Despite failure at Texas Tech, Kliff Kingsbury could be worth the gamble for an NFL team

For hardcore college football fans who watched his teams trudge to mediocrity year after year, Kliff Kingsbury’s name being floated this week for NFL head coaching jobs is a puzzling development.

Kingsbury was fired in late November after six seasons at Texas Tech, his alma mater, an era that started with great affinity for his offense and glamorous off-field profile but ended due to an obvious failure to elevate the program. In total, he was 35-40, never posted a winning record in the Big 12 and failed to make a bowl game three out of his six years. Even with his stature as a beloved former quarterback, there was no great uproar when it came time to fire him. He was just another coach who tried and failed to turn Texas Tech into a national power. 

But somehow, NFL front offices have decided that despite getting fired weeks ago as a college head coach and quickly taking a job as offensive coordinator at Southern California, Kingsbury might be ready to run an NFL team. According to multiple reports, he has interviews lined up with the Arizona Cardinals and New York Jets and perhaps others as the process goes on. 

Hey, wait a second — Isn’t this supposed to be the other way around? 

Nobody would bat an eyelash if a fired NFL coach got involved with college jobs. Whether it was Pete Carroll going to USC, Jim Mora to UCLA, Dave Wannstedt at Pittsburgh or Lovie Smith to Illinois, there is a widespread acceptance of the idea that coaching at the highest level of football — whether successful or not — automatically qualifies someone to run a college program. Likewise, there’s a long history of NFL teams getting intoxicated by the star power of winning college coaches from Jimmy Johnson to Steve Spurrier to Nick Saban.

But someone who didn’t win in college going to the NFL, not just as a coordinator but a head coach? That’s a head-scratcher for a lot of people. At best, it reeks of “smartest guy in the room” syndrome that often leads NFL teams astray at draft time when they pick quarterbacks because of how they look in spandex tights or hand size measurements rather than how successful they were running an offense. At worst, it looks like NFL teams trying to find the next Sean McVay by projecting his best qualities onto a blank slate who happens to be in his 30s and is known as a high-level offensive mind. 

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