NFL Offseason: In Today's NFL Teams Should Hire Assistants, Not Old Head Coaches

What’s the deal with today’s coaching candidates? Or more specifically–

What’s with all the old guys?

Notice anything interesting about the rumored coaching candidates for Tampa Bay’s vacant head coaching job? Perhaps the fact they’d look more at home in a Flomax commercial than on the sidelines?

Marty Schottenheimer, Wade Phillips, Mike Sherman, Brad Childress. I don’t want to say they’re old, but it feels like one of them may have invented the forward pass. Their average age is 61. Even Gene Hackman thinks these guys are getting a little long in the tooth.

I understand the thinking behind Tampa’s coaching search: They went with a young, unproven assistant in Raheem Morris, who followed up a 10-win season in 2010 with a 10-game losing streak in 2011. Worse yet, it appeared the Bucs had completely quit on Morris since around Halloween.

But consider the records of coaches in recent years: the old hands with head coaching experience aren’t doing so well, while assistants in their first head coaching gigs thrive.

The last three Super Bowls featured match-ups between head coaches who had only been assistants previously (Mike McCarthy vs. Mike Tomlin, Sean Payton vs. Jim Caldwell, Tomlin vs. Ken Whisenhunt). In fact, we haven’t had a veteran head coach win a Super Bowl since the 2007 season, when Tom Coughlin (who nobody would call a spring chicken), led the Giants to a title–but New York is still only his second head coaching job.

Look around the league and consider how assistants are faring compared to old-school coaches. In a game that’s changing every year (sometimes drastically), it seems younger voices are better prepared to lead teams.

Of the 12 playoff competitors this postseason, only three are led by coaches with previous head coaching experience (Coughlin, Bill Belichick and John Fox). Besides those old-timers, there’s just three other head coaches in the NFL who have had top jobs before (Pete Carroll, Norv Turner and Mike Shanahan); those guys combined to go 20-28 this season.

And those four rumored candidates for the Bucs job? They've coached 40 combined seasons; 0 rings.

The NFL is a very different game even when compared with last season. For example, the league has gone from simply penalizing helmet-to-helmet hits to seemingly throwing flags almost any time a receiver catches a ball over the middle. It’s also become an increasingly pass-happy league–Drew Brees broke Dan Marino’s 20+-year-old single-season passing record, and did it with one game to spare!

Not to mention the new fads that come and go constantly: think of how popular the Wildcat was a couple of years ago compared to now, or the current rise of the shotgun option-read under Tim (St.) Tebow. If you think St. Tebow is still going to be running that option offense successfully in a couple of years, I’ve got some Enron stock I’d love to sell you.

The game is now tailored to young, up-and-coming assistants who have been at the forefront of the game’s evolution–guys who are tasked with creating an offensive or defensive game plan every Sunday that’s built to win that week, and might change radically the week after.

Guys like Payton, who took a decent quarterback with injury concerns named Brees and turned him into the league’s most accurate passer. Or Hue Jackson, who, despite getting fired, still took two discarded quarterbacks (Jason Campbell and Carson Palmer) and a bunch of unproven receivers and turned them into the ninth-most potent offense in the NFL. Or Tomlin, who succeeded the enormously popular and successful Bill Cowher in Pittsburgh, but led the same team to two Super Bowls in a third of the time it took Cowher (four seasons compared to 13).

I don’t begrudge a team like St. Louis for hiring a big name, veteran coach like Jeff Fisher–they already went the promising assistant route with former defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, and that didn’t work out so well. But if recent history is any indication, teams looking for a new leader should be scouring the ranks of assistant coaches in places like Green Bay and Baltimore.

If the odds-on favorites to win the Super Bowl, the Packers, prevail again, it will be the fourth-straight season a guy with no previous head coaching experience wins a title; wouldn’t you like your team to make it five in a row next year?

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