Move over AI engineers and management consultants—America’s hottest job opening right now isn’t sitting in a cubicle in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. It’s on the sidelines of the nation’s favorite sport.
Nine NFL franchises are actively looking for new head coaches, triggering one of the most competitive—and unforgiving—hiring cycles in the U.S. labor market. The job offers eye-popping pay, unmatched visibility, and authority over billion-dollar enterprises. It also comes with a catch: failure is public, fast, and often final.
There’s no formal degree required, though playing college football is often a rite of passage. You’ll need to relocate, but you have your pick of major cities around the country. The travel schedule is intense, though you’ll never have to fly economy. And while contracts vary, it’s safe to say the role all but guarantees millionaire status—assuming you negotiate well and last long enough to collect.
This year’s openings include the Baltimore Ravens, Atlanta Falcons, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers, Miami Dolphins, Las Vegas Raiders, Cleveland Browns, Tennessee Titans, and Arizona Cardinals—each betting that the right hire can quickly change the trajectory of their franchise.
“Success is situational in this league,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay. “Sure, you need some ingenuity and some luck, and that five-year plan you’ve sketched out is adorable, but what you really need is an organization that runs more capably than an eighth grade carwash. There aren’t many.”
That reality may explain why America’s hottest job is also among the most unstable—and why so many teams are back on the market again.
Coach salaries have risen from $300K to $6 million a year—but you’ll need to prove your passion for the job decades before
Unsurprisingly, the road to becoming an NFL head coach usually begins decades before the first contract negotiation.
Most coaches develop an early passion for the sport, often playing football in high school or college before finding a foothold on a professional staff. From there, the climb resembles a corporate ladder: entry-level roles, years of apprenticeship, and frequent job changes—often requiring a move to an entirely new city every few seasons.
Take Mike McDaniel, the recently fired Miami Dolphins head coach. After being a player at Yale, he began his post-college career as a coaching intern in 2005. He spent nearly two decades rotating through assistant roles across multiple franchises before landing his first head coaching job in 2022. On the flip side, Todd Haley, the former head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, never played football in high school or college—yet still reached the league’s top coaching tier.
However varied the path, the payoff at the top is substantial.
Over the last few decades, coaches have become more like assets to franchises—and thus their average salaries have risen from $300,000 to $6 million a year, according to data compiled by Sportico and Pro Football Reference reported by The New York Times.
At the very top of the market, pay climbs much higher. Current Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, the league’s highest-paid coach, earns an estimated $20 million per year. Contracts also might include performance incentives tied to benchmarks such as playoff appearances or Super Bowl runs.
But that compensation comes with significant risk. The extreme job insecurity and high probability of public failure makes high salaries operate as a form of “hazard pay,” according to Minjung Kim, an assistant professor of sport management at Texas A&M University.
“While head coaches gain significant brand value and visibility, they operate in environments where performance is evaluated publicly, timelines are highly compressed, and job security is often shaped by factors beyond their direct control, such as injuries, roster construction, or organizational instability,” she told Fortune.
“High compensation reflects the intensity of the role but does not eliminate its volatility, underscoring how inherently unstable and demanding these positions are.”
How the expectations of an NFL head coach compare to being a top CEO
At its core, the head coach job is simple: win football games. But in practice, coaches are expected to act as the ultimate motivator, recruiter, and tactician—while serving as the first and loudest recipient of blame when things go wrong.
The effectiveness of a head coach has shifted in recent years from being judged primarily by their charisma, intuition, and coaching staff to what Kim calls the “coaching intelligence triad”: having cultural, digital, and emotional intelligence.
“In contemporary sport organizations, head coaches must lead diverse groups, integrate data and technology into fast decision-making processes, and regulate emotions under intense pressure,” she told Fortune.
Oftentimes, the skills needed to be a successful coach are equated to those of a CEO.
“Like CEOs, [coaches] should be concerned with long-term strategic planning and decision-making, managing the cultural and emotional well-being of the team and acting as the face of the organization,” wrote sports commentator and former NFL player Domonique Foxworth. “Those things don’t sound like coaching, but they have as much of an impact on a team’s success as game planning.”
Failure to take stock of the bigger picture responsibilities can ultimately lead to indecisiveness at important moments, disgruntled players, and harmful leaks to the media, Foxworth said.
“Too many head coaches underestimate the importance of their new CEO duties and focus on the side of the ball that brought them success,” Foxworth added. “The impact of that on a team is not unlike what happens in other organizations: There is no strategic cohesion, long-term awareness and a culture of apathy develops.”
Kim echoed that modern head coaches and corporate executives both need a clear vision and adaptability. Yet the relentless scrutiny week after week makes sports leadership “one of the most visible and psychologically demanding forms of organizational leadership today.”
