Not sure why/what Saban did to deserve the shade. He has been incredibly innovative on defense whether it is how to defend RPOs or his innovations in secondary coverage schemes. Yes a lot of his success is due to recruiting and playing against less stacked rosters but he's been an innovator for decades now. Belichick talks to him about how to defend against concepts to this day and many of those concepts are coming from college. The NFL is the one that is slower to change and integrate new concepts. College is the innovation lab of football. Yeah the NFL is bigger, faster, and more complex than college but Saban doesn't deserve anyone questioning his coaching credentials. He's also great at game planning and taking away things offenses do well. He saw pretty quickly that he didn't have the right QB to make it work in the NFL and bailed. He knew he could have success on his own in college whereas in the NFL if you don't have the right QB it is really hard to win. He took a more self-determined path and crushed it. Also,
@Brand Name can talk more about this but there are a lot of overlaps with the Bama defense and the Patriots. He didn't make it work in the NFL but he deserves the accolades he gets and he is an amazing coach. Plus, and this is the cherry on top, if Belichick thinks he's one of the greatest I'm going to go ahead and trust in his judgement.
I'll get off my pedestal about Saban (and I am a UGA and SMU fan so I didn't want to have to do that...) and discuss Meyer.
Lombardi has 4 principles of leadership:
1) Management of attention: do you have a plan?
2) Management of meaning: can you explain and communicate that plan?
3) Management of trust: do players trust you to be consistent? Do they trust you period?
4) Management of self: can you self-evaluate and be self-critical?
It's pretty easy seeing how Belichick embodies all 4 of those principles. But what about Meyer?
1) He had a plan in that he wanted an offense built around team speed. It wasn't a good plan and he went with guys like Travis ETN instead of a functional wide receiver but that's on him. I don't think it was a good plan or a well thought out plan but he had one... I think.
2) Well considering his WRs still can't figure out their assignments and he is throwing all of his assistant coaches under the bus I am going to say he failed to explain and communicate that plan.
3) Do I even have to explain why he's lost the trust of his locker room and players are calling him out for being unfair? I hope not.
4) Meyer has shown some ability to self-evaluate with his decision to step back from the game and with X's and O's but not when it comes to his handling of relationships. I don't think he has behaved in a competent way so far this season and hasn't learned from his mistakes in the NFL so far.
So I'd give him partial credit on 1 and 4 but a 0 for 2 and 3. Lombardi believes you need 3/4 to succeed and 2/4 to have at least short term success. Meyer is 1/4 or 2/4 depending on how generous you want to be to him and if you argued he had none of those traits I wouldn't fight you about it. He doesn't show the qualities you need to be a successful head coach in the NFL.
Last note but... what is hb?