End of an Era… Or So I Thought
It’s over, it’s done.
After a decade and a half of swooping in and plucking the top college
football coaches from University campuses, the NFL’s experiment w/ college
football coaches should officially be terminated. Hopefully in the last decade NFL GM’s and
owners have learned that success in the college game doesn’t translate to
success in the pros, but in fact usually leads to painful, agonizing
failure.
Nick Saban’s
decision to dump the Miami Dolphins for the
After Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer’s brief
success as Dallas Cowboys head coaches in the early to mid-90’s, it seems NFL
success suddenly appeared more attractive to college coaches and vice versa,
thus beginning a tumultuous decade and a half coaching carousel involving the
NFL and NCAA. They were the launching
pads for a generation of Nick Sabans, Butch Davis’
and Steve Spurriers.
The NFL is a copy cat league and this was the new blueprint for a
champion.
A short list of prominent coaches who
have gone from college and to the pro’s beginning in 1995 include Saban, Steve Spurrier, Butch
Davis, Pete Carroll, and Dennis Erickson who collectively compiled a 511-190
career coaching record along with 7 national titles. Their collective records as NFL head coaches
are a dismal 124-159.
And yet
even at this moment USC’s Pete Carroll and
Why Pete
Carroll would even consider leaving his utopia at USC for the unstable Miami
Dolphins is an enigma to me. In the six
seasons since he took over as head coach he has cornered the market in
Who knows? If this
trend had run it’s course 30 years earlier maybe Woody Hayes and Bear Bryant
would have also jumped at the opportunity only to toil in NFL obscurity and
return to NCAA football disgraced instead of winning national titles on the at
Alabama and Ohio St. respectively. These
are the scenarios that played out for Saban, Spurrier and
Instead of continually building their programs until they
reached legendary status they’ve tainted their legacies. They bought into the NFL hype and bottomed
out. Spurrier
and
Contracts
aren’t a factor as the top coaches are paid on par with their NFL counterparts
as evidenced by Nick Saban’s huge payday at
His previous stint in the NFL as head coach of the New
England Patriots wasn’t exactly memorable as his teams gradually worsened from
division champs to 6-10 cellar dwellers in his three seasons before he was
eventually dismissed. Taking history
into account why is he even being considered for another NFL head coaching
position?
Most baffling to me is Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz,
whose only NFL experience was a short stint as an offensive line coach with the
Browns and Ravens, being rumored in various head coaching vacancies for the
second consecutive off season. From the
beginning, the mistake that NFL GM’s made was not recognizing the differences
between the professional and college game.
Let’s face it, the criteria for a great college football a
coach differs from the NFL’s definition
1)
Recruiting great players is often emphasized more than game
planning. While X’s and O’s are still
vital to a coach’s success it sure doesn’t hurt to have a few former high
school All-Americans on your roster.
Meanwhile in college there’s no limit on the number of All-Americans and
five-star recruits a coach can recruit.
In the NFL each team is granted just one first round pick.
2)
Parity is rampant in the NFL, and the NFL’s salary cap (which
restricts the amount of money a team can spend on their team roster as a way to
balance the league so that wealthiest teams cannot dominant by simply buying
the top players) disperses talent more evenly league wide. College football is dominated by only an
elite few, controlled by money grubbing boosters and university presidents who
have never given non- BCS teams a championship opportunity.
1)
Many of these coaches are initially overwhelmed with the complexity of
the NFL. Because of the league’s parity,
preparation for games is more demanding which explains why many of these
coaches such as Pete Carroll, Butch Davis and Nick Saban
made great NFL solid assistant coaches.
Assistants don’t have to deal as much with the personalities, the
offense, defenses, play calling, etc.; instead they can focus solely on their
specialty. (This is why I believe Bobby Petrino will
flame out with the Falcons.)
2)
Talent development in college is essential. The players are young and many have gotten used
to being more talented and physically superior to their competition. Part of the job of a college coach is to
instill these players with the proper skills fundamentals and turn their
potential into a reality. Usually, by
the time most players reach the NFL, they’ve established their work ethic or
lack thereof and their skill level has been assessed by professional scouts for
years.
3)
The personalities of professional players differ from those of
collegiate players. After a few years,
coaches such as Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier end up returning after they realize that their
hearts are in the college game after all.
In college they are god like figures to the players because they control
player scholarships.
On the
other end established NFL head coaches and assistants such as Bill Callahan, Dave Wannstedt and Charlie Weis are experiencing success turning
around struggling college football programs.
So far the results have been mixed with the exception of Weis, who has
already been to 2 BCS Bowl games, losing both.
However, it is too early too tell where this coaching trend is headed; I
guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
--
D.J. Dunson