There is a recent NCAA national championship on the coaching résumé that brings little more than a shrug from the NFL.
Big deal. Does big-league baseball make a big deal about the Triple-A championship?
Back a ways on the same résumé, it mentions the position as defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns. Under coach Bill Belichick, no less.
The NFL nods. Now, Nick Saban is getting somewhere.
When Saban was announced last Christmas Day as coach of the Miami Dolphins, the priorities of his accomplishments were placed before a circus mirror, where everything reflects upside down. Rebuilding the Michigan State Spartans to a No. 7 ranking in 1999 and leading the LSU Tigers to a national championship in 2003 may get prominent play in the man’s biography.
But it was Saban’s sparkling record as a Browns assistant that gives Miami hope he can avoid the Steve Spurrier Stigma.
The Steve Spurrier Stigma? Even its namesake acknowledges it’s there.
“I would think now that NFL owners are really not going to look toward many college coaches,” Spurrier said.
After Spurrier bombed with the Washington Redskins despite coming off enormous success at the University of Florida, the perception was the difference between coaching the NFL and the college level was the difference between boys and men.
“I think the biggest difference is in college, the coaches have to get the most out of the players they have,” said Matt Mauck, who quarterbacked Saban’s Tigers to a national championship and recently was cut by the Broncos and picked up by Tennessee. “Whereas in the NFL, if the coaches don’t like a player, they’ll get rid of him and go sign somebody else. College coaches don’t have that choice, which is why you’ll see college coaches get on their players and yell at them or whatever.”
Early in training camp this year, Saban, who will make his NFL head coaching debut today against the Broncos at Dolphins Stadium, had what critics may have called a college moment. Not including cut days, there has been just one report of an NFL coach scolding a player to tears. The coach just happened to be Saban, who wasn’t pleased with the workout effort of rookie defensive tackle Manuel Wright.
The incident became a national story. If there’s crying in football, no one could remember tears flowing from a player at the pro level. There was also curiosity. Was Saban being too college in demeaning a player like a child? Or did the incident prove to the veteran Dolphins players that Saban was no college pushover?
“I was surprised he got so upset about it because in the 30 years I’ve been coaching, there’s probably about 15,000 guys I’ve got on worse than I got on him, and none of them had an issue in terms of bringing tears to their eyes,” Saban said. “Where I come from, you try to demand people do things the right way, and he understood that. I think his family understood that it was not personal.”
The twist to the Saban-Wright saga: Wright, a backup the previous two years for the national champion USC Trojans, made the Dolphins’ 53-man roster.
Changing conventional wisdom
While Spurrier may have hurt the future chances of prominent college coaches such as, say, Pete Carroll from returning to the NFL or the ambitious Urban Meyer from making his next leap, he does think Saban can help reverse the trend.
“I think the coaches who have done the best are the guys who have come up in the NFL system and have been offensive or defensive coordinators in the NFL for several years and went on to become a head coach,” Spurrier said. “That seems to be the course of most successful NFL coaches. Now Nick Saban, he was in the NFL a long time before he went to Michigan State, so he’s got an NFL background on his résumé.”
Oh, yes, Saban’s résumé. With apologies to the faithful of Baton Rouge and East Lansing, nothing makes Saban more qualified to become an NFL head coach than his superb work with the Browns’ defense from 1991-94.
In 1990, the year before Saban arrived with Belichick, the Browns had surrendered an NFL-high 462 points. In Saban’s final season of 1994, the Browns allowed a league-low 204 points.
When a coach can help create a 258-point swing and bring a defense from worst to first, there’s reason to believe he has what it takes.
“I always felt like when I went back to college, because of what I learned from Bill Belichick in terms of the systematic approach to how he does things, that I was actually more of a pro coach in college than just a college coach,” Saban said.
Super coaches out of college
Besides, while there may be more examples of college coaching stars who flopped in the NFL, including Spurrier, Butch Davis and Lou Holtz, a successful run by Saban in Miami would not be unprecedented. See Jimmy Johnson and Bill Walsh, two of the best coaches in NFL history.
Johnson and Walsh went directly from college to NFL head coach and quickly became multiple Super Bowl champions.
“It’s not as big a deal as people think it is,” Walsh said. “The key is in the NFL, you need great personnel. In college, if you’re coaching a top program, you’re going to have dominant talent. You might have three big games a year where you’re playing equal talent, and the other eight games you’re totally better than your opponent. At the professional level, every single week you have to bring it. You’re not going to come in and take the league by storm. It’ll take Nick awhile, but I think he’s up to it.”
Staff writer Mike Klis can be reached at 303-820-5440 or mklis@denverpost.com.
