Only four weeks have past in the 2008 NFL Season, but as Don Banks of SI.com writes, the four rookie head coaches are already off to a respectable start.
— Washington’s Jim Zorn has his confident Redskins at 3-1, on a three-game winning streak, and coming off a head-turning 26-24 upset of the previously undefeated Cowboys in Texas Stadium, where no new Redskins coach had ever won before.
— Baltimore’s John Harbaugh and his scrappy Ravens are 2-1, and on Monday night in Pittsburgh came within a play or two of going to 3-0 within the AFC North despite starting a rookie quarterback in Joe Flacco.
— Atlanta’s Mike Smith has brought 2-2 respectability to his rebuilding Falcons, who are only a game behind NFC South co-leaders Carolina and Tampa Bay (3-1). Atlanta, too, is doing just fine with a rookie quarterback in Matt Ryan.
— And even Miami’s Tony Sparano made us sit up and take notice, with his 1-2 Dolphins pulling off the NFL’s upset of the year, that imaginative 38-13 Week 3 thrashing of New England in Foxboro — a loss that snapped the Patriots’ league-record 21-game regular-season win streak. Miami, in case you forgot, finished a cool 15 games behind New England last year.
All four of these head coaches have done a wonderful job, but the one that has most impressed is Zorn. We always hear that the West Coast Offense takes two to three years to learn and yet QB Jason Campbell has already shown how comfortable he is in the new system. That’s a testament to Zorn’s coaching and getting his players up to speed with a rather complicated offensive system.
It’s not uncommon to see a team with a rookie head coach start the year winless for the first couple weeks. But considering all of these teams except Miami have two wins, it’s fair to say that these first-year head coaches are off to solid starts.
