NFL Insider: Tis time to spin the coaching carousel

With the resignation of Bobby Petrino in Atlanta, the coaching-search season is officially on.

It's an exhaustive process a team goes through to find the single most important person in the organization. And once the choice is made, people involved in the decision won't even be sure they made the right decision.

Bobby Petrino is one of many successful college coaches who did not fare as well in the pros. (AP)

Petrino's sudden resignation might have caught Atlanta by surprise, but probably not unprepared. Atlanta went through this process last year, so the Falcons already have a volume of work on a number of candidates. That is the good news.

The bad news is some of their final interviews ended up getting jobs, mainly Ken Whisenhunt, who now coaches the Arizona Cardinals.

What a team in the Falcons situation should do now is update its list, starting with the coaches who have become available since last year. The most obvious two names are Bill Cowher and Marty Schottenheimer.

The next thing to do is call the teams that filled coaching vacancies last year and ask them about the candidates they interviewed, what they thought of them and who finished second in their search.

Then look at the coordinators on this year's successful teams and investigate their viability as candidates for a head coaching position. Call their team's head coach, general manager and owner, or sometimes scouts will ask the other team's scouts what they think about these coaches.

In any case, you want more than one reference and you want a cross section of references (scouts, coaches, GMs, owners, players).

Next, review this year's successful college coaches who were not on your list last season.

While on the subject of college coaches, let me give you my thoughts on hiring a college coach.

There was a theory for a number of years that hiring a successful college head coach who had pro experience was a good move because he had already proven himself in a head coaching setting. He knew the pro game and would have contacts in the NFL to know who to hire as assistants, which would be critical to his success.

Most college coaches who make the move to the pros find this to be one of their biggest obstacles because they do not usually have firsthand knowledge of the top NFL assistants.

Some successful college head coaches who have had success in the NFL with also having prior head-coaching experience are Dick Vermeil (UCLA), Bill Walsh (Stanford), John Robinson (USC), Bobby Ross (Maryland and Georgia Tech), Dennis Green (Stanford) and Tom Coughlin (Boston College).