Giants' Mike Kafka trying to get off the short list of coaches who always came up short

There have been 537 different men to serve as a head coach in the NFL and for the various other pro football teams whose records are officially recognized by the league. Mike Kafka is one of them. It’s a list to which he has spent years trying to have his name added.

All but 31 of those 537 have won at least one game. Kafka is one of those 31, too. That’s the list he is desperately trying to get off.

After his four contests as the interim coach of the Giants led to four more losses by a team that can’t seem to figure out how to avoid them no matter who is running things, the place Kafka has reserved in his office and in his mind for the fancy painted game ball he’ll get after that first dub remains empty.

A little more than a month ago, he took over for Brian Daboll hoping to win the full-time job. Now, with three chances left on the schedule, he’s just hoping to win a game.

If he can’t, by the time this season ends, he will be 0-7, giving him the worst winless record of any coach in the Super Bowl era and leaving him among the most hapless half-dozen or so in NFL history.

Worse yet, it could impede his chances of getting another shot at a head-coaching job elsewhere.

Kafka interviewed for eight opportunities to become a head coach in recent years and figured to be atop the lists of many organizations with openings in this upcoming hiring cycle. Being blemished by this stint with the Giants might mean a longer wait for that next call . . .  assuming it ever comes.

It certainly should. Kafka is a sharp guy, a 38-year-old former quarterback who has the developments of Patrick Mahomes and Jaxson Dart on his assistant coaching resume. He also had a hand in turning Tommy DeVito from an undrafted player into a serviceable backup and is the only offensive coordinator who ever called postseason plays for Daniel Jones.

His recent appearances on the in-season edition of “Hard Knocks” have helped his image, too. While his cussing at a team meeting came off as a little out of place, the message he delivered between those naughty words was strong and the clips shown of him on the sideline illustrate a coach who is in control of the moment rather than having the moments control him.

People will recognize that Kafka is coaching uphill during this seven-game audition.

Still, winless is winless. Until it’s not.

“We want to win and there's no substitute for that,” he said. “I think the guys are playing their tails off. I appreciate that. But we’ve got to continue to find a way, continue to push just a little bit more. Where's our edge that we can find to get ourselves over the hump to win a game? We're battling, we're playing hard. That's good, we're going to need that. We're going to need more of that to win.”

Kafka said he is not concerned with how any of this looks for future employers . . .  or his current one, for that matter.

“That would be super-selfish of me to think about that,” he said this week. “Where we're at in this season, my only focus is on the players and the coaches and getting our guys ready to roll. Nothing's more important than this game right now against Minnesota [on Sunday]. So that's really where our mind is at. That's where my mind is at.”

Right now, the worst record of the modern era belongs to Hank Kuhlmann, who went 0-5 as interim head coach of the Cardinals after Gene Stallings resigned in 1989. In this century, John Fassel and Giff Smith went 0-3 as interims with the Rams and Chargers, respectively. They haven’t gotten another head-coaching chance yet, but both still work in the NFL.

Most of the 31 head coaches with an oh-fer record were in the earliest days of the sport and have long since crossed the goal line of their mortality, but among the other winless wonders are some of the most important people in the history of football.

Leo Lyons was one of the founders of the NFL, the owner of the Rochester Jeffersons, right there at the 1920 meeting in Canton, Ohio, when the league’s charter was established. He went 0-7 as a coach.

Jim Crowley was a member of the “Four Horsemen” backfield at Notre Dame and went on to a successful college coaching career that included a nine-year stint at Fordham, where he oversaw the “Seven Blocks of Granite” offensive line with Vince Lombardi as a player. He went 0-10 for the Chicago Rockets in 1947.

Herb Dell was one of the NFL’s first referees, helping to standardize the way the sport is officiated, but was 0-8 as coach of the Columbus Panhandlers.

John “Bull” Karcis was such an imposing and fiery fullback that when the 1938 Pittsburgh Pirates (as they were called before they became the Steelers) needed to release him, no one in the organization had the nerve to tell him to his face. The team simply gave him the wrong departure time for the train they were taking to a road game. Alone at the station, Karcis called the team’s offices and was told by a receptionist that he had been cut while the rest of the Pirates were safely on their way to Boston.

He was picked up by the Giants and was a big part of their 1938 NFL championship team. Then he went 0-8 for the Lions as an interim head coach in 1942.

There is no shame in Kafka being lumped together with them. At least not for now. Everyone starts out with zero wins, just as Lombardi and Don Shula and Bill Belichick did. Most move up from there. Some, however, do not.

So maybe Sunday against the Vikings, or in the coming weeks against the Raiders and Cowboys, or in some future season for some other team, Kafka will leave those nothing-but-losers behind and notch his first victory.

There are 47 head coaches in NFL history who have only one win. That’s the list Kafka is trying to get on next to make it 48.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.