By that logic we could have hired an equipment manager with 25 years experience. The key thing is that Brewster had no management experience. He probably knows how to coach up a TE, and he supposedly is a good recruiter, but he had zippo, nada, none experience managing a team, or even just one side of the ball.
What an asinine statement. Yes, equipment managers get hired to be head coaches all the time, don't they? At least make a reasonable analogy if you want to debate the point.
You're trying to simplify things by saying, "We need to have someone who has done X, because then he will be successful." It's not that easy. If it were, we wouldn't have hired 1 good coach in the last 60 years.
The fact is that coaches are hired from all different backgrounds, and while some backgrounds are less likely to fail than others, there is no failsafe method. You say Brewster couldn't succeed because he was "just" an NFL position coach? Newsflash: teams don't hire complete dolts to be position coaches in the NFL. It's a six-figure minimum salary. You don't get to that point by not putting in the work and impressing at least one person who knows what he's doing. Were you aware, for example, that the Pig-F'ers to the south hired an NFL position coach in 1999? One who is still there, and has won 60% of his games during said tenure? Sure, he coached a I-AA team for 3 years and won a dazzling 35% of his games while doing so. I'm sure the previous experience helped, but I'm fairly certain it didn't make or break his Iowa tenure.
I'd just like all adherents of this philosophy to "get it". There is no "template". There's no magic elixir to getting a coach that's the right man at the right time. Circumstantial evidence indicates that Maturi let outside factors (read: affordability) affect his hiring process, which is not how to do things the right way. He should've made a better hire. But to suggest that someone
cannot be successful as a Big Ten head coach because you
must have X experience in your past is ridiculous.
