Coaching college football and the NFL are quite different, as we know. College coaches must adapt their schemes to a roster of 53, rather than 120. The draft and the salary cap greatly constrain each team's ability to stack their roster. Even the ball and the hash marks are different.
But by far the biggest challenge from college ball to the pro game is dealing with the players themselves. It's much harder to paint yourself as an authority figure to 29-year-old grown men with millions in the bank and a wife and kids at home.
Those realities have prevented a great many of successful college coaches from making the jump to the game's highest level, and it's why most who try do so, fail.
The most successful college-and-NFL head coach is Jim Harbaugh, and one of his new Los Angeles Chargers players said the figure Harbaugh most reminds him of is Ron Burgundy, Jackie Moon, Ricky Bobby, Brennan Huff, and Chazz Reinhold.
“My first impressions of Harbaugh, I hope I don’t get in trouble for this, but he reminds me of Will Ferrell,” 10-year veteran linebacker Denzel Perryman said, via Pro Football Talk. “I don’t know if it’s the way that he talks, his analogies and everything, but they really remind me of Will Ferrell. It’s just funny to me. It’s funny, but I know he means well, like everything comes from the heart. I feel like you have to have a sense of humor to understand his lines and gimmicks. But I love it. I love him as a coach and I love the direction he’s got us going in.”
Asked to explain which Farrell character Harbaugh reminds him of, Perryman said:
“Just Will Ferrell in general. Step Brothers is a good one. I don’t know, man. He’s just giving Will Ferrell vibes. I don’t know if it’s his tone of voice or the way he talks in general, but the first thing that comes to my head is Will Ferrell. I mean, I do take him seriously. Everything he says, I take seriously though. But when he does joke around, I start cracking up in my seat.”
There are two ways to view this.
The first is that Harbaugh's rah-rah personality at the NFL level will go over like a lead balloon, the players will see right through him, and his return to the NFL will be a disaster.
The other, and I think more accurate, interpretation is that Harbaugh is simply being himself, and "himself" is a 1-of-1 personality that mixes equal parts quirk and passion that results in one of the most winningest coaches of all time. There's definitely something different about Jim, pointed out by none other than his own daughter, who gleefully documented his many quirks on a family trip to Italy a couple summers back.
People of all stripes respond to authenticity, and authentic Jim Harbaugh is the real-life version of this guy:
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.