This question of whether Doug Pederson is actually thought of as a reasonably competent head coach only because he won Super Bowl LII has come up so frequently of late that it made me wonder where Pederson actually ranks among the coaches who have won a Super Bowl.
The answer, as you might imagine:
Not that great.
In fairness, 34 of the 54 Super Bowls have been won by coaches who ultimately won it more than once: Bill Belichick (six and possibly counting), Chuck Noll (four), Joe Gibbs and Bill Walsh (three), Vince Lombardi, Don Shula, Tom Landry, Tom Flores, Bill Parcells, Jimmy Johnson, George Seifert, Mike Shanahan, and Tom Coughlin (two each). Eight of these coaches are already in the Hall of Fame and a few more are going to get in soon enough. If Marv Levy is in for losing four straight Super Bowls, then it’s going to be pretty tough to keep, say, Shanahan out. Regardless, there is no point in trying to compare Pederson to any of these guys, so we won’t.
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That leaves the one-hit wonders. And just like in music, some of these one-hit guys are Gotye and some of them are Psy.
We aren’t going to try to pick a winner between Pederson and any of the men who won the three Super Bowls after Lombardi won the first two ever played. I don’t know much about Weeb Ewbank, Hank Stram, and Don McCafferty and neither do you.
The following coaches are demonstrably superior to Pederson for the following (unscientific, often subjective) reasons:
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Taking all of those legends, semi-legends, and men still to be legends out of the discussion, here’s who you’re left with: Barry Switzer, Brian Billick, Jon Gruden, Mike McCarthy, and Gary Kubiak. Pederson is better than all of those guys, because none of them beat Belichick and Tom Brady for a championship with Nick Foles at the controls. But Pederson’s pure numbers as a head coach (41 wins, .561 winning percentage, two division wins and that Super Bowl) don’t overwhelm.
If the Eagles somehow lose the NFC East this year despite leading it through eleven weeks to, say, a 6-10 Dallas Cowboys team led by Andy Dalton, Pederson’s ability to dine out on 41-33 could run out faster than anyone could have imagined.