NFL fascination with Meyer
Wolken: Coach’s college skills not transferable
The momentum of Urban Meyer becoming an NFL head coach next season is now too great to ignore.
If he’s not being rumored as a candidate to replace Jason Garrett one day, he’s on the field with Washington owner Daniel Snyder the next and has done nothing to really knock down the idea he’d like to give the NFL a try.
But anyone who’s actually familiar with Meyer’s body of work in college football should be asking one big question: What in the world makes them think this would actually work?
Other than Meyer being a very famous coach who doesn’t currently have a job, what’s the attraction?
What part of Meyer’s skill set do NFL teams think would translate from the college to the professional ranks?
Sorry, but I’m just not seeing it – and that doesn’t even begin to account for whether the stress of coaching would trigger the health issues that partly led to him leaving his last two jobs.
No matter what you thought of Meyer’s ethics or the intolerable sanctimony he projected onto everyone and everything in his orbit, he had two undeniable strengths that made him an elite, championship-winning college coach.
The first, and probably most important, was his ability to recruit.
Meyer got the best of the best at Florida, and when he went to Ohio State, he recruited in a more aggressive way with far greater reach than anything the Big Ten had ever seen. Ohio State has always attracted terrific players, but once Meyer came in and made it run like a Southeastern Conference-style operation, the talent gap between the Buckeyes and the rest of the league became massive.
The second thing Meyer built his career on is understanding the psychology of 18- to 22-year-olds and constantly finding ways to manipulate and motivate them.
No coach in the country was as obsessed with looking for a mental edge or taking the temperature in his locker room and diagnosing what it needed.
But what relevance does any of that have in the NFL?
The minute Meyer took an NFL job, the talent advantage he’s enjoyed most of his career would be gone. The aura he employed with great effect to get immediate buy-in from freshmen and sophomores wouldn’t land the same with millionaire professionals. And if he tried to play mind games with NFL players the way he did with college kids, he’d get laughed out of the locker room.
And even if you strip all of that away and just focus on football, the fascination with Meyer still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Although he’s clearly a sharp football mind – something more fans are getting a glimpse into with his analyst work on Fox this season – the whole predicate of his offense in its various forms over the years was to make the defense defend every inch of the field and create a numbers advantage, often with the quarterback running the ball. That’s not exactly a formula that has worked reliably in the NFL.
Meanwhile, Meyer’s inability to cope with losses has been well-chronicled over the years. The thought of losing eats him alive, driving him to work beyond normal human limits and aggravating the esophageal spasms he suffered at Florida and the arachnoid brain cyst that caused him visible pain his last season on the sideline at Ohio State. Just from a health standpoint, it’s hard to imagine how he’d cope in the NFL, where every team is going to lose some games – and potentially a lot of them if he gets lured to a place like Washington that doesn’t have a winning roster right now.
To make it work in the NFL, Meyer would have to significantly dial down the intensity he brings to work each day. Great coaches like Meyer and Nick Saban can come to work and make everyone in the building feel like it’s 4th-and-1 in the fourth quarter of a national championship game and get away with it because of how successful they’ve been and how much power they’ve amassed.
But the NFL is a completely different environment where players treat it more like a job. Whether Meyer could successfully adapt to that and not make everyone around him feel as if they’re walking on eggshells is a complete unknown because he’s never been forced to do it that way.
Meyer is just 55, so it’s natural to think he’s got one more coaching run in him somewhere, at some point. From a football standpoint, it makes way more sense to envision him one day at a program like Southern California or Miami that is begging to be revived. But it’s possible, even with three national titles on his resume, Meyer might have one too many off-field controversies in his past for a college president to sign off on hiring him.
That might explain why Meyer is suddenly popping up around NFL teams and being pretty conspicuous about it. And it also appears that the interest, at least with a couple of teams, might actually be mutual.
Whether those teams actually have insight into Meyer as a coach or just want to make the biggest splash possible is anyone’s guess. Just like most first-time NFL coaches, nobody knows how Meyer would do. But given all of the obvious red flags, is it really that important to find out?