Tim Tebow And Urban Meyer…

The Jags released Tim Tebow after one live trial at tight end in an exhibition game.  That failed audition came after an 8-year gap in his NFL career where Tebow spent his athletic energy trying to be a baseball player for the NY Mets; that did not work either.  However, before tossing dirt on Tebow’s sporting grave – and heaping a measure of scorn on top of the disturbed soil – one should remember that Tebow was the QB for two national championship teams at Florida in his college days.  While he was able to dominate as a college player, he never really looked as if he would be an NFL QB and the reason for that is that professional football is a different game from college football.

What I found interesting about the news of Tebow’s release is that his former college coach – Urban Meyer – is now the coach of the Jags and is the guy who must have signed off on releasing his former college QB.  This will be Urban Meyer’s first year at the helm of what has been a pretty miserable franchise for the last several years.  And more than a few people have mused that it may be difficult for Meyer and his “football formula” to make the transition from the college game to the NFL game.

Several highly successful college coaches have failed to make that transition.  Chip Kelly’s move from Oregon to the Eagles, then to the Niners and then back to the college ranks at UCLA is probably the most recent example.  Other top-shelf college coaches who did not “make the jump” include:

• Bud Wilkinson – he dominated college football in the 1950s; his days with the Cardinals were barely mediocre.
• Steve Spurrier – he never did quite enough “coaching ‘em up” in the NFL; his two years with the Skins were painful to watch.
• Nick Saban – he dominates college football today; he did not dominate much of anything with the Dolphins.

However, before casting gloom and doom on Urban Meyer’s efforts in Jax, consider that there are examples of collegiate coaches who went on to have successful NFL careers as head coaches.  Here are ones that come to mind:

• Paul Brown:  In his first two seasons at Ohio State, his teams were 15-2-1 with one national championship.  The next year, he lost players to the military draft and also lost football games.  As coach of the Cleveland Browns his teams appeared in 7 NFL championship games in the 1950s and won 3 of those games.  He is in the NFL Hall of Fame.
• Pete Carroll:  His first stint as a head coach in the NFL was undistinguished; but after a successful decade or so at USC, he took over the Seahawks and turned them into constant winners going 112-63-1 with 2 Super Bowl appearances and 1 Super Bowl win.
• Jim Harbaugh:  As a college coach at San Diego and then at Stanford, Harbaugh’s record was 58-27; neither school was exactly a “powerhouse football factory.”  Then in 4 seasons with the Niners his teams went 44-19-1 with one Super Bowl appearance and two other appearances in the NFC Championship Game.  [Aside:  Harbaugh’s return to the collegiate coaching level at Michigan has been less-than-fully-successful.  He seems to have experienced some difficulty in going back to the “lower level of coaching.”
• Jimmy Johnson:  After a so-so run at Oklahoma State, he got the head coaching job at Miami where his teams went 52-9 and won a national championship over a 5-year span.  He then got the job as the head coach of the Cowboys and – thanks to the Herschel Walker trade – was able to go from a 1-15 record in 1989 to consecutive Super Bowl victories in 1992/93.  He is in the NFL Hall of Fame.
• Bobby Ross:  He had success at the college level at Georgia Tech – shared a national championship with Colorado there – and at Maryland.  In the NFL, he managed to get the Chargers to their only Super Bowl appearance in franchise history.  [Aside:  He also spent three-and-a-half seasons with the Lions, but an argument can be made that those years were somewhere between college-level coaching and full-scale NFL coaching.]
• Dick Vermeil:  His college career consisted of only 2 seasons at UCLA where his teams went 15-5-3.  He was hired to resuscitate a bleak Eagles’ franchise and in 7 seasons there he had the team in the playoffs 4 times and in the Super Bowl once.  Then he retired for 15 years doing color analysis for college football and returned to coach the Rams for 3 seasons with a Super Bowl win.

As I was thinking about people to put on this list, I was of two minds regarding one name:

• Barry Switzer:  From 1973 to 1988, Switzer was a major force in college football at Oklahoma winning 3 national championships and 12 conference titles.  His time in college football was quite different from the NFL game; his teams ran the wishbone offense – something that never showed up on Sunday afternoons.  In 1994, he returned to the sidelines as the coach of the Dallas Cowboys after Jimmy Johnson was fired by Jerry Jones.  And there is my balance point.  Switzer had a successful 4-year stint with the Cowboys winning a Super Bowl in 1995, but he took over a team that had already won back-to-back Super Bowls.  The other coaches on this list who I assert “made the adjustment to the pro game,” had to do so with far less of an initial roster.  You make the call…

Finally, apropos of nothing, I shall close with a thought from Mark Twain:

“Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………