The Sports Xchange

Everyone is familiar with Bill Belichick’s sorry coaching history before he landed in New England. But would you be shocked if, say, Rex Ryan in Buffalo, or John Fox in Chicago or Gary Kubiak in Denver were soon fondling the Lombardi Trophy, just as Belichick has done four times after most people thought him a loser?

Well, prepare yourself.

History tells us the NFL used to turn up its collective noses at the revolving door for baseball managers, back in an era when football had to compete with baseball for the attention of sports fans.

That day is long gone, and so is the time when the NFL could look down on a league that recycled its leaders.

Ryan, Fox and Kubiak, all embarking on new jobs this year, are part of a relatively recent trend in pro football: second acts for coaches.

The last two Super Bowl-winning coaches, Pete Carroll and Belichick, had been fired at three previous NFL jobs (Carroll twice and Belichick once) before finding success.

Once that was unheard of.

Now it is routine.

As we approach a season that will end with Super Bowl 50, it’s worth noting how different has become the ties that bind a team.

For more than three decades, the first 31 years of the Super Bowl era to be precise, two men — Weeb Ewbank and Don Shula — stood alone as the only coaches who won the championship with a team other than their first.

That changed when Denver, with former Raiders’ coach Mike Shanahan as its coach, won the Super Bowl following the 1997 and 1998 seasons, and now it has become rare when a first-time coach wins it.

What makes this pertinent is, with the latest cycle of coaching changes, there are fully a dozen coaches who are on at least their second job. The latest round of hirings included one coach who already took two teams to the Super Bowl and lost (Chicago’s Fox, who did it with Carolina and Denver) and another (Buffalo’s Ryan) whose team is looked on as one of the real potential surprises in the AFC.

Starting with those two Denver championships under Shanahan, 11 of the last 18 Super Bowls have been won by a coach who was fired previously, including Belichick’s four titles with the Patriots. Shanahan and the Giants’ Tom Coughlin each won two, and the other winners were Seattle’s Carroll, Indianapolis’ Tony Dungy and Tampa Bay’s Jon Gruden.

What in the name of Vince Lombardi is going on here?

Changing times, that’s what.

Back in the dark ages, owners used to have more patience with their coaches, so the coaches had more time to get to that first championship on their first job. Tom Landry didn’t win a championship, one example, until his 12th season in Dallas. Can you imagine an NFL coach in today’s game surviving a dozen years without winning a title? Only one has, Pittsburgh’s Bill Cowher, but there are no other owners with the patience of the Rooney family, which has hired only three coaches in a half-century.

In the late ’80s, there were only a half-dozen or so coaches working their second act in the NFL, half the number now doing it. Teams now recognize the value of experience in the job.

One GM told me some time back, “We are in an era that has cheapened experience and age in every profession. There is no substitute for having gone through it.”

And, as Chip Kelly may be finding out, NFL opponents are quicker to adapt and respond to what an opponent is doing than perhaps they did in the Pac-12. Jimmy Johnson, one of the rare few who made the jump from college coach to NFL boss without NFL experience, used to point out the margin for error is much smaller among the pros. He called it “a little shock” to know you had to be ready every week to play at a high level.

A lot of top college coaches tried to make the leap to NFL coach without prior NFL experience and flopped badly, a history that Kelly is working to avoid. In the last couple of decades, that list includes Nick Saban, Steve Spurrier, Butch Davis and Bobby Petrino, who are still winning big in college; going back years there were Lou Holtz, Frank Kush and Bud Wilkinson.

Perhaps they simply were not used to coaching where talent is so evenly distributed that quick decisions in a game make the difference. By the time they learned, they were either fired or 10 games under .500, or both, or just gave up before they got fired. When that happens today, however, there is often a second chance.

–Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.