According to several sources, the Miami Dolphins are finalizing plans to make Jeff Hafley their next head coach. Hafley earned the gig after just two seasons with the Green Bay Packers as their defensive coordinator. There, he turned around a unit that struggled under Joe Barry and produced a defense that ranked sixth in scoring in 2024 and 11th in 2025.<\/p>\n
Obviously, that\u2019s tough news for the Packers, who had made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons with the help of Hafley, although both of those seasons were cut short by losses in the Wild Card. Hafley was well-regarded by both analysts and fans alike.<\/p>\n
The Packers\u2019 pain is the Lions\u2019 gain, but this news has an even further benefit to the Detroit Lions organization. Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard also interviewed for this Dolphins head coaching gig earlier on Monday. This means Sheppard is in line to return to Detroit for his second season as the defensive coordinator\u2014although with so many head coaching vacancies still out there, nothing is certain. At the time of this writing, there are no reports that Sheppard has interviewed for any of the remaining head coaching jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like Shep. Shep has really grown this year,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cI think with any first-time coordinator, first-time coach, you go through a lot. You learn along the way. You make adjustments. You find things that you believe in. You throw other things to the side that don\u2019t fit you. You find ways to adjust, and it\u2019s just part of the process. I think Shep\u2019s done a damn good job. There\u2019s always going to be things that you learn from this job, but I like Shep.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"According to several sources, the Miami Dolphins are finalizing plans to make Jeff Hafley their next head coach.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2071],"tags":[146,113,37982,153,2506,7,147,6,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-690918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-detroit-lions","8":"tag-detroit","9":"tag-detroit-lions","10":"tag-detroit-lions-coaching-news-rumors","11":"tag-detroit-lions-news","12":"tag-detroitlions","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-lions","15":"tag-nfl","16":"tag-nfl-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115926943462546483","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}