Ex-College Coaches Struggling To Gain Traction in NFL
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Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino and Oakland Raiders coach Lane Kiffin have a lot in common.
Both Petrino and Kiffin are struggling in their first seasons as NFL head coaches. Both are leading teams that are currently 3–8 and in last place. Both have been criticized for the way they deal with their players, especially veterans. And both jumped straight to coaching in the NFL from coaching in college.
Of the 32 current NFL head coaches, only Petrino and Kiffin were coaching at the collegiate level before they got their current jobs. (Petrino was the head coach at Louisville last season and Kiffin was the offensive coordinator at USC.) The other 30 NFL head coaches were either NFL assistants or head coaches of another NFL franchise before their current teams hired them.
It’s impossible to separate the struggles of Petrino and Kiffin from the fact that they aren’t just working at new jobs this year — they’re embarking on completely new professions.
Coaching in college is so different from coaching in the NFL that there’s really no reason to expect someone who was successful in one to be successful in the other. That’s bad news for Falcons owner Arthur Blank and Raiders owner Al Davis, who have put their franchises in the hands of men who lack the necessary experience to run a pro team.
The biggest difference between coaching in college and coaching in the NFL is recruiting. College coaches spend their days begging 17-year-old high school players to come and play for them, and whether or not they can establish that rapport with teenagers is the single most important predictor of whether or not they’ll succeed. In the NFL, a coach’s ability to make a good impression on prospective players has almost nothing to do with whether those players play for him — the draft determines where players start their careers, and free agent contracts determine where players continue their careers.
The flip side is that once a college coach has convinced a recruit to join his program, the coach has complete authority over the player. College players don’t have a union to represent them in a dispute or free agency to allow them to leave for a new team. A college coach can act like a dictator because he knows his players have nowhere else to go.
But Falcons cornerback DeAngelo Hall has accused Petrino of acting like a dictator this year, and Hall does have other places he can go. Hall got into a shouting match with Petrino on the sideline during a game against the Carolina Panthers in September, and in October Hall told reporters: “I’ve got one more year on my deal. I feel as though I can go out and get a ton of money, whether it’s here or somewhere else.” Petrino isn’t accustomed to hearing players say things like that to the press.
The people skills required to recruit new players and work with current players represent the biggest difference between coaching in college and coaching in the NFL, but there are also differences from an Xs and Os perspective. Offenses that emphasize big plays at the expense of gaining ground consistently often work in college but fail in the NFL. Both Petrino and Kiffin were lauded for their offensive game plans in college, but both have had a very hard time making those game plans work at the next level. That makes them reminiscent of the most famous example of a college coach who found that his offense couldn’t make it in the NFL, Steve Spurrier, who left Florida to coach the Washington Redskins and suddenly stopped looking like an offensive genius.
A handful of coaches have had success both in college and in the NFL, most notably Jimmy Johnson, who went from the University of Miami to the Dallas Cowboys and won two Super Bowls. But even Johnson had a steep learning curve, enduring a 1–15 season in his first year running the Cowboys. And Johnson’s eventual success had more to do with his acumen for running the Cowboys’ draft room than for coaching on the sidelines. So talented was the roster Johnson assembled that his successor, Barry Switzer (who also previously coached in college), is universally considered a failure for winning “only” one Super Bowl with a roster stocked with Hall of Famers.
This week Mike Sherman, the former Green Bay Packers head coach and current Houston Texans offensive coordinator, moved in the opposite direction of Petrino and Kiffin: He left the NFL for college, accepting the head coaching job at Texas A&M. Sherman might think he just got a new job, and that coaching football is coaching football. But the reality is, by leaving the NFL for the NCAA, Sherman needs to prepare for a whole new profession.
Mr. Smith is a writer for FootballOutsiders.com.