Good morning, I’m Tyler Lauletta from Sports Illustrated’s Breaking and Trending News Team, subbing in for your usual host, Dan Gartland, to catch you up on the weekend. If you’re here, check out our other newsletter SI:CYMI—you might like it in your inbox as well!
On to the sports.
In today’s SI:AM:
🐻Bears surge
🐴Colts ride Taylor
🏫Back to school
A Tale of Two Coaches
Hot seats in the NFL are not created equal.
While football owners tend not to like making coaching changes midseason, they like losing even less. When a season feels as though it is falling out of control, someone has to take the fall—and it’s not going to be the owner.
With the Titans already moving on from Brian Callahan earlier this year, two other seats felt rather hot at the midway point of the season: Mike McDaniel with the Dolphins and Brian Daboll with the Giants.
McDaniel’s stint with the Dolphins started in 2022, and he looked like a home run hire out of the gate, leading Miami to a 9–8 record and their first playoff appearance in six years. Since then, the Dolphins have failed to make the leap from good to great, and appeared to take a step backwards through the first half of the 2025 season.
At 2–7 entering Sunday’s game against the Bills, the Dolphins front office had already made some changes, with general manager Chris Grier “mutually parting ways” with the franchise on Halloween. But McDaniel appears to still have the confidence of team owner Stephen Ross, and insiders have said that McDaniel has not “lost the locker room,” which can be a death sentence for a coach.
Ross’s faith was rewarded on Sunday. The Dolphins put up their best performance of the year, running all over the Bills en route to a 30–13 victory. In the Miami locker room, it was easy to see that, indeed, this was a team that was aligned with its coach, even at 3–7.
Over in the NFC, the Giants had just about as bad of a day as the Dolphins had a good one. New York led for most of the game against Chicago, but watched their day unravel through a string of bad breaks and mistakes. Rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart, who has been an undeniable bright spot for New York in a rough season, suffered a concussion and was forced out of action with the Giants trying to hold on to a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter.
He was replaced by Russell Wilson, who began the season as the team’s starter before being benched in favor of Dart. Wilson didn’t get the job done, and the Giants suffered their fourth straight loss to fall further into the basement of the NFC. It was the fourth time this year that New York had held a 10-point lead on the road—and the fourth time they squandered that lead on the road to ultimately lose.
For Daboll, a part of the same hiring cycle as McDaniel in 2022, the math on the hot seat is a bit murkier. Daboll was named Coach of the Year in his first year on the job, leading the Giants, who had not won more than six games in a year for five straight seasons, to a 9–7–1 record and their first postseason win since Eli Manning was under center.
Since that first season, Daboll has little to show for his efforts. With an overall record of 20–40–1, he also has one of the worst records of any head coach who has held a job for at least 50 games, and fans are growing restless.
While the wins haven’t come, it’s possible that Daboll’s apparently solid relationship with the team’s budding quarterback could be enough to garner one more year on the job. He’ll have to get through this year first, and right now, it’s unclear when Dart will be able to get back under center.
It feels as though both McDaniel and Daboll are secure at least for now, but Sunday’s results certainly turned the temperature dial a bit in opposite directions for the two coaches.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Albert Breer breaks down how Ben Johnson’s three-stage blueprint is accelerating Caleb Williams’s growth. He also has notes on the Bears’ rise, Bills’ collapse, Jets’ response and more from Week 10.
- Jonathan Taylor headlines Week 10 as a real Offensive Player of the Year—and maybe MVP—contender, while Denver’s ongoing offensive struggles land firmly in the ugly column.
- Pat Forde explains how this season’s unpredictability proves a 12-team College Football Playoff delivers all the drama we need—without diluting the field with 16.
- Bryan Fischer reports this week’s chaos leaves the CFP committee with tough calls on the Big 12’s depth, the ACC’s slump and whether a Group of 5 upstart can crash the field.
- Kevin Sweeney examines why former pros like Thierry Darlan and London Johnson are heading to college hoops now and how their arrivals are testing the NCAA’s eligibility rules.
- Pep Guardiola marked his 1,000th game with a ruthless masterclass as Manchester City dominated a flat Liverpool side—raising urgent questions for Arne Slot’s team.
The top five…
…things I saw this weekend.
5. Jonathan Taylor can’t stop scoring three touchdowns per game
4. Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac got down with the USC marching band
3. Anthony Edwards found a young fan in the cheap seats to give his jersey to
2. Every single replay of Omar Cooper Jr.’s ridiculous catch against Penn State
1. This bicycle kick goal through a blizzard in the final of the Canadian Premier League
More on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Two Coaches, Two Seats of Varying Warmth.
