Reid Em and Weep? Picking the Top Ten Coaches in the NFL

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Mina Kimes** (0:31)
The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny, the only NFL podcast where one of the hosts considers Elliot Wolfe to be an ancestor. That's Lenny, The Mina Kimes. Today, speaking of Elliot Wolfe, we are doing our annual Top 10 Coaches and Top 5 GMs. Elliot Wolfe is not one of them, spoiler, but honestly, he's done pretty good lately.
Ranking, and I am joined by my friend, he hasn't been on the show in quite some time, host of the Ringer NFL show, Sheil Kapadia. Welcome back to the show.

**Sheil Kapadia** (1:01)
Thanks for having me. It's fun going through all these coaches and GMs and being like, is there really a difference between some of these guys or did they luck into a great quarterback? So I'm curious to see what you think about a lot of them.

**Mina Kimes** (1:13)
Coaches list this year was agonizing for me. I found it, and I had to do some soul-searching, Sheil, because, okay, so the way we are doing this, for those who have not listened to this before, the coaches, it's just like a pure power ranking. So it is not, who would you pick to win a game right now? Although when I talked to you about that a little bit, when we talked about my top three, it is not of all time. So it is not like a legacy. It is, we are literally trying to combine everything and just say, these are the top 10 coaches in the NFL. Now I looked at my list the last year and the year before, and one thing I realized was I skewed too much towards legacy. And I had two guys who got fired in Tomlin and Harbaugh, which isn't to say they're not good coaches. And I do think Harbaugh will still be good. But I did feel after reviewing the tape, so to speak, that maybe I was a little bit too nervous to pick some of the young guns, some of the offensive masterminds. How do you feel about that balance?

**Sheil Kapadia** (2:10)
Yeah, I feel like I looked at it like, you hand me a team this year, you say, Sheil, you're the owner, you're the GM, whatever. What coach do you want? That's kind of good because those are the best coaches right now. Like, you don't know who your quarterback is. You don't know what your roster is going to look like. You don't know who your GM is. Just who do you think gives you your goal is to win the most games this year? Because we could look at it. Who's the best coach for the next five or 10 years? Like you said, who has the best resume? So you try to combine it all. I tried to take some swings.
Let's see, you know, I found there were like seven or eight that I felt good about. And then there was this next year where I'm like, hmm, I don't know who's going to make the cut for the last two or three here.

**Mina Kimes** (2:51)
So I texted you, we didn't share a list beforehand. Now we're going to start. So I go, and this is apparently not everyone is this, I go one, I start with one and I go down with my lists.
I was like, I have a top three and I keep rejiggering the order. And you said, oh, I only have top two. So already we're a little bit at odds here. I suspect we're going to have similar guys in the top. I'll just give you my top three in the order that I landed on. And again, agonized over this, remix them a million times.
I went my top three and I, this is a tear, I felt very clear top three. Sean McVeigh, Mike McDonald, Kyle Shanahan. What did you do? Who was your top two?

**Sheil Kapadia** (3:35)
All right, we had the same three.
I didn't know that Kyle Shanahan was a lock for three. So we can have that conversation. McVeigh and McDonald, I thought have to be in the top three. I did have McVeigh first, but I thought about it. I definitely think there's a case for McDonald to be in the top spot.