There’s an old coaching adage that “you can’t change a throwing motion! A quarterback either can throw or he can’t. Period.”

You hear this all the time, this idea that a quarterback’s mechanics can’t be changed. Commentators, football dads, and coaches proclaim, “It’s impossible to change a quarterback’s throwing motion. Just coach his footwork.” Older quarterbacks in particular get subjected to this tunnel vision.

It says more about the coaches than it does the kid. The message it sends, however, is that, “We don’t have time to improve a kid’s throwing mechanics. Or we don’t know how — we don’t have the technical skills needed to coach them up. Why bother if we can just go find another kid who can already throw it better, without coaching”?

But what is passing talent? The mentality that some kids “have it” while others don’t shouldn’t apply to throwing in the same way it might to raw speed or quickness. Yet it comes up so often. There are many high-profile “athlete-quarterbacks” who are world-class athletes but aren’t very accurate. They can throw a spiral and an accurate pass or two, but because of their latent talent the theory is that the best thing to do is just to “let them play” and the last thing you should do is “overcoach” them. The old myth comes back: Just coach their feet; ignore the upper body.

But that’s only the most high-profile example. There are thousands of high school kids that receive almost no coaching of their passing mechanics. At best they get a few throwing drills. The result is thousands of young players who are given no the opportunity to develop. For the great-athlete quarterbacks, the lack of coaching puts a cap on their success and hurts their team’s passing games. For the less talented kids, they simply never see the field or get moved to new positions. If they ask for help, it’s that same refrain again: “Let’s work on your footwork.” Yet aren’t the feet are the farthest appendage from where you throw a ball from? Don’t you throw it with your arm?

Lack of coaching or not, the expectations remain: Perform at a high level or face criticism or the bench. The “can’t coach a throwing motion” myth prejudices the careers of many young men. Not all quarterbacks make it to the NFL but all want to succeed. Ignoring the upper body is like only coaching half the kid.

Ironically, the same coaches who preach a “footwork only” gospel also throw out plenty of meaningless buzz-phrases in lieu of actual coaching: “Follow through,” “Come over the top more,” “Raise your elbow,” “Turn your shoulders more.” This double standard of non-coaching and coaching-via-cliché is confusing — for both the coach and the kid.

If all you know are the same old cliches then you’re insulting your players’ intelligences, and if you’re insulting their intelligences then, over time, you will prove yourself to know very little. Because the stuff you’re saying won’t work. It might work a time or two, but you won’t have all the answers, as so much of it will be guessing on your part. And once that happens the players will start just fiddling with it themselves, drawing their own ad hoc conclusions about what works best. The result is typically not pretty.

Can you improve a quarterback’s throwing motion? Yes, but it’s important to use the right methods. As stated above, the old way is to focus on footwork only and then sprinkle in clichés throughout practice. Our way is different. We teach quarterbacks to “self-correct, not self-destruct,” through a central focus on the arm. We do this by teaching simple biomechanics concepts that are universal and non-negotiable, and yet provide powerful results that inform the footwork to support the entire process.

Here are two simple biomechanical examples to improve a throwing motion in the wrist and elbow. The wrist should be pronated, or turned over, on the release (see the images below), yet there are countless ways the wrist can move and only some are correct — the bad variations can create problems.

If we reduce the wrist’s ability to “change” position, we make it more efficient on the throw. How is this done? The adjustment is simple. Hold the ball at the pre-pass pass position and cock the bottom end of the ball outward at a 45 degree angle off the body (see the image below), making sure that the point away from you doesn’t go above parallel to the ground. This “cocking of the wrist” reduces joint movement, presets wrist pronation, increases the ball’s spin rate when thrown, and increases ball control with the fingers.

The second aspect we’ll look at is the elbow. This is the joint that can cause the most problems for the throwing motion. The elbow must “lead” the throw. Most coaching suggests that if the elbow is simply above the shoulder — or “comes over the top” — as it comes forward in the motion, then it is sufficient. Yet in their effort to keep it simple coaches are missing a significant opportunity. We throw with muscles, not joints.

For the torque of the body (i.e. the force created when a passer twists as he releases the ball) to pass through the arm it is necessary to align the joints in the best possible position, at the right moment, to use the arm’s muscles properly. If the elbow is merely “above the shoulder” there is no guarantee that the thrower will achieve proper bio-mechanical position. But what is this “best position”?

Take your arm and, as if you had a dumbbell in your hand, do an over-the-shoulder tricep extension. Did you notice where your elbow ends up? Roughly six inches forward of your shoulder in a slot called the angle of the scapula (or in line with your shoulder blade curving around from the back — see the image below).

The name we use for this position has orthopedic foundations. We call it “zero” because it is “muscular neutral.” It is the safest, strongest position for the arm to be in, as there is no stress on the shoulder joint muscles, the front or the back. It is the perfect “middle point” in the throwing motion. This should be the location of your elbow at the exact moment your chest and hips are square to the throwing target. Everything in the turn up to achieving this position is about generating torque from the body and storing it, and everything after it is about releasing that stored energy through the tricep. Simply put, it is the lead position of the elbow on a throw.

During the motion, if your arm is too low or not far enough forward of the shoulder to be able to achieve the “zero” position then there are a series of adjustments your brain will make automatically to compensate for your poor arm alignment. None are really optimal. The brain “locks” the shoulder to protect itself from the lower angle, which also forces the wrist outward around the elbow (sidearm delivery) to reduce exposure to injury. If your elbow is too high your wrist elevates too quickly; this creates the same effect, only higher. This side arm or slashing” release widens, or elongates, the intended target hallway. Of course that reduces accuracy but it also, more importantly, reduces the power you can generate with your throw.

Imagine trying to bench press a full set of weights over your belly button. You couldn’t do it because the angle is wrong: you can’t get your chest muscles involved properly. In the same way, if the tricep misses “zero” your arm muscles won’t fire efficiently and your power will be reduced. Understanding this feedback concept is a key part of self-correcting your throwing motion.

If the elbow hits “zero” at the right time then the tricep can release all the torque from the body. And the results can often be remarkable, because so few get there. It’s like a two people jumping on a trampoline together. When they hit at the same time, the smaller one flies much higher. The tricep is the smaller person that goes much farther with the help of our much larger body.

Just by changing two simple things in the mind, the feel, and with the timing of the quarterback’s motion, we can increase his consistency, power, and accuracy dramatically – and this says nothing about the feet. The feet will support everything I’m saying, but if the arm misses the “sweet spot” of “zero” on the release path, the footwork is irrelevant.

Here are a few images of some guys who understand this concept. They may not call it “zero” but they certainly demonstrate it.

We just applied two universal, non-negotiable, biomechanical standards to a throwing motion that will never change for any quarterback. An awareness of these standards will hold them accountable, not only in his motion, but in applying more complicated techniques on his own. Indeed just having these standards provides many benefits: they are useful because they are easy to follow and, when followed, they produce results that open the young man up to even more coaching because he sees that they work and becomes hungry for more. These, rather than empty phrases, equip athletes with the tools that can make them better, and they can understand that. The older alternative reduces confidence and increases over-thinking and hence confusion and hesitant play.

“Self-correction” is the lodestar of my system. This is what I aim to do with the throwing mechanics — show you how to apply clear standards like “zero” and the wrist to throwing the ball that produce measureable results. Yet there is very little quarterback coaching available to players on this level. I dream of a point where every team has a number of well coached kids who could all throw the ball all over the field if asked to.

Young quarterbacks, their fathers, and even quarterback coaches must do their homework on the quality of instruction offered by schools and camps, and whether they are capable of producing positive, sustainable changes. Just because a high school or camp coach worked with an already talented athlete doesn’t prove anything — it’s the same old approach with a new coat of paint. It’s time to dispel the myths; there’s a better way. You can’t start by talking about what can’t be done.

- Darin Slack

[Darin Slack runs the Darin Slack Quarterback Academy. Also check out his site, "Get-2-0." Do check them out if you're at all interested in coaching better quarterbacks, or becoming a better one yourself.]

Changing the playcaller sure helped the Redskins!

In the cult of football, surely few things are more overrated than play calling. Much football commentary, from high school stands to the NFL in prime time, boils down to: “If they ran they should have passed, and if they passed they should have run.” Other commentary boils down to: “If it worked, it was a good call, if it failed, it was a bad call,” though the call is only one of many factors in a football play. Good calls are better than bad calls — this column exerts considerable effort documenting the difference. But it’s nonsensical to think that replacing a guy who calls a lot of runs to the left with a guy who calls a lot of runs to the right will transform a team.

One factor here is the Illusion of Coaching. We want to believe that coaches are super-ultra-masterminds in control of events, and coaches do not mind encouraging that belief. But coaching is a secondary force in sports; the athletes themselves are always more important. TMQ’s immutable Law of 10 Percent holds that good coaching can improve a team by 10 percent, bad coaching can subtract from performance by 10 percent — but the rest will always be on the players themselves, their athletic ability and level of devotion, plus luck. If the players are no good or out of sync, it won’t matter what plays are called; if the players are talented and dedicated, they will succeed no matter what the sideline signals in. Unless they have bad luck, which no one can control.

Yes and no. I wholeheartedly agree that playcalling is overrated, and he is right that much of the commentary after games involves a lot of second-guessing full of hindsight bias. Few ever pose the “should he have done X?” question in terms of the probabilities and tendencies at the time, or in the context of the 10 or so seconds available to make such calls. Indeed, I have even argued that there’s a case to be made that the best playcalling might be a controlled but randomized “mixed-strategy.”

The other coaching bogeyman is the aura surrounding “in-game adjustments” or “halftime adjustments,” both of which are supposed to be the “hallmarks of good coaching.” This is another thing where there’s a kernel of truth surrounding by a lot of speculation. Yes, a good coach will not do the same thing over and over again if it isn’t working, or if the other team has figured it out. And yes, coaching a game involves an ongoing process of what the other team is doing (this is one reason why I think, even if adjustments are part of the game, “halftime adjustments” are very much overrated). But if you want to see a bad coach then I’ll show you one who tries to “adjust” to everything the other team is doing with new schemes and ideas built-in midgame. Instead, teams with good coaching pretty much run only things within their plan — i.e. stuff they had practiced during the week. Indeed, much of what fans or commentators will pick out as an “adjustment” was something in the original gameplan that just didn’t get called until the second half because of the flow of the game. Yet how can good coaches both “adjust” throughout a game and also not deviate from what they have practiced?

This brings me to where I depart from Easterbrook, that coaching is minor. (I don’t really know how to judge “overrated” — in relation to what? overrated by whom?) While playcalling is definitely overhyped (hey, the talking heads get paid to talk about something), preparation is extremely important, and much of a gameplan involves contingency planning. It also means that the “base stuff” should have the counters built in, the constraint plays are already there, and the defensive adjustments are easy to make because they are a part of the system. A good offense “implies the counter,” meaning that if a defense adjusts in some way, then playcalling is simple because there’s an obvious counter play to be called. On defense you take away the other team’s best stuff, and focus on other things as it comes, though by dictating to the offense through aggressiveness and by trying to confuse it. Unlike Easterbrook I can’t hang a number on how many wins or losses “coaching” is responsible for (and if I could I’d imagine it varies by level), I can safely say that I think weekly preparation is underrated, because it is rarely talked about — other than platitudes like “we had a great week of practice” — has a long-tail in terms of continual refinement of technique and effort that can only improve incrementally, and that everything run in the games is stuff that has been practiced over and over and over.

Two final points on the Redskins situation. I find it immensely weird that Sherm Lewis, a guy basically pulled off the street, can come in and call an NFL game and, for better or for worse, the offense looks basically the same. This further validates to me that the “base” NFL offense is almost totally generic across teams — how else would Sherman Lewis even be familiar with it? — and that the only variance comes in that weekly gameplanning and preparation. This is not to say it is bad or that such preparation is insubstantial and isn’t full of wrinkles (that’s what the whole post above tried to explain), but it is still built off a core set of offense that has changed little in recent years or from team to team. As a result Lewis could walk in and be on the same page with basically everyone else, and since he was present for the past couple of gameplanning sessions there wasn’t anything that would trip him up: It was either so old he was already familiar with it, or he had a hand in devising it for that opponent. Yet it remains strange to me that NFL teams are content to be so homogeneous.

Finally, Easterbrook accurately points out that the Redskins are about a bizarre an example as possible, as the whole Sherm Lewis switch seemed to be about much else apart from playcalling:

In the Redskins’ case, there is an added dimension — the rumor is Chainsaw Dan took away coach Jim Zorn’s play-calling authority hoping that Zorn would blow a gasket and quit. If Zorn quits, he gets nothing; if he’s fired, he receives the balance due on his contract. No doubt to Chainsaw Dan’s dismay, Zorn held his ground.

Scenario 2: Your team is up 21-17. The other team has the ball on roughly your two-yard line. Thirty-six seconds remain; they have just run the ball on second down so the clock is moving. They have no timeouts, but you have all three of yours. The other team has just quickly driven the field to get into this position. Question: do you call timeout to preserve some time for yourself in the chance that they score a touchdown on third or fourth down? Or do you leave the pressure on them to execute on those two downs over thirty-six seconds. What do you do?

Analysis (and identities of the coaches) after the jump.

Scenario 1 – What actually happened: Mike Leach, with his team leading 28-23, called a quarterback sneak on fourth and one that was stopped. His team eventually lost to Houston, 29-28, in the waning seconds. Unsurprisingly, he has taken a lot of heat for not kicking the field goal. Indeed, it looks like he has even recanted, saying, “If I put the field goal team out there, at that point in the game that’s the better thing to do,” Leach said. “And I didn’t do it.” But should he feel bad?

I’m not so sure. I will say this for certain: if it is the first half, I think we can all absolutely agree that he going for it was the right call. Fourth and one is quite literally almost always worth it from just about anywhere on the field, and especially so on the goal line. The analysis goes something like this, though see the link above for more: Afield goal attempt has an expected value of about 2.5 points (the chance of making it multiplied by three). The value of “going for it” is a bit murkier, but from that part of the field the chance is worth about four points, give or take some of the yardage values. You arrive at this number by taking the chance of success times six, plus the subsequent chance at a good PAT times one, plus factoring in the opponent’s horrible field position if you fail. These numbers are fairly quantifiable, and even if they aren’t to an exact degree we know that four, the expected value of going for it, is higher than two-and-a-half. (Again, people often treat field goals as if they were automatic.)

The question is whether things change that late in the game, in the fourth quarter. Going back to Urban Meyer, I think that depends on the flow of the game and the type of opponent. And the biggest criterion is whether you think there will be more scoring. My sense is that Leach’s impulse was that eight points was probably not enough to straight win the game at that point (Houston wound up with over 600 yards of offense), though, with perfect knowledge in hindsight, it turns out that it would have been. But these decisions are made ex ante, and it still strikes me as the right one.

Now a lot of people who are understandably upset, maybe Leach himself, say, “Well, even if I agree with the call to go for it the playcall was bad.” There might be something to this but it strikes me generally as a copout way to say “I just disagree because it didn’t work.” Now the QB sneak itself was pretty ugly, so maybe it could have been practiced better, but it’s not like the team doesn’t work on the sneak or that isn’t the most direct way to convert those plays.

In any event, I’m curious if there are any comments on the call to go for it. I am looking for real analysis though, not just monday morning quarterbacking. I am legitimately interested in the best way to view these decisions as time begins to get more scarce late in games. I think the data supports the idea that the fourth and one on the one is quite literally always the right call in the first half.

Scenario 2 – What actually happened. Danny Hope, Purdue’s first year coach, called a timeout with 36 seconds left. It turns out, however, that Notre Dame’s head coach, Charlie Weis, had signaled in the “spike play” to be run on third down. As a result, because we know what Weis’s decision was going to be, the result of Hope’s timeout was to give Notre Dame two chances to score — one on third down and another on fourth — rather than one (a spike on third down and just a fourth down play). Many people excoriated Hope, including the announcers, and well, me, via twitter. But now I’m not so sure I was right. Several people pointed to my own article, which makes clear that Notre Dame had no need to spike the ball on third down — thirty-six seconds is plenty of time to run two plays. And here’s Hope’s defense of his call in his own words:

“I want to retract my statement from last night. Last night, I wasn’t sure it was the right call, but now that I look (back) at it, I’m sure it was the right call, in spite of what a lot of the experts and the critics think.

“You know, it was second-and-goal and they ran it. I was on the headset with Coach (Gary) Nord and any time you get down there, on first- or second-and-goal inside the 5-yard line, the probability of getting a touchdown is pretty good. … I don’t know what the statistics would say, but it’s very significant, the chances that when you get down there, you’re going to score.

“If that was going to be the case, we needed to get in a position to get a field goal to go into overtime or a touchdown to win. We couldn’t do that if there wasn’t any time left on the clock. I was on the headset with Coach Nord and said that if they threw a pass, one of two things would happen, that they might get a touchdown or they might throw an incompletion that would stop the clock. But if they ran the ball and it’s not a touchdown, the clock’s going to keep running, and I don’t want to run out of time.

So I got the official’s attention (and said) that if they ran the ball and it wasn’t a touchdown, that I wanted to call a timeout as soon as I could to save as much time as I could on the clock. I don’t have any reservation about that at all.”

I think this is quite persuasive. Now, again, with hindsight, the only scenario that would make the timeout a bad idea actually was the one happening: that Charlie Weis would make the amateurish call to waste third down by unnecessarily spiking the ball on third-and-goal with over 30 seconds left, which was plenty of time to run two plays. But how could Hope know that? I suppose you could say you could wait to see if your opponent was going to do something so lucky for you, but that might waste precious seconds.

And it offends my sense of order to say that Hope erred by not presuming that his adversary would do something so suboptimal, even if [insert Charlie Weis joke]. Unfortunately for Hope, he saved Weis from himself, but otherwise he left Purdue in a better position than it would be otherwise: ND still had two chances to score, and Purdue still had more time than it would have had otherwise to put together a drive. Although it didn’t work out for Purdue, that Charlie Weis after all these years doesn’t know his clock management well enough to see what a huge waste of a down spiking the ball would have been with that much time is his problem, not Hope’s. They just need to play better defense in that situation (i.e. not giving 25 yard cushions on third and 18 to give up the 20 yard comeback….).

But, as with the Mike Leach scenario, comments and criticisms necessary. And, for this second one, apologies to Coach Hope as I initially thought it was the wrong call. I retract.

The [coaching] staff met in the War Room. (In a culture so steeped in tradition, everything has a fancy name.) The mood there always seems part frat house, part locker room, part battlefield HQ. There’s much scathing humor and shit-giving, bro love in its highest form. Around the rectangular wood table are fourteen high-backed leather swivel chairs; each of the coaches takes the same chair every time, with Carroll at the head. Behind them, a hodgepodge of stools and folding chairs for the graduate assistants — some of them former players, some manager types who never played a down. Two walls are dominated by double whiteboards; panels slide to reveal depth charts of players and recruits; another whiteboard lists the name of every offensive play and the number of yards the play averaged last season. With desks occupying two corners and video-projection equipment in a third, the room is tight. Deep into a session you will find some of the larger guys reclining so far back they’re practically in the lap of a GA.

At one minute before seven, one of the GAs walked in with two giant sacks of Egg McMuffins.

“All right!” somebody screamed. “The hockey pucks are here!”

“Pucks!”

“Go Pens!” hollered BC [Carroll's son, an assistant coach].

A feeding frenzy ensued. Large men reached and grabbed for the various bottles of hot sauce and mini containers of jelly that live permanently at the center of the table.

“It’s time to get ready for some football around this muthafucka,” yelled Ken Norton Jr., son of the former world-champion boxer, himself a former All-Pro linebacker. Norton had retired after thirteen seasons when he happened to meet Carroll; things just clicked. Now he’s going into his fifth year with USC. Nobody gives him shit for being a UCLA alum, particularly at noontime basketball, where he’s been known to let out the monster, playing Shaq to Carroll’s Kobe. Since the last NFL draft, when three USC linebackers were scooped up in the first two rounds, people have begun joking that USC, once known as Tailback U, needs to be renamed. Norton’s Egg McMuffin appeared tiny in his giant paw. His rocklike mandible made quick work of it. He helped himself to another.

Carroll entered from his office across the hall, McMuffin in hand. His mouth was full, he was chewing, he was wearing the silly/happy expression of a guy who’s just come to work after his morning surf. “What’s happenin’ boys?”

“A little camp today!” hollered the defensive coordinator, Haruki Rocky Seto, “Rock” to his friends, a second-generation Japanese American named for the boxer Marciano. (His brothers are named after Sonny Jurgensen and Johnny Bench.) An undersized junior-college fullback who made the Trojans as a walk-on, Seto entered the coaching ranks as a video assistant, filming practices. When Carroll came to town for his first USC press conference nine years ago, Rocky was the kid who picked him up at the airport. Now he’s in charge of Carroll’s first love: defense.

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” hollered offensive-line coach Golden Pat Ruel (his actual full name). He’s known Carroll since 1977, when they were both graduate assistant coaches making $172 a month at Arkansas. Like most of the veterans in the room, he’d coached in the NFL. He chose to work for Carroll for less money. “How many people do you know who enjoy driving to work every morning?” he’d testimonialized at the chalk talk.

Carroll talks a lot about his coaches “growing up in the program.” He likes grooming his own people instead of bringing in established stars. He is proud of the fact that former assistant coaches, like Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, who recently departed for Pac-10 rival Washington, have gone on to head-coaching jobs themselves. “I want guys to come to the program knowing that I’ll do everything in my power to get them the job of their dreams at some other place,” he says.

Carroll gulped down the last of his sandwich and took his chair; the GA in charge of statistics fired up the iPod. Carroll ran the meeting briskly, a stylized form of controlled chaos. And then a few final words:

“Let’s come out of our shoes today on these kids, man,” he told his staff. “Let’s just coach the shit out of these guys. I want lots of enthusiasm. I want you frickin’ screamin’ and yellin’ and makin’ ‘em feel it. Make it memorable — but don’t abuse anybody.”

“Dude! You suck! Get the fuck out of here,” bellowed offensive coordinator Johnny “Mo” Morton, who arrived a few years ago from the New Orleans Saints.

“Get off my field!” hollered special-teams coach Brian Schneider, a new hire, fresh from the Oakland Raiders.

“You fuckin’ suck!” hollered BC, never to be outdone in loudness by anyone.

“Let’s not do that,” Carroll said, playing aghast, his tone recalling a guy with a secondary teaching credential, which he has, along with his master’s degree in physical education. “But make sure they feel us. Get ‘em fired up, hustling their ass off. And if somebody gets hurt, don’t throw a fuckin’ fit, hollerin’ for the trainer. Do it cool and calm like we been there before, so we don’t freak anybody out.”

“Unless there’s a fuckin’ bone stickin’ out,” Johnny Mo offered.

“If there’s a bone sticking out, you can frickin’ go crazy!” Carroll hollered, standing to leave.

“Aaaaaiiiiiii,” somebody cried in agony.

“Ohhhhhhhhhaaahhhh,” groaned somebody else.

“Trainerrrrrrrr!”

“Go Pens!” hollered BC.

Carroll was again wearing the shorts with the quarter-sized stain; from behind his sunglasses, he was watching the Category 1 players go through a pass-rushing drill — senior standouts, a couple of promising juniors. Starting in a down stance, each man had to explode off the line, throw a forearm at a large tackling dummy — man-sized with a weighted bottom to make it self-righting — then run around another dummy, then sprint to an orange traffic cone. Carroll’s arms were crossed. The only part of him that was moving was his jaw, furiously working a piece of pink bubble gum. For once, he seemed utterly still.

What are you seeing? I asked.

“When you run around a corner, some guys just naturally plant their toe and swivel — it’s called turning the toe.” He pointed to the kid going through. “That guy can’t do it.”

He watched another. “That guy’s trying to go sideways. He can’t do it, either.”

The next kid slid out, lost his footing, fell piteously to his knees. “See how that one wanted to pick up his foot to turn? You gotta turn the toe to get around a guy,” Carroll said. He planted his toe and swiveled, demonstrating.

“From the discipline and repetition comes the ability to improvise and be creative,” he said matter-of-factly. “If you try to be creative and improvise without the discipline, you have chaos. But once you have the discipline, once you take care of all the details, you can play with it. You gain the ability to add accent, to improvise with trust and confidence, to make it into jazz.”

All around us, huge guys were hollering and grunting and sweating. Bodies collided. Whistles twittered. Large metal sleds were being violently impacted. Carroll crossed his arms, satisfied, and returned to watching, as if from a mountaintop — a crooked, blue-eyed guru behind rose-colored Maui Jims. Find a philosophy for yourself. Compete to become the best you you can be. Work hard enough to transcend. Don’t lose your sense of humor along the way: the Zen of Big Balls Pete.

Just then, somewhere across the field, Carroll spotted something he liked. “Wow!” he exclaimed, his stillness suddenly broken. “Did you see that? That’s a nice move over there.”

And off he went at a trot.

[T]he larger coaching issue is that once again, the NFL is stocking up on head coaches who have never been a head coach at any level, even high school, before becoming the boss in the pros.

Steve Spagnuolo, the new coach of the Rams, has never been a head coach at any level, not even when he worked for the Barcelona Dragons. Spagnuolo has been an assistant coach or scout for the University of Massachusetts, the Redskins, Lafayette, the University of Connecticut, the Dragons, the Chargers, the University of Maine, Rutgers, Bowling Green, the Frankfurt Galaxy, the Eagles and the Giants before landing the Rams headmastership. Twelve previous employers — he must have quite a collection of team apparel! But no head coaching experience before becoming an NFL head coach.

Rex Ryan, the new head coach of the Jets, has been an assistant at Eastern Kentucky, New Mexico/Highlands, Morehead, the Cardinals, the University of Cincinnati, Oklahoma and the Ravens. . . . Raheem Morris, the new head coach of the Bucs, has been an assistant at Hofstra, Cornell and Kansas State. Lots of college pennants for his dorm room — but no head coaching experience. Morris has never even been a coordinator at any level, and now he’s an NFL head coach. Todd Haley, the new head coach of the Chiefs, . . . [had] no head coaching experience before becoming an NFL head coach. Josh McDaniels, the new head coach of the Broncos, has been an assistant for Michigan State and the Patriots. He didn’t even collect much team apparel, in addition to less than a decade of experience, before becoming an NFL head coach.

Meanwhile Jim Fassel, Jon Gruden, Dan Reeves, Marty Schottenheimer and Mike Shanahan — a combined 701-536-4 as NFL head coaches — aren’t working in the NFL this season. Schottenheimer and Shanahan each have more career victories than any active NFL coach, yet neither wears a headset. Only four active NFL head coaches have at least 100 victories (Bill Belichick with 153, Jeff Fisher with 133, Tom Coughlin with 123 and Andy Reid with 107). Yet 100-plus winners Shanahan and Gruden were just shown the door and 100-plus winner Schottenheimer can’t get his phone calls returned.

Why do NFL teams keep hiring head coaches who have never been head coaches? This year, inexperienced head coaches sound good because Mike Smith and John Harbaugh, neither of whom had been a head coach previously at any level, just did great jobs in Atlanta and Baltimore. But other factors are at work. One is inexperienced gentlemen earn less than experienced head coaches. Going into the next round of collective bargaining talks, NFL owners are attempting to project a “woe is me, the wolf is at the door” financial image. There will be internal league pressure come late December for no owner to give Bill Cowher the $10 million a year that is reputed to be his price for returning to coaching, as this would counteract the league’s poor-mouth campaign. Hiring inexperienced coaches to moderate salaries, on the other hand, fits the times.

Another factor is that inexperienced coaches kowtow to owners and general managers. For bureaucratic reasons, some NFL front offices prefer a head coach in weak political position. . . .

Next, the track record of major-college head coaches who jump to the pros — Nicky Saban, Bobby Petrino, Steve Spurrier — isn’t good. Few Division I coaches even want NFL posts. Who in his right mind would give up the job security and fawning treatment that football-factory college coaches enjoy, in order to be knifed in the back for a couple of years in the NFL, then fired? If big-college head coaches either won’t take NFL jobs or don’t do well in them, owners may assume that NFL assistants without head coaching experience are the only option. But what about the universe of small-college and high school head coaches? The more coaches I meet and the more I learn about football, the more I become convinced that some of the best coaching occurs at small colleges and in high school — where coaches must succeed without huge staffs and unlimited budgets. But the NFL looks down its nose at small colleges and high schools; Mike Holmgren was one of the few successful recent NFL coaches to begin as a high school head coach.

That pretty much leaves NFL assistants who have never been head coaches as the NFL recruiting pool. But bear in mind: Roughly two-thirds of coaches whose first head coaching experience comes in the NFL fail. That suggests of Haley, Morris, McDaniels, Ryan, Schwartz and Spagnuolo, four will be busts. Then their employers will look around to hire someone else who has never been a head coach at any level!

I don’t need to add much; this is provocative enough. I agree that the head college job and the head pro job are very different animals. Recruiting versus roster management, the nature of scrutiny is different, as are the players. In this way it is not a surprise that it is NFL assistants that tend to get hired for NFL head gigs. I mean there is a logic that they have at least been around what the head coaches do and much of an NFL head coach’s job is managing his assistants, and you figure a guy who has been an assistant would understand what they do. But I am glad to see Easterbrook say that high school coaches are often more innovative and do better coaching jobs than NFL guys, especially when you take into account resources. (NFL coaches and big-time colleges really have no excuse with the huge resources and staffs they have. I’d like to see one of these big timers coach a HS squad with only two other coaches total and barely any equipment and see what your team looks like.) But again, the skills are different, so it’s not to say that just because you can succeed with 16-18 year old high schoolers you can succeed with 22-30 year old millionaires. But Easterbrook is entertaining and thought provoking, as always.