The move to younger head coaches

[lastcat3]

THe league is clearly doing this right now and it will be interesting to see how well it works out. Completely understandable to why they want to give it a shot as the younger coaches probably understand these new age offenses a little better than the old guard does. And I think it will work completely fine for them as long as things are going well. My question though is how these young coaches will respond as soon as things stop going well for them. Will they be able to keep the teams together and maintain the teams respect when they go through a patch of seasons where they aren't making the playoffs?

Sean Mcvay's upcoming career will be fun to watch. He has had a great deal of success his first few seasons but he also was placed into a very good situation. THe Rams are probably going to have to blow up their team in the next couple seasons as their is no way they are going to be able to pay all their guys the money they are wanting. How will Mcvay respond when he isn't coaching a team quite as loaded as they are now and how will his team respond to him when they aren't seeing the success that they are now? Will be fun to follow.

[Rupert Patrick]

There have been young coaches enter the NFL in the past, but it was a trickle - a Don Shula here, a John Madden there, a Bill Cowher and Jon Gruden over there. In many cases, they had been hugely successful, but this season it started to become not just a trend, but rather standard operational procedure. I feel it traces back to the success of Sean McVey in LA, but one to wonder why it took so long, as most of the young guys in their early 30's were elevated to being a head coach, in most cases they were successful. I think using the past examples of Shula and Madden and Cowher may not be applicable as they were, shall I say, savants, in that they were brilliant and the people who hired them realized it off the bat and soon the public figured it out too. I know there were exceptions to the rule of hiring young head coaches in the past (Mike Shula in Cincinnati in the mid 90's) but one wonders if it will get to the point in the future that the NFL will create some corollary to the Rooney Rule that will force teams to interview a head coaching candidate who has previously been a head coach in the NFL. I don't think it will get to that point, but rather I think this is a short-lived trend, that most of these new young head coaches will demonstrate they are not mature or experienced enough to be a head coach. My guess is that four of these six new head coaches will flame out and be unemployed within the next three years, and teams will go back to picking new head coaches, for the most part, from the group of those who had already been head coaches.

[RyanChristiansen]

When I hear about these younger head coaches, I wonder how much of it has to do with team culture and how today's players expect to be treated differently. Last February, when Mike Tice quit his position as offensive line coach for the Raiders, he quipped that "players no longer want to be coached." I keep wondering how soon P.J. Fleck at the University of Minnesota will get the call to coach pro.