IF I was general manager of a NFL team and I was tasked with recruiting a new head coach, the last place I would look for a replacement in this day and age would be at the collegiate level -- NCAA or otherwise.
If I was forced by my owner or CEO to interview a collegiate coaching applicant who hadn't already spent time in the pro ranks, the first question I would ask would not be why he thought he could make a successful transition to the pro game, but what did he like most about coaching college football?
Because as evidenced by the last three of the biggest names to come out of the NCAA to take over the reins as NFL head coaches -- Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban, and now Bobby Petrino -- what they enjoyed about coaching in the college ranks is definitely something none of them were able to find or resurrect in the big show.
So what is it about these head coaches that spurred them leave the pinnacle of their sport in two years or less, and return to coaching a bunch of kids one to five years out of high school?
The one phrase that you can find in virtually every story written about these high profile NCAA-to-NFL-back-to-NCAA leaders of men is that they all ended up admitting to having a "preference for the college game."
While I have a hard time believing the accuracy of that statement, I do believe they had a preference for the idolization they received as amateurs.
Steve Spurrier won 163 games and only lost 56 in his days as a college head coach, but in his two years with the Washington Redskins he won 12 games and lost 20.
Nick Saban went 98-48 in college and went 15-17 with the Dolphins and Bobby Petrino was 41-9 in college, but went only 3-10 in less than a year with the Atlanta Falcons.
In my opinion, this "preference for the college game" is a cop-out; what they have a preference for is winning immediately and having unchallenged authority over their players.
What they have no preference for is the increased workload and pressure that the pro game elicits and to work in an environment that is not an absolute dictatorship.
Looking back on how I was coached in my college career and how I have been handled in my NFL and CFL careers, the biggest difference I have noticed is the amount of total control collegiate coaches have compared to the professional coaches. It starts with the imbalance that as a player in college you are the volunteer and your head coach is the only one in the relationship that is a fixture and paid to be there. If you have pro aspirations as a college athlete, your relationship with your coach is almost as important as your performance on the field and, more often than not, that relationship is leveraged by the fact that you are an adolescent in your formative years and your head coach is a domineering father figure. If you do not get along with them, they can almost single-handedly dissolve your ambition to turn pro.
In the pros, while the head coach is still the absolute authority in the locker-room, he is forced to make more concessions and share some of this control with his players for the sake of both their careers.
Pro coaches operate less of a dictatorship because they understand their players often have as much invested in their professions as they do and are simply not passing through their system like they are in college.
In the pros, the players often have the gumption to question and criticize the operations of their field general because they are adults and have a stake in the business. And since we are adults, we are not as impressed by their working titles and actually have the audacity to make them earn our respect -- just as they have us do -- before we simply hand it over to them.
As we have seen in the three examples I present here, in two years or less in the pros, these differences and the relinquishment of their God powers is enough for these men to no longer care about testing their abilities at the pinnacle of their sport.
And for Bobby Petrino, formerly of the Atlanta Falcons, this distaste for partial democracy and dealing with men only took 13 games to turn sour.
Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.
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