His options have been reduced
Over the course of last weekend, Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores had a trio of interviews with teams who are looking for a new head coach. On Monday, one of those three teams decided that they were going to go in a different direction.
The Vikings’ NFC North rivals, the Chicago Bears, have announced the hiring of former Detroit Lions’ offensive coordinator Ben Johnson to be their new head coach. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed yet, but enough connected sources are reporting it to make it realistic enough to report.
Johnson was one of the top names available in this cycle, and now he’ll go to a Bears team that has been, to say the least, offensively challenged in recent years and has a quarterback who looks like he’s in need of some direction. Will Johnson be able to provide that? For the Vikings’ sake, I certainly hope not.
That means that two of the three teams that Flores interviewed with are still looking to fill their head coaching vacancies. Those teams are both in the AFC, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Jets. The Jets might be tempting for Flores, as it would give him a shot at his former employers in Miami twice a year (and in New England as well, though I don’t think there’s any potential bad blood there like there might be with Miami). Jacksonville fired an offensive-minded head coach in Doug Pederson and might be willing to turn to someone with Flores’ defensive prowess.
Flores has been on record stating that he won’t take a head coaching job just to take one, so we’ll see if either the Jaguars or the Jets can impress him enough to get him to make the move. If they each go in a different direction as well, it seems likely that Flores would return to the Vikings for a third season as the team’s defensive coordinator.
We’ll be keeping an eye on the coaching carousel around the league, as well as any Vikings coaches who might get snagged by other teams with new coaches looking to fill out their staffs.
