Sydney Roosters assistant coaches Adam O'Brien and Craig Fitzgibbon and Melbourne Storm assistant Jason Ryles are expected to be among the frontrunners to replace Nathan Brown at the Knights at the end of the season.
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Brown's shock decision on Tuesday to walk away from the coaching job after four years at the helm will see the Knights immediately enter the market for a replacement.
Given the roster includes five current Origin players in Mitchell Pearce, Kalyn Ponga, David Klemmer, Tim Glasby and Daniel Saifiti and a host of quality juniors set to make their mark, there will be no shortage of interest in the job.
Despite not having been a head coach at NRL level, O'Brien, Fitzgibbon and Ryles are all highly regarded and have been spoken about internally by Knights officials over the past 48 hours.
There are also a host of ex-NRL coaches without a job headed by the likes of Anthony Griffin, Shane Flanagan, Geoff Toovey, Trent Barrett and Garth Brennan, whose names will be bandied about in the coming weeks.
Griffin was on the Knights' shortlist back in late 2015 and was interviewed when Brown was appointed coach following the sacking of Rick Stone. He is understood to have withdrawn from the race late in the piece when offered the job at Penrith.
Flanagan's coaching future is clouded with the former Sharks coach, who took the club to a premiership in 2016, still deregistered by the NRL and given no indication of when he will be allowed to resume his career.
But there is a strong chance the Knights may not go after a recycled coach who has been off-loaded elsewhere and instead target a rookie. Fitzgibbon is a former Roosters premiership winner who played 19 Tests for Australia and coached NSW Country Origin on two occasions.
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He is currently on the Roosters staff under Trent Robinson and is regarded as a future NRL coach in waiting.
The same goes for O'Brien, who spent 12 years under Craig Bellamy at Melbourne Storm before linking with the Roosters as their attacking coach this year and already has support for the Knights job. So highly regarded is O'Brien in Melbourne, he was awarded life membership of the Storm before he departed for Sydney.
The fact Ryles knocked back an assistant's role at the Knights this season may count against him.