Coaching Notes: Giants, Chargers, Lions

With less than a month remaining in the NFL regular season, we’re getting to that time of year when every poor performance by a sub-.500 team can raise questions about a head coach’s job security. A few coaches, in particular, are on the hot seat after bad Week 13 showings, so let’s round up the latest on a handful of situations around the NFL….

• The Giants aren’t the sort of team that would fire a head coach – particularly one with two Super Bowl wins under his belt – for clock management. However, at some point, after so many terrible losses this season, “the accumulation of disappointment erodes even the most formidable reservoir of goodwill,” writes Dan Graziano of ESPN.com in his discussion of Tom Coughlin.
• Giants co-owners John Mara and Steve Tisch may love Coughlin, but the head coach is making their choice on his future easier with a series of bad losses, writes Gary Myers of the New York Daily News.
• Jordan Raanan of NJ.com identifies 13 potential head coaching candidates for the Giants in the event that the team decides to replace Coughlin at season’s end.
• Wholesale changes to the Chargers‘ coaching staff are necessary, according to Eric D. Williams of ESPN.com. That could mean parting ways with head coach Mike McCoy, though Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune hears from a highly-placed source that team management has mulled the possibility of retaining McCoy and making changes to his staff on both offense and defense.
• While the Lions would like to get a permanent general manager in place before deciding on the future of head coach Jim Caldwell, sticking to that plan may result in the team missing out on some top candidates, as Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press observes. At the very least, the club likely wouldn’t be involved in the first interview window for assistants on teams with first-round byes.