In honor of the Packers releasing their coaching staff list prior to the month of April this off-season, we're gonna go over which proverbial Titanic deck chairs the inferior North teams moved around.

Vikings

The big news is that the Vikings didn't make any coordinator-level changes. Sadly, that means Brian Flores will be back. Historically, I've been hot or cold about Flores - when he's on, there's close to no one better, but when teams figure out his weirdness he sometimes takes an off-season to make big changes. It's interesting that Flores came back, considering the Vikings lost his right-hand man, Daronte Jones, and there is a mega talent suck happening on the field. As we've covered over the last few weeks. 

The Vikings added a few semi-big names to help Flores. Ryan Nielsen, who interviewed for the Packers DC job that went to Joe Barry, comes from the Dennis Allen tree and is a two-time just OK defensive coordinator for the Falcons and then Jags. He was also a co-DC for the Saints when Dennis Allen was the head coach - that was a fake coordinator job. Gerald Alexander was hired to coach defensive backs. 

On the offensive side of things, the team promoted Josh McCown to pass game coordinator from QB coach, despite a horrific year for the team's QBs last season. And hired Frank Smith as assistant head coach. Smith was MIke McDaniel's OC in Miami. 

I'm sure Smith will add some ideas to the offense, maybe from his experience coaching a small QB who gets hurt every other week. 

Bears

The Bears did replace a coordinator, though it probably isn't that impactful of a move. Decla, Doyle, the wunderkind 29-year-old OC took the Raven's OC job and was replaced by Press Taylor, who was already pass-game coordinator. Taylor comes from the Doug Pederson tree, where Doyle came from the Sean Payton tree. Ben Johnson doesn't come from either of those trees, unless you count his time with Dan Cambpell as the Payton tree, so it's unlikely this change will have an overhaul effect on the offense, but we could see some more spread concepts than we did before. 

Eric Studsville was hired to replace Eric Bieniemy, who returned to Kansas City as the offensive coordinator again. Studsville has been in Miami the past four years, under Mike McDaniel. Again, I doubt we're going to see any big offensive concept changes because of his hire; Ben Johnson runs the offense.

The Bears made two more offensive additions to non-material positions and made no changes to the defensive staff.

Lions

We've been waiting for the OC news here since week 10 when Dan Campbell took over play-calling and effectively fired John Morton last season. There was sort of a two-tier replacement for Morton. Former Cardinals offensive coordinmator Drew Petzing was hired as offensive coordinator, and Mike Kafka was hired as pass-game coordinator, and some believe OC in waiting. 

Petzing came up in the league working for Kevin Stefanski and runs a two-tight-end heavy offense. He came onto that position with a bang in 2024, running t a top-8 offense, but did not follow that up with a good season last year. Many question why he couldn't get Marvin Harrison Jr. (the highest-rated WR prospect in years) more involved in the offense in Arizona. The Stefanski tree isn't part of the Shanahan tree, but it's certainly adjacent to it - just like Ben Johnson's offense was. 

Mike Kafka came up under Andy Reid in Kansas City and then spent the past few years under Brian Daboll in New York. Daboll ran the offense in New York, and various OCs, along with Andy Reid, ran it in Kansas City. Interestingly, none of those guys has a run-heavy or tight-end-heavy approach. Kafka was a rising star in Kansas City and was instrumental in training up Pat Mahomes before his star sort of dulled over the past few years of weirdness with the Giants. 

There's been a lot of speculation that Campbell is hedging his bet by having Kafka on the staff - if he makes a quick decision to cut Petzing, like he has done twice now with his OCs, Kafka is waiting in the wings to take over, and Campbell won't have to.