Jaguars Clips
Mike McDaniel won’t be the Browns’ next head coach, as McDaniel withdrew from the search on Tuesday. But the Browns are getting closer to hiring a replacement for Kevin Stefanski.
Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter will interview with the Browns on Thursday, Albert Breer of MMQB reports, with Jaguars offensive coordinator Grant Udinski interviewing on Friday.
The Browns talked with their own defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz, on Monday and Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken on Tuesday.
Rams passing game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase also remains in the mix in Cleveland.
The Jaguars’ recent home playoff loss to the Bills had an official attendance of 70,250. If the Jaguars host a playoff game next season, there will be far fewer fans present — and not because the team will have reverted to the days of tarps on the upper deck.
Via Garry Smits of the Florida Times-Union, $1.4 billion in upgrades to EverBank Stadium will limit capacity in 2026 to 43,000 fans.
Only the lower bowl at the stadium will be open. And, as Smits explains it, the cabanas and the pool in the stadium likely will be closed for all of 2026, too.
The ongoing work will require the Jaguars to play elsewhere in 2027, with Orlando’s Camping World Stadium the likely (but not yet official) location.
And so the Jaguars won’t return to a complete home-field advantage until 2028, when the fully-renovated Everbank Stadium opens its doors.
Until the next time it’s renovated, that is.
The Ravens will add another head coaching candidate to the list on Monday.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that Jaguars defensive coordinator Anthony Campanile will interview with the team. He is the 16th candidate to meet with the team since they fired John Harbaugh earlier this month.
Campanile has also interviewed for the Dolphins’ head coaching job. He just completed his first season running the defense in Jacksonville and has also worked for the Packers and Dolphins during his time as an NFL assistant.
Ravens General Manager Eric DeCosta said he expected to meet with around 16 coaches in the team’s first round of interviews, so the search process may be moving into its next stage in the near future.
Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud had a disastrous day in New England, with four first-half interceptions in a 28-16 loss. But he wasn’t the first quarterback to have that stat line through two quarters of a postseason game.
In 2022, Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence had four interceptions in the first half of a wild-card game against the Chargers. The Jaguars came back to win the game.
Stroud and Lawrence are the only two quarterbacks with four first-half interceptions in a playoff game since 2000.
Lawrence was the first to throw four interceptions in the first half of a postseason game since Lions quarterback Gary Danielson in the 1982 playoffs against Washington.
Others have had rough days in the postseason. In the 2015 postseason, Cardinals quarterback Carson Palmer had four interceptions and two lost fumbles in a playoff loss to the Panthers. In the 2011 playoffs, Packers quarterback Brett Favre threw six interceptions in a blowout loss to the Rams.
And in Super Bowl XIII, Broncos quarterback Craig Morton had four first-half interceptions against the Cowboys.
For Stroud, who had three turnovers in a wild-card win over the Steelers, his most recent two games put a cloud over the Texans’ offseason. He’ll have plenty of pressure on him in 2026, unless the Texans sign him to an extension in the offseason.
The Browns are moving into their second round of interviews with head coaching candidates and the list is up to six names.
According to multiple reports, the Browns are set to interview former Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel, Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, Rams passing game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase, and Jaguars offensive coordinator Grant Udinski a second time. Browns defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz and Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken are also on the list.
Scheelhaase’s second interview will have to wait at least a week if the Rams beat the Bears on Sunday as coaches for teams in the conference title game are not eligible to interview until after that game has been played. He interviewed with several teams this weekend.
McDaniel is set to interview with the Raiders on Monday and he’s also in the mix for offensive coordinator opportunities. Minter has interviewed with most of the teams that made head coaching changes while Udinski’s only interview thus far has been with Cleveland.
Could the Browns go particularly young at head coach?
It’s a possibility, as the team is interviewing Jaguars offensive coordinator Grant Udinski for the role on Saturday, the team announced.
Udinski, who just turned 30 on Jan. 12, would be the youngest head coach in modern NFL history if he were hired. Rams head coach Sean McVay currently has that distinction, as he was hired just before turning 31 in January 2017.
Udinski has been a fast riser, having joined the Vikings’ staff as assistant to the head coach in 2022, following two years with the Panthers as a coaching assistant.
He was promoted to Minnesota’s assistant QBs coach in 2023 and then added assistant offensive coordinator to his title in 2024.
The Jaguars hired him away to be their offensive coordinator under head coach Liam Coen last February. Udinski did not call plays, as Coen handled that role for Jacksonville.
Udinski is set to be the ninth person to interview with Cleveland for its head coaching vacancy in this cycle.
The NFL previously applied the term “super” to the wild-card round of the playoffs. This year, the ratings were.
Via Sports Business Journal, the six games televised by Fox (which had two), CBS, Prime Video, NBC and ABC/ESPN/ESPN2 attracted an average of 31.9 million viewers.
That’s a 13-percent increase from last year, and the best since the NFL expanded the playoffs from six teams to seven in 2020, which grew the wild-card round from four games to six.
The total average is the best since the four-game format attracted an average of 32.6 million in 2016 for these games: Raiders-Texans, Lions-Seahawks, Dolphins-Steelers, and Packers-Giants. The smallest victory margin that year was 13 points, with an average score of 30-11.
This year, four of the games went down to the wire. Two of the games were lopsided.
The Dolphins would like to speak to one of Mike McDaniel’s former assistants as they look for someone to replace McDaniel as their head coach.
Tom Pelissero of NFL Media reports that the team requested an interview with Jaguars defensive coordinator Anthony Campanile. It’s the first time Campanile’s name has come up in conjunction with a current head coaching vacancy.
Campanile was the Dolphins’ linebackers coach from 2020-2023, so he was on the staff when the team advanced to the playoffs in McDaniel’s first two seasons in Miami.
Campanile left the Dolphins to be the linebackers coach and run game coordinator for the Packers — new Dolphins GM Jon-Eric Sullivan was in Green Bay at the same time — and then jumped to Jacksonville for the 2025 season. The Jags were eighth in points allowed and 11th in yards allowed while winning the AFC South.
After Travis Hunter’s season-ending knee injury, Jaguars head coach Liam Coen said it was too early to say if the team would continue to play him at both wide receiver and cornerback in 2026.
Coen was responding to questions about the physical toll playing both ways may have taken on Hunter and that the team would evaluate their plans at the end of the season. The Jaguars’ season has been over for a few days and General Manager James Gladstone delivered an update on the team’s plans for Hunter at a Wednesday press conference.
Gladstone said the rehab process is going as the team expected and that the first-round pick is “hitting it hard” before moving on to the question of how he’ll be deployed.
“Beyond that, in the role that he’ll play, we still expect him to play on both sides of the ball,” Gladstone said. “Obviously, you can take a peek at expiring contracts on our roster and which side of the ball has more. Obviously at this point, walking into the offseason, corner is a position where we have a few guys who are on expiring contracts. So, by default, you can expect there to be a higher emphasis on his placement.”
Hunte played 324 offensive snaps and 162 defensive snaps in seven appearances before his injury. He had 28 catches for 298 yards and a touchdown on offense to go with 15 tackles on defense.
The numbers are showing up for the 2025 wild-card round.
CBS has announced that 32.7 million viewers, on average, watched Sunday’s Bills-Jaguars game. It’s a 5.1-percent increase over last year’s Broncos-Bills game on CBS, which averaged 31.1 million.
The Bills-Jaguars game peaked at 41.1 million.
Anything less than a 10-percent bump over 2025 is essentially a decline, given the impact of the Nielsen Big Data + Panel metric that has generally boosted all numbers with a greater number of out-of-home viewers.
We’ll see how the rest of the games did. Last year, the wild-card round audience dropped from the year before.
