I'm talking about coaches the stature of Gruden, Dungy and Cowher. There are fringe coaches like Wannstedt and Devine who bounce around some, but a coach who has had a good deal of success at the NFL level has not made the move back to college football. If it was the easy, plum job you make it out to be, wouldn't more coaches do it? All sorts of coaches have spent considerable amount of time in the NFL only to go back to the college ranks. Some have become established college coaches only to dip their toes in the NFL and move right back to college. Coaching is not a career that has a particularly long shelf life. The 40 year old head is kind of unique to recent times, as is the money bag college head coach. Wanny was hardly a fringe coach, he was a big name NFL coach for well over a decade. Al Groh, Nick Saban, Jim Mora, Bobby Petrino and many others have moved back to the college ranks. Others, like Kirk Ferentz, who has seen the NFL in person, has chosen to take his name out of the running of multiple NFL gigs because of the preference for NCAA life. Somebody like Mike Ditka, who spent his entire career coaching in the NFL, or Bill Parcells, who coached in the NFL and then moved into personel, or Mike Holmgren who coached/GMd until he was in his 60's were never good candidates to go into the college coaching ranks. If your only exposure to college football was the relatively laid back version of the 60's/70's, you might not see the draw. Most coaches burn out sometime in their 50's or early 60's, so the idea of building up your resume until you are an elite NFL head coach and then going back to college isn't all that realistic anyway due to time. There are big name and well paid coaches who have chosen college over the NFL, either by leaving or never going in the first place. Maybe Gruden, Dungy or Cowher never will, but there's no reason why some other late 40's early 50's established NFL coach won't choose to go to college, still rake in big bucks with better stability a longer term focus and less demand on his time.