There’s a trap I’ve fallen into with some football coaches that, admittedly, I could do better to avoid in the future.
Urban Meyer is no one’s idiot. He’ll go down as the second-most successful college football coach of the last 30 or 40 years. He coached dozens of players who made it to the NFL, and I’ve even talked with him a bunch over the last couple of years about how hard he’s studied the pro game, working with the guys he coached at Florida and Ohio State to learn what works and what doesn’t at the sport’s highest level.
And still, his fit in the NFL went the way so many of his detractors predicted. Part of that result is hard for me to reconcile—how someone as sharp and accomplished as Meyer, with access to as much information as Meyer had, and the drive to win that Meyer has, could come undone for reasons easily identified by people with no deeper knowledge of the NFL than what they can get from an internet connection and cable subscription. How these things happen to guys like Nick Saban and Chip Kelly, too, who were more successful (and, yes, smarter) than the great majority of those who land head coaching jobs in the NFL.
That’s where the trap is for me: assuming that the next guy in this sort of position isn’t going to step on the rake laying in the yard just like the last guy did.
There was Tuesday’s story from Rick Stroud of the , revealing former Jaguars kicker Josh Lambo’s allegation that Meyer had kicked him during warmups last summer, setting off a profane exchange and leading Lambo’s agent to contact the team’s legal counsel the next day. (Meyer said Lambo’s “characterization of me and this incident is completely inaccurate.”)
But before that, there was the reporting of Tom Pelissero of NFL.com last week, which revealed more than just a building in two-win turmoil. It showed a willingness of those within the building to lob grenades into the work Meyer was doing, and to tear the Jaguars’ football operation down to the studs, requiring a rebuild from the ground up.
Among those people were assistants that I’m told Meyer had quickly identified as weak links on his own staff. It revealed not only the strife within his group but also the mistakes Meyer had already made. Going forward with Meyer would require doubling-down on him—having to pay some of his handpicked lieutenants to get lost while hiring new ones to replace them.
How the hell did we get there? Again, I think the answer is probably easy. Meyer’s program is difficult. He pushed everyone. He’s hard on players. He’s much harder on coaches. It’s an old-school way. And he and Saban, and Bill Belichick, too, have proven over the years that having that sort of foundation can be an incredibly effective way to build a football program.
Here’s the catch—if you’re going to do it that way, you better win quickly. Or at the very least, you better show the players, and the assistants that you haven’t worked with before, that working in that kind of intense, edgy environment is going to benefit their own career development in the short term, and their finances in the long term.
Belichick has shown over and over and over again that his program does that, so guys put their heads down and work, trusting that following him will lead to the right results, both individually and collectively. And for a lot of people, it has. Others, of course, get weeded out along the way, in an operation that naturally became self-selecting over the years.
A reason many of Belichick’s assistants haven’t made it as head coaches over the years is right there, too. Most put the same demands on players and coaches that Belichick would but without the testimony to go with the theory. Then, once the losses start to mount, people get worn out working in a way that few in football, at any level, are asked to work nowadays. Then, they go from worn out to checked out, which ultimately can lead to speaking out—and once they start speaking out, it’s over.
Things went a similar way for Saban, one of the greatest football coaches ever to walk a sideline, in 2006. He picked the wrong quarterback, lost more than he had in ’05, had a harder time getting players on board, wore everyone out and bailed. At Alabama, where it took him about 20 games to have the Tide rolling at a national-title level, he’s had the promise of consistently getting guys to championship stages and into the first round of the draft to keep them captivated. In the NFL, he couldn’t point to the trophy case the same way.
So it went for Meyer—who often talked at Ohio State about testimony over theory. He was selling theory to those in the building, but the lack of results on the field meant he had no testimony. At Ohio State, he went 12–0 in Year 1. At Florida, he won a national title in Year 2. Quickly, any room to question how he did things evaporated. He won at a historic clip, and his players were being developed into high-end pro prospects, then getting rich.
In Jacksonville, he couldn’t create enough of that sort of value for people before people tired of his ways. And when people tire of your ways in the NFL, they don’t tend to keep it to themselves, no matter how hard you insist things stay in-house.
That brings me back to the trap I fall into. I assumed that, with time on task, a smart guy like Meyer would adjust and find a way to achieve, because he always had achieved. What I underestimated was how deeply set in his ways he was, like Saban and Kelly were in theirs. And why wouldn’t they be? Until they got to the NFL, it hadn’t failed them—so there was no need for any period of self-reflection the way there might’ve been for, say, Kliff Kingsbury after he was fired by his alma mater.
It’s why Meyer has been known in the past to say the plan he and his people have is infallible. Maybe, in the end, it was that belief that got him.
On to your mail …
