Will Urban Meyer be a successful coach in the NFL? | Yahoo Sports College Podcast
Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel and Pete Thamel, and Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde discuss former Ohio State and Florida head coach Urban Meyer’s decision to take the head coaching job with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Video Transcript
DAN WETZEL: Offseason's here-- Urban Meyer is heading back to work-- not in college football. But America's favorite unhinged college football coach is going to take a swing at the pros-- Jacksonville Jaguars. I know it's an NFL story, but it's also-- Urban, he's always one of ours. He's one of ours. It's like watching your child leave.
Pat, you know what this is like. It's like we're watching Urban drive off in a used car with all the stuff jammed into the back, half a tank of gas, wing and a prayer. What is it like, Pat?
PAT FORDE: You know, you just-- you say, make good decisions.
[LAUGHTER]
Son or daughter. You just-- you hope that they're going out there. You shoot the arrow from the bow, you don't know where it's going to land. Urban Meyer's landing in Jacksonville.
DAN WETZEL: Well, look, you get invited to an Urban Meyer or Floyd Mayweather retirement party, get a gift receipt. Get a gift receipt.
[LAUGHTER]
Like a Larry King wedding-- didn't that guy get married like eight times or something?
PAT FORDE: Yeah. Oh yeah.
DAN WETZEL: Yeah. So glad he's unretired, happy retirement or not. Well, look, what makes this interesting to me is, obviously, we have a lengthy history of coaches going to the NFL and it not working out to various degrees, dating back to, like, Lou Holtz at the Jets won three games. You know, Steve Spurrier famously barely made it through two seasons in Washington-- I don't even know if he made it all two seasons.
Nick Saban didn't work out in Miami, although he did a pretty good job. And the team's decision not to draft-- or not to trade for Drew Brees was not a good one in hindsight. But Urban, you know, to me, he needs to build a culture. He wants his guys-- this is as close as you're going to get. He's got almost $100 million maybe in cap space. We're not sure what the cap is going to be.
He's got four of the top 45 picks. He's got Trevor Lawrence. He's got 11 picks overall. Pete, does that mitigate some of the issues of, like, college coach that can't just recruit, you know, 25 guys a season?
PETE THAMEL: The path for success here, if you're going to draw it out, is pretty obvious for Urban Meyer. There are essentially 8 to 10 quarterbacks who are high functioning in the NFL. And then you have 24-ish franchises trying to find a highly functioning quarterback.
If you go in to the NFL with a highly functioning quarterback, which we assume it's going to be Trevor Lawrence, and they're going to draft him, you kind of start with pocket aces. So I really think that that was a really attractive piece of this to Urban Meyer is that he knows he can draft, and then develop, and then build an offensive system around, you know, a generational-- potentially generational talent, certainly a generational prospect.
So the path to success, if Urban Meyer's going to be a success in the NFL, it starts with Trevor Lawrence. And then step two is he needs to identify, hire, and then learn from established NFL coordinators. Who those are is unknown yet, but this can't be a get the band back together. He certainly will need some familiar faces around, and I think he'll go find some. But I really feel like if Urban Meyer is going to make, it they need to make deft coordinator hires, and he has to be open to learning and evolving from them.
PAT FORDE: Yeah. No, yeah. This is not just something where you roll out the same formula you've gone with at Ohio State, Florida, Utah, Bowling Green. You have to be willing to attack this differently than you attacked a college job, because it is different in huge ways. And yes, having Trevor Lawrence is great, and all that cap space-- yeah, you can put together, I think, some good pieces.
But then, yeah, you've got to be able to coach professionals in a professional manner. You've got to be able to have a staff that functions at an NFL level. And you know, most important, I think, for Urban, you've got to handle losing a lot of games the first year, and probably a fairly significant number of games thereafter for, you know, maybe the next couple of years.
Maybe by year three, four, you've got it going. I mean, you're asking your guy after three years of college to step in to a bad franchise and immediately take over. There's not a lot of quarterbacks that can do that off of three years of college. I think most of them probably would benefit from a year to sit, and watch, and learn before you get into it.
But I mean, we'll see what-- you know, if Gardner Minshew's going to still be around, if they're going to ask him to be a placeholder for a year or what have you. But Trevor Lawrence is obviously going to be the guy for the future, but it's going to be a while. This is not going to be just a radical transformation, I don't believe.
