What Do We Make of Eric Bieniemy’s Body of Work Now?

The NFL regular season has officially concluded, which means Black Monday has unfortunately arrived. And as the tea leaves suggested, Washington Commanders head coach Ron Rivera has officially lost his job.

And at the risk of immediately turning the page from the former head coach, the move puts offensive coordinator and assistant head coach Eric Bieniemy in the spotlight. Will he remain in the nation’s capital? Does he have a shot at the Commanders’ head coaching gig? Will he take the top job elsewhere?

The answers to those questions will ultimately become clear, but right now, we’re somewhat in limbo. Bieniemy, despite his best efforts, remains something of an NFL enigma.

No One Was Sure What Bieniemy Contributed in KC

Before moving forward, let’s turn the clock back a bit. Before he headed east to Washington, Bieniemy served as the Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator. And while you might think that working alongside Andy Reid, running a unit boasting Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce and winning two Super Bowl rings would look great on a resume, things weren’t that straightforward.

EB was the coordinator, but it’s an established truth within the NFL that Reid is an offensive genius who handles the play-calling. That was viewed as a major strike against the former running back; if he wasn’t running things in-game, how could anyone be sure what he’d do as the main man?

That, rightly or wrongly, explains why Bieniemy made a rarely-seen lateral move and took his current position as the Commanders’ offensive coordinator. “Away from Reid,” his thought process presumably went, “I can show what I can really do.”

Bieniemy’s Year In Washington Was a Mixed Bag

Turing the page ahead to Washington, the coordinator didn’t get off to the smoothest start. There were rumblings that he was too hard on the Commanders during training camp, but things did initially work on the field. The team opened the season with two wins and the offense did more than their fair share of the work.

A glowing Andscape piece about Bieniemy had shattered the narrative that he did little more than hold Reid’s clipboard. It featured a quote from Washington’s president calling the coordinator “the single biggest accelerant to the culture change Ron was brought in to do.” There was also a reference to EB’s late nights of film study and his efforts to understand the Washington offense.

But then the worm turned, and the losses started piling up. The Commanders lost three in a row, before beating the Falcons. They then lost two more games ahead of a Week 9 win over the Patriots. That would be the last win they earned all season.

Quarterback Sam Howell, who looked like Bieniemy’s man, was ultimately benched. The coordinator essentially said that the quarterback wasn’t good enough to retain the starting job; he ultimately finished the 2023 campaign with 3,946 yards and 21 touchdowns, but he also threw 21 interceptions. The second-year signal-caller also absorbed 65 sacks.

Did Bieniemy, who gets some of the credit for helping to develop Patrick Mahomes, take Howell to his ceiling? Or is it shallow praise to say you elevated a quarterback to a place where he ultimately wasn’t good enough?

And, when push comes to shove, working with a quarterback is a key part of the modern NFL. If a team is looking for a new head coach, they probably don’t have a franchise player under center; to phrase things differently, you’re probably not going to have a Mahomes to work with at each stop of your career.

Can Bieniemy still find success with that lesser talent? Or, if the coach were to remain in Washington or join a team like Carolina, do you trust him to be the driving force developing your franchise quarterback?

Howell, for what it’s worth, offered a glowing review of the coach. But how do you reconcile that anecdotal evidence with the numbers?

Returning to the 2023 season, the Commanders sat near the bottom of the NFL with a shade over 312 yards per contest. The ground game was especially weak, as you might expect given the offensive line’s inability to protect Howell.

How do you grade the offensive coordinator for that performance? Do you argue that he was set up to fail thanks to a faulty foundation (a leaky offensive line)? Or do you say that it’s EB’s job to make the best of his unit and find a way to succeed?

Similarly, consider the coach’s quotes from late December.

“We’re not playing very well right now,” Bieniemy explained. “But one thing that I do appreciate, guys are playing hard. We just not executing. It’s not a lack of effort. We just need to play better. And when we’re playing pretty good collectively as one unit, we have a chance.

“We haven’t quite given ourselves the best opportunity over the past few weeks. So, we got to continue chopping wood. We got to continue addressing those issues, and we got to continue making sure that our guys are going out there and executing exactly what we want.”

Is effort the bare minimum and something that shouldn’t be praised, especially when you’re theoretically responsible for execution as the assistant head coach? Or is it a sign that the offense is fighting through an overall lack of talent?

We can also look at Rivera’s quotes about his staff member as something of a black box.

“I think he can be,” Rivera said, when asked if Bieniemy could be a head coach in 2024. “I mean, you never know what people are thinking. I think the biggest thing for Eric is the things that he’s learned. And hopefully he’ll take those things and continue to use them and help him grow. But we’ll see.

“I mean, you never know what people are thinking or what people are looking for. It’s not necessarily just what has happened now as much as it’s about the body of work. And I think that sometimes speaks for itself. It’s hard to tell what people are thinking.”

And while coach-speak is rarely transparent, that quote can be read in two very distinct ways. If you doubt Bieniemy’s chops, then you’ll probably key in on the “I think” and notice that Rivera wasn’t very committal. If he thought his coordinator was deserving of a head coaching job, he could have been more direct.

But on the other hand, you could contend that Rivera, one of the league’s few minority bench bosses, understands the reality of getting the top job. If there’s no owner who wants to hire you, that’s ultimately what matters.

(And, on the subject of Bieniemy’s race, we’ve also heard both sides. Some have suggested that he simply hasn’t received an opportunity where others would have; others, like LeSean McCoy, said that race is irrelevant.)

But now we’re at a place where we’ve been before. It’s the NFL offseason, and there are vacancies. At least one team is rumored to be interested in Bieniemy, and you’d assume he’d at least be considered for Washington’s top spot.

Will the long-time coordinator finally get his chance? Only time will tell. But until we see EB in the top job, he’s going to remain one of the NFL’s coaching enigmas. You can see just about whatever you want by looking at him and his body of work.