The NFL season is nine weeks old, and something unprecedented, unnerving, and frankly a little rude is happening: nobody has fired anybody.
Not one head coach has been let go this season. Last year at this time the league had already conducted its autumn ritual — the Titans parted with Brian Callahan on Oct. 13, the first of last season’s nine firings, a calendar event about as reliable as daylight saving time and about as welcome. This year the calendar has a hole in it, and the men whose livelihoods depend on that hole are starting to sweat through their suits.
Which brings us to Dale Rusk.
Rusk is a sports agent who represents head coaches — a job title that sounds glamorous until you understand the business model, which is, plainly put: other people get fired, and then his clients get rich. He has represented two coordinators who became head coaches on the strength of someone else’s termination, a promotion path he describes as “organic growth.”
Rusk, 54, has a client who is currently 0 and 5. In a normal October, that record is two job offers and a buyout number with a comma in it. This October, it is what Rusk calls “a conversation we keep having with ourselves.”
He has done everything the season requires. He has drafted his client’s “new chapter” statement, the one that begins “I’m grateful to the organization” and ends by implying an ownership group made a beautiful mistake. He has pre-booked a flight to a city where a vacant job might exist. He has assembled a press kit with the headshot, the season stat sheets, and the one photo where his client looks intense near a whiteboard.
The feeling is not unique to Rusk. “It’s coming,” one NFL agent who represents coaches told Front Office Sports this week, in a sentence repeated across the industry like a prayer for rain. Even owners sound spooked: Josh Harris, whose Commanders are struggling, used a public appearance this month to apologize to his wife for “a bad Sunday” — a man standing at the edge of a cliff that, historically, he would already have jumped off, discovering that the ground underneath the tradition has quietly gone.
Analysts have theories. Competitive balance means more coaches look employable than usual. New rules sped up the game but slowed the ax. Some owners, having paid coaching-tree protection money for years, appear to be calling their own bluff. None of these theories comfort the men whose contracts are measured in weeks of patience.
The ecosystem, meanwhile, is idling. Firing-season forecasting — a real content economy of segments, hot-seat boards, and “hot sheet” newsletters — is producing its best product into an empty year. Two networks have already held segments about a firing that hasn’t happened, with the energy of weathercasters describing a hurricane that keeps politely turning at sea.
Rusk keeps the press kit in his trunk. He drives past the league office on the way home some nights, not for any reason, and tells himself that’s coincidence. His client’s team plays on Sunday. If they lose badly — and the mathematics of his industry say they might — October will finally do what October does.
Until then, the most reliable calendar event in professional football remains unconfirmed, the statements remain in their folders, and everyone in the room keeps saying the same three words like a man watching the sky.