It says a lot about where the Giants and Raiders are right now that both fired coordinators after Week 12… and no one was surprised.

Two bottom-tier teams hit the same panic button within 24 hours. The Raiders dumped offensive coordinator Chip Kelly on Sunday night, and the Giants moved on from defensive coordinator Shane Bowen the next day. Both teams have spent the year hanging out near the basement with the Titans, Jets, and Browns — all fighting for the first pick of the draft.

The Giants are already officially eliminated from playoff contention at 2–10, the first team in the league to get the boot. The Raiders are 2–9 and sitting in that same “we all know what’s coming” zone, but the AFC playoff picture is such a bizarre mess that they’re technically still alive.

And honestly, that’s what makes the timing so interesting. These aren’t playoff pushes. These aren’t must-win streaks. These are two franchises so stuck in neutral that even losing hasn’t looked clean. When your rebuild is supposed to come with some growing pains and instead it looks like full-on chaos, somebody eventually becomes the fall guy — and for the Giants, it's their second this season.

Chip Kelly’s Short, Expensive, and Ugly Stay in Las Vegas

The Highest-Paid Coordinator in Football… for 11 Games

When the Raiders hired Chip Kelly back in early February, the pitch was simple and honestly kind of easy to buy into: pair a veteran, steady hand in Pete Carroll with an aggressive, college-style offensive mind who could jolt a stale unit back to life. Carroll would set the culture, Chip would scheme the fireworks, and Vegas would finally have something resembling an identity on offense.

And they didn’t just hire him — they backed up the Brinks truck. Kelly became the highest-paid offensive coordinator in the entire league at around $6 million per season. That’s not just a nice salary. That’s the kind of paycheck you give someone when you’re saying, “Here, take this whole thing and make it yours.” Vegas handed him the offense, the quarterback in Geno Smith, the shiny new first-round running back in Ashton Jeanty, and basically said, “Do that Ohio State magic again.”

And to be fair, you could talk yourself into it. For all the jokes people love to make about his NFL stints, Kelly’s offense at Oregon genuinely changed the sport. His tempo, spacing, and QB-friendly designs still show up everywhere. And his year at Ohio State wasn’t some nostalgia tour — he helped win a national title and reminded everyone he can still draw up an offense with answers.

So yeah, on paper, it wasn’t the craziest gamble in the world. It just turned out to be the wrong one. Because eleven games later, he’s out of a job.

And it didn’t happen quietly. There was no slow, steady unraveling or “maybe they’ll figure it out after the bye.” The whole thing fell apart in real time, out in the open, with each passing week making it harder to pretend this experiment was going to work. By the time Week 12 wrapped, it wasn’t just a failed partnership — it was a pretty spectacular crash landing.

The Browns Slammed the Door on Chip Kelly’s Tenure

Kelly’s firing came hours after a 24–10 home loss to the Cleveland Browns that felt like the moment everyone finally looked around and said, “Alright, this just isn’t working.” 

To be fair, it wasn't solely the offense's fault. They gave up 24 points to a rookie fifth-round pick quarterback making his first start, so the defense bears plenty of the blame for this one. But it was Kelly's side of the ball that consistently failed to come through week after week. 

The box score for this one was far from pretty:

• Only 10 points scored.

• Just 268 yards of total offense.

• 10 sacks allowed on Geno Smith.

Ten. Sacks.

That’s not just a bad day at the office. That’s the kind of stat line you stare at for a second and wonder if there’s a typo. Geno spent the afternoon either on his back or bracing for impact, and at points it started to feel like the Browns’ pass rush was being let into the backfield on purpose.

It was chaotic, it was ugly, and worst of all, it was predictable.

This was the loudest, most amplified version of issues that have been simmering all season: protection breakdowns, living behind the sticks, no rhythm, no answers, and a coordinator who couldn’t find an adjustment that stuck.

In a season full of warning signs, this was the flashing red light.

A Season of Struggles

You can live with an offense that’s inconsistent or streaky — that happens, even on good teams. But what the Raiders have dealt with this year goes way past a few cold spells. This offense has been consistently awful, the kind of week‑after‑week slog that wears everybody down, especially when you’ve handed the keys (and a massive paycheck) to the guy calling the plays.

And the numbers through Week 12 paint the picture perfectly:

• Tied for last in points per game at 15.0.

• 30th in total yards per game at 268.9.

• 31st in rushing yards per game, failing to crack even 80 a week.

• 16 points or fewer in four of their last five games.

That’s not just bad — that’s the kind of output that gets coordinators fired no matter what stage of a rebuild you’re in.

Geno Smith, who the Raiders paid like a stabilizing veteran presence, has taken a noticeable step backward in this system:

• 13 touchdowns, 13 interceptions.

• 32nd in QBR (29.4).

• Just 5.7 air-yards per attempt.

That’s rough. And it’s not the type of regression you can write off as “growing pains.” That’s a quarterback pressing, forcing throws, and trying to make something happen in an offense that isn’t giving him much help.

The run game hasn’t provided any relief either. Ashton Jeanty still looks like the guy they thought they drafted — he’s got the juice, he’s got the balance, he’s got real NFL talent. But even great backs can only do so much when they’re getting hit at or behind the line every other carry. Sitting at 3.6 yards per attempt, Jeanty has spent most of the season trying to make lemonade with apples behind an offensive line that hasn’t consistently opened lanes.

It wasn’t just bad football — it was the culmination of every issue they’ve been dragging around all season.

Kelly, to his credit, didn’t pretend he’d been wronged or blindsided. He talked to Jay Glazer on Sunday night, saying:

I am grateful for the opportunity with the Raiders, bottom line in this league you have to win. I really loved those players, I’m a huge, HUGE Geno Smith fan, that was one of the best parts of this experience for me, working with Geno and those guys every day. But hey, we gotta win. I get it.

There’s no hiding behind bad luck when your offense is bottom-three in every meaningful category and your quarterback is getting sacked 10 times at home.

The wild part is this: this is the third straight season the Raiders have fired their offensive coordinator mid-season. At some point, it’s not just about the playcaller. It’s about what kind of offense you’re trying to be.

Under this new regime — Tom Brady in the ownership suite, Pete Carroll on the sideline, a big-ticket OC in Kelly — the idea was to create something stable and modern at the same time. Instead, they burned through another coordinator, and we’re back to the same question: what exactly is the plan here?

The Giants and the Art of Blowing Leads

Shane Bowen’s Exit

On the other side of the country, the Giants aren’t dealing with an offense that can’t get off the ground. Their issue is a defense that can’t get off the field — especially in those moments where every fan in the building knows, “Alright, we just need one stop.” And then they don’t get it.

Shane Bowen’s firing came after yet another one of those collapses, this time a 34–27 overtime loss to the Lions, where the Giants somehow turned a double‑digit fourth‑quarter lead into a gut punch that every Giants fan saw coming the second momentum started to swing. It wasn’t shocking. It was just the latest chapter in a season full of the same script: play well enough to build a lead, crumble when it matters, and walk off the field wondering how the game slipped away… again.

The Latest Collapse in a Season Full of Them

Let’s start with the Lions game, because it pretty much summed up everything that’s gone wrong for the Giants this year in one long, painful unraveling.

The Giants were up 27–17 in the fourth quarter, and it felt like things were actually trending in the right direction. The offense wasn’t perfect, but they hung over 500 yards on Detroit, moved the ball with confidence, and stacked enough productive drives to give the defense a real cushion. In a season where nothing has come easy, that should’ve been enough.

Then Jahmyr Gibbs decided he was done watching the Giants pretend they had control.

Detroit chipped away, stole the momentum, and suddenly every Giants fan watching — whether they were at the stadium, on the couch, or pretending not to check the score during Thanksgiving errands — had the same sinking feeling: here we go again.

And sure enough, overtime lasted all of one play. Gibbs took a handoff, found daylight, and hit a gear no one on the Giants' defense has. Sixty-nine yards later, the crowd was stunned, and Gibbs had racked up a ridiculous 219 rushing yards.

If it felt familiar, that’s because it was deja vu wrapped inside deja vu. This wasn’t a one-time collapse or some weird outlier. It was the latest entry in a season filled with meltdowns that defined Shane Bowen’s tenure.

By the time he was shown the door, the Giants had blown five double-digit fourth‑quarter leads. That ties an NFL record for most games in a single year where a team lost after leading by 10+ in the fourth.

You don’t need to be a defensive genius to know what that means. If your unit keeps folding in the exact same scenario — late lead, one stop needed, can’t deliver — eventually the guy calling the plays is going to feel the heat. And for Bowen, the Lions game just turned that heat into a blowtorch.

A Defense Built to Be the Strength… But Isn’t

What makes Bowen’s firing sting even more in New York is that this defense was supposed to be the identity of the team — the one reliable thing this roster could hang its hat on. This wasn’t a situation where the Giants hired a coordinator and handed him a bunch of Day 3 picks and practice‑squad hopefuls. They actually tried to build something real on that side of the ball.

They went out and spent money, added veterans, brought in leadership, and used premium draft capital to bolster every level of the defense:

• Veterans like Jevon Holland and Paulson Adebo were signed to stabilize the secondary.

• They used the No. 3 overall pick on Abdul Carter, betting on him to become the heartbeat of the front seven.

• And surrounding him were former first‑rounders like Dexter Lawrence and Kayvon Thibodeaux, guys who are supposed to set the tone every single Sunday.

In reality? They’ve been one of the worst units in the NFL.

Through 12 games:

• Dead last in rushing defense, giving up a brutal 5.93 yards per carry.

• 30th in total yards allowed, hovering right around 385 per game.

• 30th in points allowed, surrendering 27.8 per game.

Those aren’t “we’re rebuilding” numbers. Those are “how in the world is this happening with this personnel?” numbers. It’s the kind of statistical profile that makes fans lean forward and squint at the screen trying to understand why nothing looks the way it should.

Even the stars haven’t been able to pull the defense out of the mud. Lawrence and Thibodeaux — now seeing less help because of the top‑three pick in Carter — have combined for just 3.5 sacks. The pass rush is inconsistent, the gap fits are all over the place, and the coverage unit has been asked to survive far too many plays where the front doesn’t generate pressure.

A Decision That Had Been Coming

Bowen’s seat has been warming for weeks.

It really traces back to that collapse in Denver, the one where the Giants somehow blew a 19‑point lead and gave up a franchise‑record 33 points in the fourth quarter to the Broncos. That’s the kind of loss fans talk about for years. It was the first time most of the fanbase looked around and went, “Alright, something is seriously wrong here.”

By the time the Lions game rolled around, Bowen wasn’t just on the hot seat — he was basically sitting on a stove. And the biggest reason is that he had already lost the one guy who might’ve shielded him: Brian Daboll, the head coach who brought him in, was fired two weeks earlier. Once Mike Kafka stepped in as interim head coach, the dynamic completely changed. Bowen went from having an ally to working for someone who had no reason to tie his future to Bowen’s.

Kafka said in a press conference on Monday morning:

You know, when I got the job, I [didn't] want to make a lot of rash decisions and jump to anything really quick. I want to have some time to sit back, evaluate it, look at it, and kind of figure out what the best thing to do was. So, you know, wanted to be, wanted to be calculated how I handled it. And, you know, I thought that today was right time.

Bowen’s out. And stepping into the role is Charlie Bullen, the outside linebackers coach — a guy getting his first real crack at running a defense at the NFL level. It’s a massive responsibility and a brutal situation to be dropped into, but at least it gives the Giants a fresh set of eyes on a unit that desperately needed a reset.

Kafka has full faith in the first-time play-caller:

I have a lot of faith in Charlie and in the things that he’s brought from, you know, the pedigree that he brings... I think he’s a smart, smart coach. I think he’s detailed, he’s aggressive, and his room has had a lot of production. Yeah, and I know he’s ready for the task, and so he’s going to jump in. He’s meeting with the staff right now, and these guys will get rolling for him.

When “Rebuilding” Stops Being an Excuse

Both of these firings live in the same uncomfortable space: two teams that weren’t trying to contend this year, but also couldn’t keep pretending everything was fine under the blanket excuse of “well, we’re rebuilding.” There’s rebuilding, and then there’s whatever the Giants and Raiders have been putting on tape.

It’s a weird in‑between space to be in. They’re not tanking on purpose, but they’re not exactly building momentum either. And when you’re stuck there — when your losses start to feel the same every week, and your issues keep repeating like a bad season of a show you can’t cancel — firing a coordinator becomes the one move you can still make to show you haven’t completely checked out.

The Draft Race Nobody Wants to Talk About (But Everyone Sees)

Nobody’s stepping up to the podium and openly campaigning to be the worst team in the league. But you don’t need anyone to say it out loud when the standings are basically screaming it for them.

Right now, the Titans are sitting in the driver’s seat for the top pick, and right behind them is a crowded little parking lot full of the Giants, Raiders, Jets, and Browns — all stuck at two wins.

For the Giants, the firings of Daboll and Bowen essentially turn the rest of this season into one long, awkward audition. Mike Kafka is suddenly juggling two jobs — running the offense and running the entire team as interim head coach. Charlie Bullen is getting tossed straight into the fire as a first‑time defensive play‑caller. And every game they coach from here on out isn’t just about trying to win; it’s a resume line. It’s a chance to prove they should still be here once the season ends and the real evaluating begins.

But here’s the weird part: if they do fix things, even just a little — if the defense tightens up, if they stop melting down in the fourth quarter, if they stumble into a couple of wins — they’re suddenly sliding back in the draft order. That’s always the tug‑of‑war on bad teams. The stuff you do to fix the culture right now… might cost you a crack at a franchise-changing player in April.

And the Raiders? They’re living the exact same reality, just flipped to the offensive side.

If the post‑Kelly offense finds a little rhythm — if Geno stops forcing throws, if the protection settles down, if the run game becomes something more than a weekly chore — they’ll steal a win or two. That’s great for morale, great for the vets, great for keeping the building from drifting into full-on offseason mode before Christmas.

But it’s not great if you’re one of the fans quietly staring at mock drafts, thinking about a quarterback class that gets more interesting with every passing Saturday, and realizing that those “feel‑good” win might be nudging your team further away from the guy you really want under center next year.

You Can’t Tank Your Way Out of Everything

The easy way to look at the Giants and Raiders is to shrug and say, “Who cares? They’re bad, they’re going to be in the top five of the draft, this is all just noise.”

But the way you lose matters.

Both organizations are staring at a long offseason full of hard decisions. Both are in a prime position to draft a franchise-changing player. But if there’s one thing these Week 12 firings remind us, it’s this:

You can’t just tank your way to being good.

At some point, you have to build something real — a defense that can close games, an offense that can function, a coaching staff that players believe in. Until you do, all firing a coordinator really does is buy you a little time and change the name on the office door.

All stats courtesy of NFL Pro.

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