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Urban Meyer to Jacksonville Jaguars


Vic Mackey

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It’s incredible how many truly legendary college coaches make the jump to the NFL and prove mediocre at best or outright fail, and quickly.  Urban Meyer joins a long list of names like Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino to name a few.  There are certainly exceptions (Jimmy Johnson comes to mind), but in general there are clearly ingredients that bake a good college coach that produce a flat bake in the NFL.  If history is out guide, Urban Meyer, if he wants it, will likely return to the college game and experience a swift return to his past success at that level and the sour narratives of today will be forgotten and chalked up to another case of what works in college does not necessarily work in the NFL.  Feels like someone could write a good book trying to get to the bottom of why we see this narrative recur time and time again.

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1 minute ago, Steelers Roll Left said:

It’s incredible how many truly legendary college coaches make the jump to the NFL and prove mediocre at best or outright fail, and quickly.  Urban Meyer joins a long list of names like Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino to name a few.  There are certainly exceptions (Jimmy Johnson comes to mind), but in general there are clearly ingredients that bake a good college coach that produce a flat bake in the NFL.  If history is out guide, Urban Meyer, if he wants it, will likely return to the college game and experience a swift return to his past success at that level and the sour narratives of today will be forgotten and chalked up to another case of what works in college does not necessarily work in the NFL.  Feels like someone could write a good book trying to get to the bottom of why we see this narrative recur time and time again.

Same thing happens when nfl coaches come to college

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3 minutes ago, Steelers Roll Left said:

It’s incredible how many truly legendary college coaches make the jump to the NFL and prove mediocre at best or outright fail, and quickly.  Urban Meyer joins a long list of names like Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino to name a few.  There are certainly exceptions (Jimmy Johnson comes to mind), but in general there are clearly ingredients that bake a good college coach that produce a flat bake in the NFL.  If history is out guide, Urban Meyer, if he wants it, will likely return to the college game and experience a swift return to his past success at that level and the sour narratives of today will be forgotten and chalked up to another case of what works in college does not necessarily work in the NFL.  Feels like someone could write a good book trying to get to the bottom of why we see this narrative recur time and time again.

You forgot to include Barry Switzer as a coach who made it to the top in both college and pro football.

With coaches having such defined personality and character traits, it is interesting that there has been so little written about which attributes are positives and which are negatives, as well as which ones translate from one level to another.

Obviously, Urban didn't have what it took to succeed in the NFL, but neither did Saban or Spurrier. That Urban's potential for failure at the pro was so badly missed is interesting.

If I were a betting man, I would wager the lessons inherent in Urban's failure will be completely ignored.

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4 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:


Once you’re an NFL assistant, you can be totally incompetent and hop from team to team for 30 years. Keep your head down, don’t go for a coordinator or HC job, and you’re Golden forever. He’s riding a gravy river now.

Until the Texans hire you because no one else wants the job 

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You forgot to include Barry Switzer as a coach who made it to the top in both college and pro football.
With coaches having such defined personality and character traits, it is interesting that there has been so little written about which attributes are positives and which are negatives, as well as which ones translate from one level to another.
Obviously, Urban didn't have what it took to succeed in the NFL, but neither did Saban or Spurrier. That Urban's potential for failure at the pro was so badly missed is interesting.
If I were a betting man, I would wager the lessons inherent in Urban's failure will be completely ignored.

I don’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Jimmy Johnson who said college coaches fail in the NFL because they don’t respect their players and NFL players as a result don’t respect them. You can’t be a parental authority figure to grown ass men, even if they need it.

Barry and Jimmy respected their players. You know they rolled around in the shit with them. Hookers and blow, etc. Yeah, they’d bench your ass for underperforming but as long as you performed, you could do what you wanted.
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Just now, CooterBrown said:


I don’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Jimmy Johnson who said college coaches fail in the NFL because they don’t respect their players and NFL players as a result don’t respect them. You can’t be a parental authority figure to grown ass men, even if they need it.

Barry and Jimmy respected their players. You know they rolled around in the shit with them. Hookers and blow, etc. Yeah, they’d bench your ass for underperforming but as long as you performed, you could do what you wanted.

Let's not kid ourselves, Barry just shut his mouth and let what Jimmy built do what it did. One could never accuse Barry of being an intelligent man, but he wasn't stupid.

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All y’all dumping on Urban had better keep your powder dry. With him out there, and the SECX3 move pending, a half-season even remotely resembling 2021 will result in Sark hitting the bricks so UT can win the Urban lottery. Book it. 

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Urban is not a complicated person.  He is an incredibly arrogant and condescending asshole who occasionally experiences a moment of self-awareness and briefly modifies his behavior only to almost immediately revert to his true nature.  His tenure with the Jags is unquestionably a historic failure that significantly tarnishes his legacy.  I would be shocked if he doesn't return to the college ranks in the near future in an ego-driven effort to rehabilitate his record/image.  The floodgates will probably open with anecdotes regarding his behavior, but the vast majority will just further underscore what a garden variety dick he is.     

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1 minute ago, nnm said:

All y’all dumping on Urban had better keep your powder dry. With him out there, and the SECX3 move pending, a half-season even remotely resembling 2021 will result in Sark hitting the bricks so UT can win the Urban lottery. Book it. 

This is not an unreasonable take. We have another 5-7 season, and Texas boosters will have forgotten all about Fingerbanggate.

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You would have preferred that he destroyed his reputation here?  WTF is wrong with you?
Why is everyone assuming it would have played out here at Texas like it did at Jacksonville? We didn't dodge some bullet. We got fucking Sark as our head coach.

College is a total 180 from the NFL. Urban will do just fine back in college. The pro experiment is over. Most of your successful college coaches are psychopaths. College football is a very toxic atmosphere and Urban fits right in
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1 hour ago, crimsonlonghorn said:

Not sure. I think a big part of his flameout had to do with the fact that the NFL wasn't as easy as he thought it would be compared to college. 

His biggest strengths don’t translate to the NFL. He’s a recruiter that relies on a talent advantage over other teams and he’s a hard-ass on his players. The former doesn’t exist in the league beyond teams striking gold in the draft, and even then it’s very short lived because of the salary cap. The latter rarely ever works in the modern game because it has to still be respectful of the grown ass men it’s being applied to. Belichik is the only guy I can think of that’s carried it off. 
 

He also surrounded himself in college with really good staff.  Those guys were good recruiters and college coaches. Again, I don’t think his eye for talent translated to the NFL. X’s and O’s were secondary in the college game. That’s all that matters for an NFL coach, especially at the coordinator level. He was in over his head from day one, but those paychecks will soothe whatever embarrassment he got out of this. 

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54 minutes ago, Randolph Duke said:

You forgot to include Barry Switzer as a coach who made it to the top in both college and pro football.

With coaches having such defined personality and character traits, it is interesting that there has been so little written about which attributes are positives and which are negatives, as well as which ones translate from one level to another.

Obviously, Urban didn't have what it took to succeed in the NFL, but neither did Saban or Spurrier. That Urban's potential for failure at the pro was so badly missed is interesting.

If I were a betting man, I would wager the lessons inherent in Urban's failure will be completely ignored.

I like your points, but am commenting because I'm in the group that believes Barry Switzer did little more than inherit a polished and finished build handed to him by Jimmy Johnson.  That's why I didn't include him on my list.  A more interesting case study in current times would be Kingsbury with the Cardinals.  It would seem that there IS room for college coaches, often young college coaches, to bring the college-style air raid offenses to the pros to take advantage of certain unique mobile QB attributes at that level in ways that weren't capitalized upon a decade ago.  Of course you could make a pretty good argument that Kliff was hardly a great college coach, though he was limited by being at Tech and given those limitations had quite the track record of QB's passing through his tenures.  Adaptation is req'd be it from college coaching to NFL coaching, NFL accepting college type offense, etc to find rare success in making the transition.  What works at one level may not work at all at the other. 

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27 minutes ago, South Austin said:

This is not an unreasonable take. We have another 5-7 season, and Texas boosters will have forgotten all about Fingerbanggate.

This is absolutely true, and very conceivable with one look at the early season schedule, fairly or unfairly to Sark.  Make no mistake about it.

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Pete Carroll is an interesting study also:

10 years as a college assistant

10 years NFL assistant

4 mediocre years NFL head coach

9 years as very successful college head coach (including best team EVAAAAHHHH) ha ha

going on 12 years as a successful Super Bowl winning (should have been 2) NFL head coach.

Seems like generally a pretty nice guy.

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1 hour ago, BurntOrange&White said:

I'd still make a run at him in a few years if Sark doesn't work out. Many college coaches failed in the NFL, although his circumstances are a bit different. Hell of a college coach.

I just don't think his style will work anymore with the portal, etc.  He would have to have major buy in day 1 from leaders of whatever school hires him.  After this debacle, plus whatever hasn't been made public but is known in NFL circles which can trickle down to college players, I can see top talent saying F this guy.   I'm just not sure he would get the benefit of the doubt or buy in from a roster at any level after this but especially not 4 and 5 stars.

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42 minutes ago, Vic Mackey said:

Why is everyone assuming it would have played out here at Texas like it did at Jacksonville? We didn't dodge some bullet. We got fucking Sark as our head coach.

College is a total 180 from the NFL. Urban will do just fine back in college. The pro experiment is over. Most of your successful college coaches are psychopaths. College football is a very toxic atmosphere and Urban fits right in

 

3 minutes ago, Longboard Horn said:

He's not a man of morals whatsoever, but the guy wins won in college. I digress. 

 

Why is everyone assuming that his failures are due to unexpected challenges that the NFL presents, and not because he is past his prime?  Some desperate school may overlook the fact that he is a shitty human being, and give him a chance to recapture his legacy, but I sure as hell hope it isn't Texas.  

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6 minutes ago, DiceHands said:

As someone who wanted Meyer before we fired Herman, I am glad I was wrong because he seems like a fuck.  Keep his ass away from UT.

Meh. Tom Herman could’ve been caught fingerbanging Kendra Scott in the middle of the Barnes & Noble kids section, and I’d have been cool with that if he got Texas into the playoffs.

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42 minutes ago, Steelers Roll Left said:

I like your points, but am commenting because I'm in the group that believes Barry Switzer did little more than inherit a polished and finished build handed to him by Jimmy Johnson.  That's why I didn't include him on my list.  A more interesting case study in current times would be Kingsbury with the Cardinals.  It would seem that there IS room for college coaches, often young college coaches, to bring the college-style air raid offenses to the pros to take advantage of certain unique mobile QB attributes at that level in ways that weren't capitalized upon a decade ago.  Of course you could make a pretty good argument that Kliff was hardly a great college coach, though he was limited by being at Tech and given those limitations had quite the track record of QB's passing through his tenures.  Adaptation is req'd be it from college coaching to NFL coaching, NFL accepting college type offense, etc to find rare success in making the transition.  What works at one level may not work at all at the other. 

Yeah, Jimmy Johnson literally rebuilt the organization (it sure as hell wasn't Jerry). He had an eye for talent and got (really) lucky with the Herschel Walker trade.

Barry didn't do anything except be smart enough to stay out of the way of the established players and assistants. In a way that's pretty admirable, too, but you can't compare Jimmy and Barry. 

My son was asking me this morning about Kingsbury and after thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that he wasn't ever a mega-successful college head coach at a football factory, so it's also very hard to compare him to Jimmy or to Urban. Kingsbury was a QB whisperer assistant who was a mediocre head coach and now he's a successful NFL head coach who is a QB whisperer again. I'd say that Kingsbury is the opposite of Urban: not suited to be a rah-rah CFB general but definitely an X's and O's guy.

 

 

 

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33 minutes ago, idigTexas said:

 

 

Why is everyone assuming that his failures are due to unexpected challenges that the NFL presents, and not because he is past his prime?  Some desperate school may overlook the fact that he is a shitty human being, and give him a chance to recapture his legacy, but I sure as hell hope it isn't Texas.  

 

It can be both. Deep down he's a dick and his struggles in the NFL exposed what was already there. 

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