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Jason La Canfora
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www.cbssports.com]
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... please allow me to stump for Dave Toub. Yes, Dave Toub. And the fact you have no idea who the hell he is, in and of itself, is indicative of the kind of tail-wagging that has been going on with these searches for far too long.
Toub is the stud special teams coach for Andy Reid in Kansas City. He’s the guy who has been helping win games for the Chiefs with big returns and fake punts and shifting field position and motivating men and outsmarting his opponents. And before that, he was the guy behind the perennially dominant special teams in Chicago (2004-12). Oh, and before that he led Reid’s special teams units in Philly (2001-03), which were also generally top notch. He’s the guy behind Devin Hester and Robbie Gould and, lately, Chiefs dervish Tyreek Hill.
Many of his players over the years have told me Toub should be leading an entire team, not merely one unit. He’s a leader of men. He commands respect. He gets the best out of players. He is arguably the best coach on Reid’s esteemed staff in Kansas City, and Reid has been nothing but a developer of NFL coaches. He grows them. And Toub is one of his best, yet the fact that he coaches special teams works against him. That still remains true in spite of Hall of Famers like George Allen and Marv Levy were coaches who came through the special teams pipeline, not to mention Bobby Ross or Baltimore’s John Harbaugh, another one of Reid’s disciples.
“He’s a combination of Harbaugh and John Madden,” one of Toub’s former colleagues said. “He is the real deal. This guy can coach. Period. He’s a big guy, physically, who can take over a room when he has to. He gets people to buy in. These guys love playing for him. He comes from a great [coaching] family tree. Look at Andy Reid’s assistants over the years. This guy is ready. All he needs is a chance.”
A personnel exec who used to work with Toub, 54, said: “If Dave Toub can’t get a job in this league, then I give up. Talk to other coaches in the league. They know who is for real and who is horseshit or the flavor of the month. This guy can coach a football team. He’d be the first guy I’d talk to, and it isn’t even really close.”
Toub has been involved in head coaching searches before, interviewing with the Dolphins when they hired Joe Philbin (how did that work out for them?) and the Bears in 2013 (when they hired Marc Trestman — yikes). He has been under consideration for many more, but general managers have been scared to pull the trigger. I spoke to two of them a year ago about Toub, a former all-WAC offensive lineman who was drafted in the ninth round by the Eagles but never made it on to an NFL roster. Both agreed he was a hell of a coach and an inspired thought to run a team and that he merited a chance, but then both essentially ruled it out in the end because they needed to develop a quarterback and were locked into going offense. Neither guy who was eventually hired, by the way, is what I would call especially safe even only one year in.
Another exec who knows him said: “Superb at what he does and by a million miles the best special teams coach in the league. He is an A-plus guy.”
You can find a quarterback coach and offensive coordinator to work with the passers. It doesn’t have to define the entire coaching search. I would actually assert that special teams coaches are ahead of the curve in that they already must address players from both sides of the ball, and in essence the entire team with regularity. They aren’t dealing with merely those certain position groups. Besides the head coach, the special teams coach is the only guy on the staff entrusted with clock management and other in-game responsibilities. He also must adjust to losing more players than any other unit. A special teams coach comes in with no inherent bias to either side of the ball, and thus no sentimental ties or desires of offense over defense (or vice versa) in terms of roster composition with the GM.
I hope this hiring season that some of the GMs who invariably consider Toub actually give the Chiefs a call and ask to interview him. I hope they reflect on how Harbaugh and Mike Tomlin were two of the more outside-the-box hires of the past decade or so, and how well they have worked out. I hope they get beyond the norms and perceived constraints and branch out a little bit. If they do, I suspect they end up richly rewarded.
