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Black Monday: Now a Ritual Whose Meaning Is Clear By KEN BELSON Published: December 28, 2013
The N.F.L. loves to trumpet its calendar, from Draft Day to Kickoff Weekend to Super Bowl Sunday. Then there is Black Monday, the day after the regular season ends, when a dozen teams prepare for the playoffs and some of the rest announce that they have fired their coaches or general managers or both.
The league does not include the red-letter date on its schedule, and its origins are murky. But to N.F.L. insiders and fans around the country, Black Monday has its own news media ecosystem, complete with weeks of speculation, denials and news releases, followed by confessionals, goodbyes and promises to start anew.
Last year, seven coaches and five general managers were replaced, one of the busier Black Mondays on record. Because many assistants are also shown the door when their bosses are fired, Black Monday 2012 was a veritable funeral procession in the coaching industry.
This year will very likely be no different. As teams that started the season with high hopes have slid out of contention, rumors have swirled about the future of coaches from New York to Detroit and from Washington to Oakland. Minnesota Vikings Coach Leslie Frazier, Rex Ryan of the Jets and Greg Schiano of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are just a few of the leaders with their fates in the balance as the regular season comes to a close.
As with everything in the N.F.L., there is a science behind the decision to waste no time in firing coaches. For one, no team wants the news media to spend yet more time speculating about a coach after a deflating season. Turning the page as quickly as possible allows teams to change the conversation to the future and the potential for wins and championships.
But there is another practical merit to moving fast: Teams have to start searching for a new coach, and other teams that fired their coaches will be bidding for a limited pool of top replacements. Once a head coach is hired, other coaching spots must be filled. Then all of them must prepare for the combine and the draft.
“Everyone’s in such a competitive environment, there’s a race to get things done because there is the same group of candidates out there,” said Mike Tannenbaum, the former general manager of the Jets who now represents coaches for Priority Sports & Entertainment. “It’s to clear the decks and move on.”
This year, more than a half-dozen teams may clear the decks. In Washington, Redskins Coach Mike Shanahan, whose team has three victories going into Sunday’s game just one year after making the playoffs, has feuded publicly with the owner Daniel Snyder over the decision to bench quarterback Robert Griffin III.
Mike Munchak of the Tennessee Titans, Dennis Allen in Oakland and Jim Schwartz in Detroit are also in the hot seat. The Houston Texans, another team unable to return to the playoffs, fired Gary Kubiak earlier this month, just weeks after he collapsed on the field during a game and was hospitalized.
Innovations like 24-hour sports channels, Twitter and blogs have fueled the coaching merry-go-round and given Black Monday an almost historical or hysterical feel, depending on your point of view. But the use of the phrase Black Monday to denote the coaching day of reckoning appears to date back only about 10 or 15 years.
Even with an extensive search of news databases, it is difficult to determine who coined the phrase Black Monday, which the N.F.L. does not endorse. Some of the earliest references were in the late 1990s, including a story in The Chicago Tribune about several college coaches being fired at one time. In 1998, The Associated Press ran an article with the headline “Black Monday for N.F.L. coaches.” The story began: “The next time a group of N.F.L. coaches gets together and someone says ‘Black Monday,’ nobody should ask him what he’s talking about.”
The New York Post and The Houston Chronicle also used Black Monday in their headlines that day.
It is unclear whether the news media created the phrase or whether reporters parroted a term used liberally by football insiders. But two years later, The Associated Press ran an article that said that the day after the regular season ends “traditionally is called ‘Black Monday’ in the coaching profession,” though when this so-called tradition started was not defined.
There are few examples of N.F.L. and team personnel using the phrase, though in a Jan. 6, 2000, article in The Times-Picayune, Greg Bensel, a spokesman for the New Orleans Saints, was quoted saying that he discussed with Tom Benson, the team owner, “what the state of the league was on Black Monday” and “who was around and who wasn’t.” That off-season, the Saints fired Mike Ditka and hired Jim Haslett.
Bensel said he did not recall where he first heard the phrase. But within a few years, others in the N.F.L. started saying Black Monday, including Bill Cowher, then the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He said that coaches always feared being fired and were motivated “to not be a part of Black Monday.”
While the term’s roots are uncertain, it is clear that a handful of coaches, assistants and front office personnel are going to receive pink slips Monday, regardless of whether their teams win their season finales.
As Cowher said in 2006, “We all understand that getting into this business.”
Alain Delaqueriere contributed reporting.
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