New England's Jerod Mayo and Jacksonville's Doug Pederson are two NFL coaches who are out of a job, though a handful of other teams decided to stay with the status quo in the days following the NFL's regular season.
The Tennessee Titans — who own the No. 1 overall pick in the upcoming draft — shook up their front office on Tuesday, firing GM Ran Carthon after two seasons. The week after the season's final game is usually a tough stretch for coaches and front office staff as underachieving teams move quickly to make changes.
Here is a look at the major moves around the league:
Mayo was fired on Sunday after the team's win over the Buffalo Bills, ending his tenure after just one season and a 4-13 record. The move means the Patriots will embark on another rebuild as the team tries to build an identity following the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady era.
On Monday, Patriots owner Robert Kraft took a big chunk of the blame for Mayo's quick tenure.
“This whole situation is on me. I feel terrible for Jerod. Because I put him in an untenable situation,” Kraft said. “I know he has all the tools as a head coach to be successful in this league. He just needed more time before taking the job.”
Pederson is out as Jacksonville’s head coach after the franchise’s “best team assembled” won just four games, though owner Shad Khan did opt to retain general manager Trent Baalke. The Jaguars have lost 18 of their past 23 games dating back to last season.
“It’s unfortunate because at the end of the day we all had a hand in it,” Jaguars receiver Christian Kirk said. “I have a ton of respect for Doug. He’s made me a better football player, better man. I think he’s one of the better coaches to have coached in this league, and it’s just unfortunate the way that things went.”
The 56-year-old Pederson went 23-30 with Jacksonville, a far cry from the Super Bowl-winning coach Khan thought he hired in February 2021. Pederson led the Eagles to their first Super Bowl title in 2018.
Carthon is out for the Tennessee Titans after the team went 9-25 in his two seasons, though coach Brian Callahan will be back for a second season.
Carthon was fired Tuesday, two days after the Titans finished with a 3-14 record. The Titans introduced Carthon as the general manager in January 2023.
Tennessee has the top overall pick in April's draft.
Tennessee controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk said Chad Brinker, president of football operations, will lead the search for a new GM. Brinker also will have full roster control.
“I am deeply disappointed in our poor win-loss record during this period, of course, but my decision also speaks to my concern about our long-term future should we stay the course,” Strunk said in her statement. “I love this team more than you can imagine. To our fans: we know this level of performance isn’t acceptable."
Not every team that had a rough year has decided to change directions — the Giants announced on Monday that they're keeping coach Brian Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen despite a 3-14 record this season.
“We came to the decision that staying with both of them is the best course of action for us right now,” said John Mara, the team president and co-owner. "I think in Brian’s case, he was the Coach of the Year two years ago. That didn’t disappear all of a sudden. I still believe he can do that again."
The Indianapolis Colts are staying with their current regime after owner Jim Irsay said coach Shane Steichen and general manager Chris Ballard will return.
The Miami Dolphins are also sticking with their leaders: Owner Stephen Ross said coach Mike McDaniel and general manager Chris Grier will return after an 8-9 season.
“As we now look towards 2025, our football operations will continue to be led by Chris Grier and Mike McDaniel with my full support,” Ross said on X. “Their positive working relationship is an asset to the Dolphins, and I believe in the value of stability.
“However, continuity in leadership is not to be confused with an acceptance that status quo is good enough.”
The coaching movement might not be over. The Dallas Cowboys are one of a few teams that is still mulling the next move following a 7-10 season that put coach Mike McCarthy on the hot seat.
Three NFL coaches were fired during the regular season, including Chicago's Matt Eberflus, New Orleans' Dennis Allen and the New York Jets' Robert Saleh.
AP Pro Football Writers Dennis Waszak Jr. and Teresa Walker and AP Sports Writers Kyle Hightower and Michael Marot contributed to this report.
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo departs after answering questions following an NFL football game against the Buffalo Bills, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Foxborough, Mass. Mayo was fired shortly after the news conference. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson pauses during a news conference after an NFL football game against the Indianapolis Colts, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Indianapolis. The Colts won 26-23 in overtime. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson pauses during a news conference after an NFL football game against the Indianapolis Colts, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Indianapolis. The Colts won 26-23 in overtime. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
Bending to the political headwinds of the incoming Trump administration, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with “community notes” written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk's social platform X.
Announcing the policy shift Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the latest election heralded "a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
The tech giant said expert fact checkers have their own biases and too much content ends up being fact checked, and that it is pivoting to crowdsourcing contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post. He said the new system will be phased in over the coming months.
Meta is among several tech companies apparently working to get in Trump's good graces before he takes office later this month. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund in December, and Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at the his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, bringing together the Facebook founder and the former president who was once banned from his social network.
Meta this week appointed Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a familiar figure in Trump’s orbit, to its board of directors. Kaplan, a former adviser to George W. Bush, was announced as the head of Meta’s global affairs on Jan. 2.
Meta began fact checks in December 2016 after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, in response to criticism that “fake news” was spreading on its platforms. For years, the tech giant boasted it was working with more than 100 organizations in over 60 languages to combat misinformation.
The Associated Press ended its participation in Meta’s fact-checking program a year ago.
The tech company said the new system will allow “more speech” by lifting restrictions on discussions of certain mainstream topics, such as immigration and gender, and focus on curbing illegal and “high severity violations," including terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has "gone too far" and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
“Meta is repositioning the company for the incoming Trump administration,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. "The move will elate conservatives, who’ve often criticized Meta for censoring speech, but it will spook many liberals and advertisers, showing just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go to win Trump’s approval.”
In a shift driven largely by Musk, third-party fact-checking “has gone out of fashion among social executives,” Enberg added. "Social platforms have become more political and polarized, as misinformation has become a buzzword that encompasses everything from outright lies to viewpoints people disagree with.”
X's approach to content moderation has led to the loss of some advertisers, but Enberg said Meta’s “massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulate it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus.” Even so, she said, any major drop in user engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business.
Meta's quasi-independent Oversight Board, which acts as a referee of controversial content decisions, said it welcomes the changes and looks forward to working with the company "to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible."
Reaction to Meta's changes fell largely along political lines.
On X, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio called it a “huge step in the right direction.”
Others were skeptical and said the move wasn’t enough to make them trust Zuckerberg.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Rep. Mike Lee of Utah wrote on X. “Can any of us assume Zuckerberg won’t return to his old tricks?”
On Trump’s Truth Social platform, users didn’t hold back from their ongoing criticism of the Meta CEO, calling him a “snake” and “the enemy.”
Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and a former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the change is “by no means perfect, and fact-checkers have no doubt erred in some percentage of their labels.”
He called the change at Meta “a choice of politics, not policy,” and warned: "Depending on how this is applied, the consequences of this decision will be an increase in harassment, hate speech and other harmful behavior across billion-user platforms.”
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump stands on stage with former first lady Melania Trump, family members and Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, during the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
FILE - An "X" sign rests atop the company's headquarters in downtown San Francisco on July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)
FILE - Elon Musk speaks at Life Center Church in Harrisburg, Pa., on Oct. 19, 2024. (Sean Simmers/The Patriot-News via AP, File)
FILE - Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
