Do Singletary, Millen have what it takes to run a team?

Sporting News, The, Jan 18, 1999 by Dan Pompei

If a professional wrestler can be governor of Minnesota, why couldn't Mike Singletary be coach of the Bears, or Matt Millen be general manager of the Lions?

Great question, isn't it? Not according to all my football friends.

Singletary has no coaching experience and Millen has no administrative experience, facts that rankle many football men who paid their dues and struggled for years to get where they are. They tell me the game is too complex for novices. They say former players sometimes make the worst coaches and administrators. They think a move like this reeks of desperation.

The greater question surrounding these issues is this: What exactly qualifies someone to run an NFL team anyway?

When hiring a coach or administrator, there is no substitute for experience. Sometimes the best hire you could make is the guy who has made every mistake possible. At least you know he probably won't make the same mistakes again.

But here's where my friends start sizing me up for a straitjacket. I don't think there's anything wrong with considering people like Singletary and Millen for the types of jobs they're being considered for. Too much of the time, teams travel down the same, predictable roads in their hiring practices and end up with the same, predictable results. To attain greatness, teams have to think outside the box. They have to make bold moves, the kind where the risk may be as great as the potential reward.

Give Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard credit for hiring Oregon State coach Mike Riley to guide the Chargers. That was not a conventional hire. Riley was neither a highly successful college coach nor an NFL coordinator. He took a back alley to the NFL, making his name in the World League and the Canadian League. But there were head coaching qualities in Riley that appealed to Beathard. It wasn't about pelts on the wall, as it so often is with head coach hirings.

And don't criticize Eagles owner Jeff Lurie for pursuing Packers quarterbacks coach Andy Reid for his head coach opening. Although Reid never has been a coordinator or head coach, he could be the kind of dynamic salesman that can save a sinking franchise.

Everyone looks at coordinators for head coaching openings. But what makes a coordinator qualified to oversee an entire team? Just being a coordinator--even a successful one--isn't enough. That's a different job from being a head coach, as being a head coach requires a different set of skills. For a head coach, leadership, communication, personality management, organization and delegation are much more important.

Look at Bill Belichick. There may have never been a better coordinator, but when he put on the head coaching hat with the Browns, it didn't fit him any more than a baby bonnet would have.

There are no guarantees in hiring a head coach. The most qualified unemployed candidate this offseason was George Seifert, who won 76 percent of his games as a head coach. But even he was fired because the 49ers didn't think he was doing a good enough job.

To hire someone like Singletary would take an awful lot of blind projecting. But the same holds hue of hiring a coordinator with no head coaching experience--or even hiring Seifert, because the Panthers had to give him more power than he ever had with the 49ers, Do we know any more about Gary Kubiak's ability to be a head coach than Singletary's? Not really. But Kubiak's name has been on everyone's list of prospective new head coaches.

Hiring an inexperienced head coach might result in a more painful first year or two, as the coach could need more time than most to acclimate himself. But the large majority of teams that change head coaches aren't in a position to win a Super Bowl right away anyhow.

Singletary and Millen dearly are intelligent men, smart enough to figure out how to oversee a team at least as well as most others are doing it. Understand this: It doesn't take 12 years of schooling, a thesis and an internship to be qualified to run a football team. The lives of patients aren't at stake. There isn't some secret code known only to a select few.

The worst that could happen by going out on a limb with someone like Singletary would be the team would have to start over in four years. Well, how many coaches that are being hired this year do you suppose will be working with that team four years from now? Four seasons ago, eight head coaches were hired. Six have been fired, with only Mike Shanahan and Tom Coughlin remaining employed by the teams that hired them.

The six who were fired all were considered "highly qualified" going in. Dennis Erickson, Mike White, Rich Brooks and Rich Kotite had previous head coaching experience at the college or pro level. Ray Rhodes and Dom Capers were considered cutting-edge defensive coordinators.

When George Halas hired Mike Ditka to coach the Bears in 1982, Ditka didn't have the proper qualifications. He had been only a special teams/receivers/tight ends coach for the Cowboys, not a coordinator. Hence, the popular opinion at the time was that Halas had gone senile. That dearly was not the case.