For hardcore college football fans who watched his teams trudge to mediocrity year after year, Kliff Kingsbury’s name being floated this week for NFL head coaching jobs is a puzzling development.

Kingsbury was fired in late November after six seasons at Texas Tech, his alma mater, an era that started with great affinity for his offense and glamorous off-field profile but ended due to an obvious failure to elevate the program. In total, he was 35-40, never posted a winning record in the Big 12 and failed to make a bowl game three out of his six years. Even with his stature as a beloved former quarterback, there was no great uproar when it came time to fire him. He was just another coach who tried and failed to turn Texas Tech into a national power.

But somehow, NFL front offices have decided that despite getting fired weeks ago as a college head coach and quickly taking a job as offensive coordinator at Southern California, Kingsbury might be ready to run an NFL team. According to multiple reports, he has interviews lined up with the Arizona Cardinals and New York Jets and perhaps others as the process goes on.

Hey, wait a second — Isn’t this supposed to be the other way around?

Nobody would bat an eyelash if a fired NFL coach got involved with college jobs. Whether it was Pete Carroll going to USC, Jim Mora to UCLA, Dave Wannstedt at Pittsburgh or Lovie Smith to Illinois, there is a widespread acceptance of the idea that coaching at the highest level of football — whether successful or not — automatically qualifies someone to run a college program. Likewise, there’s a long history of NFL teams getting intoxicated by the star power of winning college coaches from Jimmy Johnson to Steve Spurrier to Nick Saban.

But someone who didn’t win in college going to the NFL, not just as a coordinator but a head coach? That’s a head-scratcher for a lot of people. At best, it reeks of “smartest guy in the room” syndrome that often leads NFL teams astray at draft time when they pick quarterbacks because of how they look in spandex tights or hand size measurements rather than how successful they were running an offense. At worst, it looks like NFL teams trying to find the next Sean McVay by projecting his best qualities onto a blank slate who happens to be in his 30s and is known as a high-level offensive mind.

From everything we have been conditioned to think about the hierarchy of coaches, Kingsbury shouldn’t even be under consideration for NFL jobs. But then again, in a league where 3-4 years has become a normal coaching tenure before getting fired, maybe the entire paradigm needs a reset. Why is hiring Kingsbury any more ridiculous than most of the coaching decisions that will get made this year by NFL teams?

If there’s anything that’s been proven over and over again, it’s that there’s not much correlation between success as a college coach and success as an NFL coach.

Saban didn’t work out with the Dolphins after winning a national championship at LSU. Spurrier was a disaster in Washington after his remarkable tenure at Florida. Butch Davis couldn’t cut it in Cleveland after turning Miami into a national power. Lou Holtz tried the NFL once and didn’t even make it a full season. At the same time, there are plenty of others who were unremarkable in college but did quite well in the NFL from Tom Coughlin to Dennis Green to Steve Mariucci.

In many of those cases, the disconnect between college and pro success was personality. For someone who is comfortable running a fiefdom and commanding the attention of teenagers, an NFL locker room full of millionaires and strong personalities may not be a great fit. For someone who would rather obsess over film and scheme and not worry about what their players are doing when they leave the facility, running a college program will be a guaranteed disaster.

They are fundamentally two different jobs. So if you believe Kingsbury is a talented enough offensive coach to match X’s and O’s with Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll, why would his record at Texas Tech be disqualifying?

From everything I’ve gathered, neither McVay nor Chicago Bears coach Matt Nagy — who are held up as great offensive minds steering the NFL toward a more wide-open era — were ever on the radar for college jobs. They were pro guys who came up on NFL staffs and avoided the track that might have led them to college football.

But it’s worth asking whether either of them, had they traded career paths with Kingsbury, would they have been so good at Texas Tech that blueblood programs or NFL teams would have come knocking down their door. In the NFL, you’re limited by the salary cap, how well your front office drafted and who you have at quarterback. In college, you’re typically only going to be as good as your resources and recruiting appeal, and Texas Tech has never been considered one of the “haves” of the Big 12.

The last Red Raiders coach to leave for a better job? David McWilliams, who was there for one year in 1986 and got the job at Texas.

Over the last six years, Kingsbury’s offenses finished 12th, 16th, 1st, 2nd, 10th and 8th nationally in yards per game, which is even more impressive when you consider that the Red Raiders suffered multiple quarterback injuries this season.

Given where the NFL is going conceptually and the spread concepts that have proven successful for players like Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield, Kingsbury undoubtedly fits the bill. It also helps that he spent four seasons bouncing around NFL rosters and practice squads, so he’s not entirely new to the league. He understands the locker room dynamics and the egos and the rhythm of a season.

The biggest question about Kingsbury as a coach is on defense, where his Texas Tech teams struggled badly. It would be easy enough for an NFL team to write that off as a function of his inability to recruit good defensive players to Lubbock, which wouldn’t matter in the NFL where a front office would undoubtedly pair him with a veteran defensive coordinator and handle the personnel side.

Despite his pretty boy image, Kingsbury didn’t fail at Texas Tech because he wasn’t serious about his craft or didn’t work hard enough. He was known as a grinder, even if that didn’t always translate to wins and losses, and a guy who wanted badly to get better as a coach.

Even with his record in Lubbock, everyone in college football expects him to turn around USC’s offense and land another Power Five head coaching job in relatively short order.

Viewed through that prism, it doesn’t seem so crazy that NFL teams who want to build a modern offense around a young quarterback are enamored with Kingsbury’s potential as an NFL coach. It may not be the conventional path, but given the league’s shallow pool of new coaching talent, it may be worth the gamble.