Why can't a good man be a great coach?

Of course, it's possible. However, for some reason, we demand certain extra attributes in a man before we consider him a great coach. We tend to look for the disciplinarian type epitomized by Vince Lombardi. We look for the crafty genius type like Bill Belichick. We look for a tough guy like Bill Parcells. But, we hardly ever look for a coach who has the attributes of a good and decent man without demanding that he also have other behavioral characteristics which we superficially define as necessary leadership qualities.

Jim Zorn is a good man. I would be proud to call him my friend, my son, my buddy. I'd go out of my way to help him if I could. I'd tell my children to look up to him and use him as an example of a good and decent man.

But, I can't, for the life of me, say that he is a good coach. He certainly has the expertise required to be an elite NFL coach. He has the moxy. He has the experience. He has the desire to lead a team to the Super Bowl. But, he won't. In fact, he can't. He doesn't yell and spit and curse at his players. He doesn't call them out in a public forum. He looks at a player's skill set and sees the opportunity to mold the player into something great.

And, I don't buy into this idea that he can't effectively call the proper plays. Football isn't rocket science. It's a simple game played by physically talented athletes and coached by ordinary men who have gained expertise through experience. Of course, their football savvy is high. They have seen and run the same plays over and over again hundreds of times. They have a level of expertise in a narrow band of athletic and cognitive endeavor. They aren't special. Zorn can call the right play for the right situation. But, he must weigh which call to make against the availability of a player to successfully execute the play on the field. If he had Tom Brady at quarterback and Randy Moss at wide receiver, he'd tend to run play action and a post route to Randy on first and ten at the forty and figure that he had a fifty fifty chance of scoring a touchdown. But, since he has Jason Campbell and Santana Moss, he will tend to call a twenty yard square out to Santana and figure that Campbell will either overthrow Santana or panic and dump the ball off to Cooley in the flat. Zorn can and does adjust his play calling to maximize the success rate based on the talent pool he has available to him. I have no problem with his play calling. He calls what he thinks his players can execute.

Zorn will never be Parcells, or Lombardi, or Belichick. The players probably call him soft, too easy, too laid back. But, what the players don't seem to understand is that they have just as much, or more, responsibility for making the team successful as anyone else in the organization. In a perfect world, they would listen to the coach and run through a wall for him. But, they won't. They never will.

So, at the end of the season, Zorn will be fired and then land a job as quarterback coach in Seattle or Oakland. And, he'll be as happy as he can be for getting the opportunity to teach a young man the skills required to be an NFL quarterback.

And, he'll look back on his two years at Washington as an opportunity to test himself and see how he would fare as a head coach in the National Football League. He'll accept his failure on that grand stage as a life experience that he'll never forget and will never regret.

That's the type of person who is a good and decent man, but not a person who will ever be considered a great coach. I find that depressing.