All week we’ve discussed the achievements of the SEC’s coaches and their role in the conference’s seven national titles since 2006 and its frequent flooding of the national polls.

Obviously all the success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Among those that can appreciate the success of the SEC and its coaches is the NFL, a league filled with teams hoping to stay ahead of the curve and find the “next big thing” that will make them a contender for a decade.

Three coaches in the SEC have already tried their hand at the NFL, and the results were less than desirable. But the pathway for college coaches to make the leap to the NFL remains intact to this day, and there are a handful of current SEC coaches would may still take a stab at coaching at the game’s highest level.

Let’s reflect on the conference’s three failed NFL experiments, see where they went wrong, and project how a few other SEC coaches might fare in the NFL if given a shot one day:

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier was the first of the SEC’s three active coaches with NFL head coaching experience to make the jump to the league. He took over the Washington Redskins in 2002, ending his 12-year reign at Florida that included eight division titles, six SEC championships and the 1996 national title.

In Washington, however, Spurrier did something he’d never done in his head coaching career: he lost.

Spurrier was 7-9 in 2002 and 5-11 in 2003 before he and the Redskins divorced. Spurrier’s biggest issue among many in the NFL was his unwarranted trust in his former Florida players. The Redskins trotted Shane Matthews and Danny Wuerffel out as starting quarterbacks, in the same season no less, and many wonder to this day how Spurrier’s Redskins even won five games that season. Wuerffel and Matthews are legendary college quarterbacks, but Spurrier’s insistence on using his former players rather than proven NFL commodities was his undoing.

Of course, in 2005 Spurrier returned to the SEC to coach South Carolina, and he’s been in Columbia ever since.

As Spurrier was returning to the SEC, then-LSU head coach Nick Saban, just two years removed from his second SEC crown and first national title, left the Tigers to take over the Miami Dolphins. Like Spurrier, he lasted only two years in the NFL, but unlike Spurrier, he posted a 9-7 record in his first season on the job. Many often forget that Saban has as many winning seasons in the NFL as he does losing seasons (the Dolphins were 6-10 in 2006 before Saban left for Alabama).

Saban’s biggest issue in the pros is one of his greatest strengths as a college coach. Saban was a disciplinarian known to be critical of his players in order to inspire improvement. However, NFL athletes making more than the coach don’t often respond well to that kind of coaching.

Saban brought a defensive linemen to tears during his first training camp in Miami, and that served as foreshadowing for why he would ultimately fail to translate to the next level.

Saban’s current offensive coordinator at Alabama, Lane Kiffin, is the third and final SEC coach with NFL head man experience. He coached the Oakland Raiders for a little more than one season from 2007-08 when he was just 32 years old. He posted a 4-12 record in ’07 and began the ’08 season 1-3 before he was fired.

To be fair, Kiffin was likely in over his head when he took a job that most other coaches wanted nothing to do with. He’d never even been a coordinator at the NFL and had never been a head coach at any level. And for context’s sake, six other men have coached the Raiders since 2004 and none of them have posted a single winning season. Kiffin didn’t perform, but he was also stuck in a toxic situation.

POTENTIAL DOWN THE ROAD

Three more current SEC head coaches may have NFL futures of their own down the line. Those men include Arkansas head coach Bret Bielema, who was tied to the once-vacant Miami Dolphins job in 2012 (he left Wisconsin for Arkansas instead), and two more up-and-coming coaches in Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin and Tennessee’s Butch Jones.

Let’s start with Bielema, since he has established ties to an NFL job opening in the last three years. Bielema has completely changed the culture of Arkansas football, and the passion he shows for his players in the public arena and in the media indicates he’d win the favor of his locker room rather fast (Sumlin and Jones share this quality, and we’ll get to that in a moment).

Bielema knows how to lead a potent rushing attack and knows how to piece together a strong defense led by its front seven. He achieved both of these characteristics at Wisconsin and Arkansas, and has had just one losing season in nine years as a head coach following that formula.

His issue is that aside from his lone year with eventual Super Bowl champion Russell Wilson, Bielema has never led a team with a respectable passing attack, and in the NFL if you can’t throw the ball it is very hard to win 10-plus games a year. However, most teams are crippled by the lack of a capable quarterback, and Bielema’s system has worked without a quarterback most years, meaning he could overcome certain NFL obstacles that others cannot.

Sumlin and Jones are a lot like Bielema in that they’ve achieved nothing but success as college coaches and that they recruit well and are popular among their players.

The two coaches have turned Texas A&M and Tennessee, two programs with proud football traditions who had regressed during the mid-to-late 2000s, back into traditional powers and recruiting factories. If you thought Bielema overhauled the culture in Arkansas, these guys did twice the job in College Station and Knoxville, respectively.

What makes Sumlin an appealing NFL candidate is that he leads a potent spread passing offense that has led the SEC in yards through the air since his arrival. Granted he’s had talent on his side, but every NFL team has talent; that’s how pro sports work.

So if Sumlin had a capable quarterback and some decent protection, it’s likely his teams could put points on the board. He’d need a trusted defensive coordinator and savvy personnel guys, but he has an offense that can succeed at any level, especially as the NFL trends away from the run and toward the pass.

Jones would be the rebuilding master of the three coaches in question. He’s been either praised or mocked for his brick by brick approach to rebuilding Tennessee, depending on how you view the Vols, but you have to hand it to him — his rebuilding plan has worked.

He’s promised recruits immediate playing time, got the best recruits to choose his program despite no prior evidence of success during his tenure, then got a large heap of underclassmen to reach a bowl game out of a conference with 12 teams boasting seven wins or more.

Now his club is considered a contender to win the SEC East as he enters just his third year on the job. Jones knows which guys fit his system, he knows how to get them to play for his team, and he knows how to make it work quickly to allow his teams to hit the ground running.

In a modern NFL culture where you’re either a Super Bowl contender or taking for a better draft slot, he could turn any team’s culture into that of a contender sooner than later.

All three coaches would have to earn the trust of a few key leaders in their locker rooms first, but considering their rapport with their college players and their big personalities, this seems attainable.

To clarify, there’s no reason to suspect any of these three coaches will be leaving for the NFL anytime soon. But if they achieve all they wish to achieve in college sometime in the next 5, 10, maybe even 20 years, the NFL could be a spot in which they’d succeed.

It’s hard to imagine a coach like Bret Bielema having more NFL success than Steve Spurrier or Nick Saban, but with his personality and football philosophy he and Jones and Sumlin may just be the kinds of coaches who can win anywhere.