Mullen believes mentor Meyer will succeed in Jacksonville
GAINESVILLE — Even the best college football coaches have struggled to successfully pivot to the NFL.
Nick Saban, a seventime national title-winning college coach, tops the list of high-profile stumbles at the next level.
New Jacksonville Jaguars coach Urban Meyer hopes to avoid joining Saban as another cautionary tale. Meyer, 56, won three national titles, including two at Florida.
Gators coach Dan Mullen has faith Meyer — his mentor and former boss at Bowling Green, Utah and UF — is up to the job of rebuilding the Jaguars’ moribund franchise.
“I do think Urban’s a great head coach, great leader, great motivator of players, obviously, and his staff and people that work for him does a great job of developing them,” Mullen said. “He always surrounds himself with great people. He sets a very high standard and sets the bar extremely high within the organization and has been successful everywhere he’s been.
“So you’d think he’d be successful with the Jags.”
A key for Meyer will be connecting with professional players after 15 years as a college head coach and no NFL experience during a coaching career dating to 1986, when he was a graduate assistant at Ohio State.
“I guess we’re going to have to see,” Mullen said. “Let’s see how that works.
I think you can look at a lot of different coaches in a lot of different areas. There’s a lot that have gone from college to the NFL and been extremely successful and some that haven’t. It might not just be that coach.”
Mullen said Bill Belichick’s initial failures with the Cleveland Browns in the 1990s did not hint he later would win six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots. More confounding could be Pete Carroll’s career trajectory from an NFL flop with the New York Jets and New England to a national championship winner at USC. Carroll then returned to the NFL and won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks.
“Whether it’s NFL to NFL, college to the NFL, NFL back to college, I think there’s a lot of different circumstances that go on within organizations sometimes,” Mullen said. “The easiest thing to do is say this coach was successful here, but not here, and why that didn’t work. I think there are so many different things to go in and say ‘Hey, this guy is good here and not here.’ ”