinuating that it was Eli Manning’s fault McAdoo tried to transform him from a conscience-free chucker into a west coast precision passer thirteen years into the quarterback’s career. He could neither relate to Odell Beckham nor control his volatility. He pissed off and alienated a defense he presumably didn’t even talk to that much, with both Janoris Jenkins and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie getting suspended essentially for succumbing to ennui. All of this happened, and the Eli Manning benching was a graceless debacle, and then the G-Men were handled by a moderately banged up Raiders team, and McAdoo got canned along with the general manager who assembled the collection of players he couldn’t reach.
There’s a bit that Drew Magary does over at his weekly football column at Deadspin, where he writes in the voice of Jim Tomsula as the world’s savviest drifter. Magary’s Tomsula will tell you that you can use some discarded dental floss and a couple styrofoam meat-packing troughs you rassled away from the local possum population to make yourself a perfectly fine pair of sandals. It’s like you’re vacationing in Martinique! (But of course you’re dying of gangrene in a train yard in Dayton, Ohio.) Magary does a similar thing with Rex Ryan, beginning every horny/hungry monologue with exhortations of “Men! MEN! MEN!” The broader joke Magary’s making is that football teams are run by kooks and loudmouths and weirdos who are variably able to gameplan for a good pass rush but are invariably fucking ridiculous.
The thing about Tomsula and Ryan, which makes them both easy to parody and a little bit endearing, is that they seem to know this more than most of their peers and so don’t fear leaning into it. Ben McAdoo, by contrast, sees not a damn thing funny. He fits into a long line of overconfidently beige tacticians who confuse self-seriousness with competence. In this way, he’s not dissimilar to supercilious Sunday show natterers or critics who Klostermanically cluck their tongues for a while before they deliver some cumshot-subtle cliché about the new Drake record. McAdoo is mockable, in other words, but also primarily a bummer. I wonder sometimes why the NFL isn’t better to watch, given that, even with a talent pool that might be dwindling, teams employ the best athletes they ever have. And then I tune into a Giants game and catch McAdoo wordlessly ensconced within a clubhouse of diner menus and I think: oh, right.
Franchises tend to hire the bizarro world version of whoever recently put them in a ditch, which is to say they jump across the center point of a dime-sized color wheel. The last guy was shouty, so they get a quiet one. The grim whiz kid flamed out, so they bring in a jocular gym teacher. It rarely works and it often doesn’t. As absurd as the gig and the men in it are, it’s also basically impossible. New head coaches are emphatically and unfailingly posited as The Solution, but the reality is your team is likely only giving you a fresh face to chuck rotting fruit at when it all breaks bad in a season or three.
And yet this doesn’t dampen the thrill of running the old hack out of town and installing a new one. What about this Eagles QB coach? I hear he’s some kind of miracle worker.
