The day after Pete Carroll was fired, I appeared on Puck and Jim on KJR. Jason Puckett brought up a point that I’ve since heard in a couple of other places. John Schneider is known for being unpredictable in the draft. Could the same thing happen with his first Head Coaching appointment?
Initially it was difficult to imagine who that could be. Then the names started to come in, including a few most people hadn’t anticipated. Mike Kafka was on the list of interviewees and he’s since been invited for an in-person meeting this week.
Making him Pete Carroll’s replacement wouldn’t be any more surprising than, say, Patrick Graham or Ejiro Evero. Yet very few people talk about Kafka. He’s the one guy everyone overlooks. He’s an afterthought. I think there’s at least a chance if Schneider is going to pull off a shock, this could be his guy.
He’s not the most charismatic individual. He seems quite low-key, similar to Doug Pederson in that regard. In a recent interview on KJR, a New York based journalist told a story about how Kafka’s own mother, during an interview, referred to him as boring. Yet he’s had something of a meteoric rise through the coaching ranks after a journeyman playing career.
Here’s a quick recap. A former fourth round pick by the Andy Reid-led Eagles, he bounced around six different teams before trying his hand at coaching at alma mater Northwestern. It’s there he decided to commit to a coaching career and after a year, he hooked up with Reid in Kansas City, taking on the role of offensive quality control coach. A year later, in 2018, he was promoted to quarterbacks coach — working with a certain first-year starter called Patrick Mahomes.
After two seasons he added the title ‘passing game coordinator’ and he began to gain buzz around the media as a highly thought of lieutenant of Reid’s. He was also being touted as the heir apparent to Eric Bieniemy, should he be offered a job as a Head Coach. That never happened — so Kafka took the plunge in 2022 to move to New York and reconnect with Brian Daboll, who coached him during a stint in New England. Funnily enough, a year later Bieniemy moved on himself. You have to wonder how vaunted Kafka would be right now if he’d just waited one more year with the Chiefs and replaced Bieniemy.
With the Giants, he called plays (likely a promise that lured him to New York). However, Kafka was a victim of what is appearing to be an increasingly toxic environment under Daboll’s leadership as this article explains:
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