Ranking the 8 new NFL head coaches: Who made the best hire?

From Jim Harbaugh to Dan Quinn, all eight of 2024's new coaches make sense. But who'll engineer the fastest turnaround?

The 2024 NFL head coach hiring cycle is over. One quarter of the league — eight teams — will head into the offseason with a new name atop their organizational decision-making chart.

Some of these acquisitions look like perfect fits. Others are a little tougher to understand. And, like everything football related, snap judgments may not have any actual bearing on how things pan out.

Last year, I ranked Frank Reich as the best head coach hire of the 2023 cycle. It was a solid theory. He’d helped Philip Rivers win comeback player of the year honors in San Diego, turned Carson Wentz from FCS star to MVP candidate in two seasons and made Nick Foles a Super Bowl MVP. He was 40-33-1 in four-plus seasons leading the Indianapolis Colts.

He inherited a team willing to spend big to take a star quarterback with the first overall pick in the 2023 Draft. This could have, and maybe should have, worked.

It did not. Reich’s reported preference for CJ Stroud at the top of the draft was overruled by owner David Tepper. A roster devoid of talent struggled to win games. Tepper proved he’s exactly the kind of guy who keeps bronzed bull testicles on his work desk by clashing with his new coach and firing him after 11 games. Reich, it turned out, was the worst head coach hiring of 2023.

This is all my fun way of telling you it’s pretty dang difficult to nail your head coaching hire and even tougher to figure out exactly how it’s going to work before their first offseason begins. But using the data we have now — the rosters each coach is inheriting and their histories on the sideline — we can make some educated guesses about who’ll be the best hires of 2024.

Let’s begin at the bottom.