Current NFL Coaching Trees

By Stephen Juza

July 19th, 2024

As the current training camp comes to a close, we examine the coaching landscape with our updated look at the active coaching trees. While coaching tree influence can be debated in a coach’s career, they can be a fun way to look at league history over time. As hot coaching trends take the league by storm, you can often trace several coaching hires that stem from a team or a philosophy over time as league priorities shift. While inclusion in a tree may be subjective, here’s how the current head coaches group together entering the 2024 season.

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Andy Reid

Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid continues his streak of the largest active coaching tree in the league with four former assistants currently leading NFL teams. The road to the Super Bowl continues to run through him and his former assistants. In 2023, three of the divisions were won by either him or a former assistant, with one other leading their team to a wildcard appearance.

We have written recently about Reid’s continued dominance, with an outside shot at achieving the NFL wins record by the end of his current contract extension. Entering 2024, the Chiefs have an outstanding shot to become the first team in NFL history to win three straight Super Bowls, and while the task is always going to be difficult, the odds appear to be in their favor.

Reid’s coaching tree is one of the most expansive in recent NFL history, with several notable standouts. Current tree branches include John Harbaugh, Todd Bowles, Doug Pederson, and Sean McDermott. Overall, his tree boasts an average win percentage of 55%, 23 playoff wins, and two Super Bowls across the eleven branches.

Kyle Shanahan:

Kyle Shanahan, Reid’s opponent in last year’s Super Bowl, is tied for the second largest active coaching tree. Despite losing talented coaches to other teams, he has kept the team in Super Bowl contention for several years. His latest coach to take over a team, DeMeco Ryans, led the Houston Texans to a division championship in his first season at the top job after winning Assistant Coach of the Year in 2022.

Despite Ryans hiring several 49ers assistants to key positions in his first coaching staff, Shanahan was able to keep the team competitive after the continued emergence of quarterback Brock Purdy. Throughout the 2023 season, both Purdy and running back Christian McCaffrey were talked about in the MVP race, and both players figure to be in the conversation again in 2024.

Beyond Ryans, Shanahan’s current coaching tree includes AFC East rivals Mike McDaniel and Robert Saleh. Both coaches are entering a crucial 2024 season. McDaniel is hoping to avoid another late-season collapse (2-4 in the final games of 2023 and 1-6 in 2022). Saleh is needing the Jets to take a major step forward after starting his head coaching career with three-straight losing seasons.

Sean McVay:

Sean McVay has had some rollercoaster seasons out in Los Angeles. After taking the league by storm as one of the youngest head coaches ever hired, and the youngest to ever reach the Super Bowl, his offensive coaching staff has routinely been hired away as offensive coordinators became head coaches. Despite this, his offense has kept on clicking, culminating in a Super Bowl victory in 2021. McVay has three active coaches in his coaching tree: Zac Taylor, Matt LaFleur, and Kevin O'Connell. While each has had some success in their short careers thus far, Taylor is the shining star of the bunch. After a slow start to his Bengals career, he led the team to a Super Bowl appearance, losing to the Rams in 2021. He followed up that season with 12 wins and an appearance in the AFC Championship game in 2022. LaFleur and O’Connell had success early for their respective teams, but that success has not translated into much playoff success.

Sean Payton:

After returning to the sideline after a brief time away from the NFL, Sean Payton brought a lot of bluster to the Broncos, but without the results to follow. After making a blockbuster trade for quarterback Russell Wilson, what followed was nothing short of disappointment for the team. Wilson didn’t even make it through an entire season as the starting quarterback, and the Broncos limped to the seventh straight losing season.

During Payton’s long career in New Orleans, he had four assistants continue on to be head coaches, and two of them remain actively coaching into 2024. Dan Campbell had an incredibly slow start in the Motor City, going 3-13-1 in his first season and starting 1-6 in his second before turning it around to finish 9-8. Campbell rewarded the Lions’ patience in 2023 with their first division title since 1993. The other active coach, Dennis Allen, replaced Payton in New Orleans but has yet to reach any measure of success, finishing second in the division both years.

Nick Sirianni:

Our least experienced coach in our list is Nick Sirianni. While it’s far from certain if a successful coach will have successful assistants, the inverse is also true: Unsuccessful coaches may still have future successful coaches on their staff. Sirianni is a great example of this. Despite working for numerous underwhelming head coaches, such as Romeo Crennel, Anthony Lynn, and Mike McCoy, Sirianni was able to land a head coaching job with the Philadelphia Eagles. In his three years at the helm, he has led the Eagles to a combined 34-17 record, with a playoff appearance in each season and a Super Bowl appearance in 2022. Following that season, he lost both of his coordinators to the head coaching carousel.

Former offensive coordinator Shane Steichen went to lead the Indianapolis Colts, while former defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon went on to lead the Arizona Cardinals. With just one season under their belt, it’s too early to make any prediction about their future success, but at least Sirianni was able to keep the team moving forward. The Eagles followed up their 14-3 season in 2022 with a 11-6 campaign in 2023. However, both the offense and defense are being led by their third coordinator in three years, posing a unique challenge to Sirianni in 2024.

Mike Tomlin:

One of the notable outliers in this list is Steelers coach, Mike Tomlin. Despite being the longest tenured coach with the same team, he does not have an active coach in his coaching tree. This isn’t due to assistants being unsuccessful head coaches. Only one of his assistants have gone on to be a head coach after spending time on Tomlin’s staff.

The Steelers’ coaching staff has been one of remarkable stability. At the start of his seventeen-year career in Pittsburgh, he inherited several long-time assistants from Bill Cowher’s staff that continued to stick with him for many years, such as Keith Butler, Dick LeBeau, and John Mitchell. Not just that, but many former head coaches, such as Brian Flores or Arthur Smith, have joined Tomlin’s staff after being fired from their own head coaching job.

The result for the Steelers has been one of continued consistency, much to the chagrin of some die-hard Steelers fans. While consistency can be nice, the Steelers have only one season over 10 wins since 2018, their longest stretch of time since 1980-1991.

Honorary Mentions:

Not every coach fits neatly into a coaching tree or has numerous assistants to go on and lead their own team. Some, like Jim Harbaugh, simply have more of a track record in the college game compared to the NFL, and assistants are more likely to stay in the NCAA. Other times, a coach may have a long track record in the NFL, such as Mike McCarthy, but that never translates into coordinators that are hired away.

While coaching trees are nebulous in nature, they can be an intriguing way to map the history of the NFL. As hot coaching trends take over the league, you see many assistants hired away to install their own version of the trend. This has been going on for decades, and undoubtedly will continue into the future.

Methodology: Coaching trees are often open to interpretation, but throughout the website we automatically place any coach in the tree of a head coach up to their first head coaching opportunity. This allows coaches to be in multiple trees, without limiting them to only one coach that they spent the most time with.