When the Jets hired Eric Mangini as their head coach last year, it seemed like a risky decision. Mangini was a bright coach with a sharp football mind, but he was two days shy of his 35th birthday, making him the youngest coach in the league.

Just a year later, Mangini’s youth doesn’t seem so extraordinary. Five new NFL head coaches have been hired since the 2006 season ended, and all five are young and relatively inexperienced — including two who are younger than Mangini. The coaching changes in the NFL this off-season suggest a new trend is emerging of teams caring less about experience and more about potential when seeking new coaches.

The Pittsburgh Steelers made 34-year-old Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Mike Tomlin the youngest head coach in the league last month, but Tomlin held that distinction for less than 24 hours. The next day the Oakland Raiders hired 31-year-old University of Southern California assistant Lane Kiffin, making him not just the youngest coach in the league right now but the youngest coach in the history of the league.

A year ago some fans and commentators complained that Mangini had too little experience, but Mangini looks like a seasoned veteran next to Tomlin and Kiffin. With only six seasons as an NFL assistant coach and only one as a coordinator, Tomlin has less experience than Mangini had when the Jets hired him. And Kiffin’s coaching experience is mostly in college. Kiffin has spent only one season in the NFL, when he was a quality-control coach (the lowest rung on the coaching ladder) for the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2000.

Although the other three new coaches hired this off-season (Bobby Petrino of the Atlanta Falcons, Cam Cameron of the Miami Dolphins, and Ken Whisenhunt of the Arizona Cardinals) are all older than Tomlin and Kiffin, they’re still younger and less experienced than most NFL head coaches. All three are in their 40s, and none has been an NFL head coach before.

Of the five new head coaches, Kiffin was by far the most surprising hire, not only because of his age but also because coaches rarely go directly from college assistant to professional head coach. But Raiders owner Al Davis has never hesitated to hire young coaches. Davis himself spent three seasons as the team’s head coach, starting in 1963 when he was 33 years old, and Davis hired four of the 16 other men who have become NFL head coaches at age 35 or younger: Kiffin, John Madden, Mike Shanahan, and Jon Gruden. Davis clearly has an eye for young coaching talent, as Madden, Shanahan, and Gruden all coached teams to championships, although only Madden won his Super Bowl ring with the Raiders.

The list of NFL head coaches who have started before age 35 includes two who are now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Madden and Don Shula, but it also includes several who were in over their heads, such as Harland Svare of the Los Angeles Rams, who went 14–31–3 in the 1960s, and Shula’s son, David, who went 19–52 in the 1990s with the Cincinnati Bengals.

Kiffin, Tomlin, and Mangini are the only coaches born after 1970, but 2007 will likely be the last NFL season with more coaches born in the 1940s than the 1970s. The current NFL head coaches who were born in the 1940s are the Giants’ Tom Coughlin, the San Diego Chargers’ Marty Schottenheimer, the Washington Redskins’ Joe Gibbs, the Detroit Lions’ Rod Marinelli, the Seattle Seahawks’ Mike Holmgren, and the Cleveland Browns’ Romeo Crennel. It’s likely that at least a few of those coaches will retire or be fired after the 2007 season, and as they’re replaced, the coaching ranks will get younger still.

Schottenheimer is the league’s second-oldest coach (only Gibbs is older), and as a new generation of coaches takes the baton from Schottenheimer’s generation, the NFL’s next young head coach could be Schottenheimer’s son, Jets offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer. At age 33, Schottenheimer is almost three years younger than Mangini.

The younger Schottenheimer interviewed for the Miami Dolphins job before Miami hired Cameron, and he’ll no doubt have other chances to become a head coach in the near future. Mangini would hate to lose Schottenheimer, but Mangini’s success is one of the primary reasons that owners are giving younger coaches a chance. Mangini led the Jets to the playoffs just a year after they finished 4–12, and in the copycat NFL, if one team has that kind of success with a young coach, other teams are sure to follow.

One more coaching vacancy remains, as the Dallas Cowboys continue to interview candidates to replace Bill Parcells. One candidate the Cowboys will interview, Bears defensive coordinator Ron Rivera, is 45 years old and has never been a head coach. Dallas is also considering Norv Turner, a 54-year-old former head coach of both the Washington Redskins and Oakland Raiders who is a member of the older coaching fraternity. If Rivera gets the job over the more experienced Turner, he ought to thank Mangini for showing that in coaching, talent trumps experience.

Mr. Smith is a writer for FootballOutsiders.com.