For the life of me, I just don't understand all this momentum for Urban Meyer.
Forget for a moment that he basically got run out of Ohio State for knowingly covering up years of horrific domestic violence for a key assistant coach. Forget that he was coaching a bunch of really evil players at Florida and didn't care. Forget the myriad of sleezy recruiting tactics he's known for.
What makes him a good NFL coaching candidate? Nobody from college has had success at the NFL level since Jimmy (Pete Carroll was in the NFL for many years before his stint at USC). College isn't a good place to even look unless you pick a very specific type of football mind.
How would Urban Meyer even translate?
He's the prime definition of the RPO offense. It's all he's ever run. It requires the likes of JT Barrett and Tim Tebow to run it, and Dak hardly looks the part for such an offense. Even Alex Smith was pretty much a runner in college under Meyer.
This smells of Chip Kelly allure.
We saw Kelly bring an even more creative version of that offense to the NFL, and it fell SPLAT in the NFL. Despite accolades from everywhere, that was a crash-and-burn of epic proportions. To this day, analysts like Cris Collinsworth and Jon Gruden (at the time) are embarrassed about how they went gooey over Chip and the "new NFL offense of the future."
Did Urban ever run his QB under center? Did he have read routes for his receivers? Did he employ NFL-style play action? Did anything he ran look NFL worthy, or did he just out-recruit the pants off of everybody and run up gaudy numbers against far lesser players?
The same goes for Chris Peterson and that nonsense offense.
The ONLY college guy I would even consider is Lincoln Riley because he focuses on the run game first and utilizes his QB under center a ton. His is an NFL style offense with fresh passing ideas mixed in and a deep passing game.
For what it's worth, Riley toyed with Meyer in Columbus the last time they met.
But I don't think either of them are the right guy. Jerry needs to go NFL first, and big names at that. I start with Bill Belichick, Mike Zimmer, Sean Payton, Greg Roman, Robert Saleh, etc. Shoot for the moon in the dark of the night, then look for quality assistant coach candidates in the NFL after that.
Just don't fall for Chip Kelly, Steve Spurrier, Greg Schiano, Bobby Petrino Nick Saban, etc.
This is why I'd prefer someone like Ron Rivera, who has actually been to a Super Bowl.
Here's where the Super Bowl-winning coaches were before being hired by their teams:
LA's Sean McVay was an offensive coordinator for the Commanders and New England's Bill Belichick was a defensive coordinator for the Jets.
Doug Pederson was offensive coordinator for the Chiefs.
Dan Quinn was defensive coordinator for Seattle.
Ron Rivera was defensive coordinator for the Chargers and Gary Kubiak was offensive coordinator for the Ravens.
Pete Carroll was head coach at USC (but had been a defensive coach or head coach in the NFL from 1984-1999 before that) and John Fox had been a head coach for Carolina.
Jim Harbaugh was head coach at Stanford and John Harbaugh was special teams coordinator and defensive backs coach for the Eagles.
Tom Coughlin was head coach for the Jaguars.
Mike Tomlin was defensive coordinator for the Vikings and Mike McCarty was offensive coordinator for San Francisco.
Jim Caldwell was assistant head coach and quarterbacks coach for the Colts and Sean Payton was offensive coordinator for Dallas.
That takes us back to 2000, and since then, only two head coaches coming from college teams have led teams to Super bowls, and both had at least some pro coaching experience. (Harbaugh was the Raiders QB coach from 2002-2003).
If Meyer or Riley is hired, I'll hope that we strike gold like we did with Johnson, but we're likely to just end up with mud.