With the conclusion of the 2025 college football season on Monday, Jan. 20 and the NFL season on Sunday, Feb. 9, teams across both leagues will be competing for the best chance at success for the coming season.
When gauging a football team’s success, most eyes will turn to coaching, and if a certain coach is producing good results, other teams will attempt to replicate those results by acquiring that coach onto their staff.
There have been many such cases in recent years and even just this offseason in a process commonly referred to as the coaching carousel, producing varying results.
Since the end of the college football season, both teams that made it to the national championship lost their defensive coordinators, with The Ohio State University’s Jim Knowles taking the same position at in-conference rival Penn State University and the University of Notre Dame’s Al Golden heading to coach the Cincinnati Bengals’ defense.
Similarly, former Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, who is largely credited with revamping the team into a legitimate Super Bowl contender, took the Chicago Bears head coaching job.
The Bears have a young team with lots of potential, headlined by former No. 1 overall draft pick Caleb Williams, and are looking for the kind of offensive success that the Lions have had over the past few years.
In a more shocking hire, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill hired former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick to lead their program. Belichick was notorious for his winning mentality in his time in the NFL, bringing in six Super Bowls as head coach of the Patriots and two as a defensive coordinator for the New York Giants.
The reason for coaches leaving one level of football another can largely be traced back to the major changes college football has seen in recent years.
As the NCAA becomes less strict on name, image and likeness, or NIL, freedoms for college athletes, the sport arguably becomes more like the NFL. This can cause college coaches to become less enthused about the sport and seek other opportunities, and it can make coaching vacancies in college more enticing to NFL coaches.
In 2021, the Jacksonville Jaguars took a chance on legendary college football coach Urban Meyer.
In his time as a college coach, Meyer won three national championships, two of which he won with the University of Florida in 2006 and 2008 and one with Ohio State in 2014.
However, his short-lived NFL tenure was not reflective of his college-level success.
As the head coach of the Jaguars, Meyer posted a 3-14 record and was fired less than a year after being announced as the new coach.
However, coaching transitions between college football and the NFL are not always failures.
In 2018, former University of Alabama offensive coordinator Brian Daboll left the Crimson Tide for the same role with the Buffalo Bills, where he eventually found his way into the head coaching job for the New York Giants.
In his first year with the Giants in 2022, he led the team, which had struggled in previous years, to a 9-7-1 record, earning a playoff berth. The Giants upset the Minnesota Vikings in the Wild Card round for the organization’s first playoff win since 2012.
“I’d say that hiring Daboll helped the team overall,” said Justin Buglion, a GCSU alumnus and Giants fan. “He hasn’t been as consistent as he was in that first year, but it was a good hire for what we needed at the time.”
As the offseason progresses, fans will have to wait and see if their favorite programs and organizations will be able to hold on to their most valued coaches.