When the 2008 NFL season opens for Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore and Washington, players like QB Matt Ryan, LT Jake Long, QB Joe Flacco and WR Devin Thomas won’t be the only rookies on their respected teams, as the rookie players will all be led by rookie head coaches.

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The Atlanta Falcons are in full rebuild mode and enter a new era in Falcons football, post-. The Falcons and the entire NFL were devastated by the whole dog-fighting scandal, but the franchise appears all too ready to move on and move forward.

Out are veterans like Alge Crumpler, DeAngelo Hall, and Warrick Dunn, and in are new faces like Michael Turner, Matt Ryan and Sam Baker, and first and foremost, the new head man Smith.

Smith comes over from the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he spent the last five seasons as Jack Del Rio’s defensive coordinator. Of the four rookie head coaches, Smith is the only one who has experience as a coordinator in the NFL.

A big plus besides his coaching experience is that Smith is described as having a hands-on approach and is a better communicator than Falcons former head coach , who resigned after a Week 14 loss to New Orleans and promptly took the vacant job at Arkansas.

Smith and new GM will have plenty of time to work, and along with the personnel changes on the field, Smith made a wise move by filling his staff with veteran coaches, who will help make the rebuilding process go as smoothly as possible.

In Miami, the era has begun, and though the former head coach is now in the front office and not on the sidelines, the new-look franchise will have his imprint on it in a big way. After a catastrophic 2007 season and many years of mismanagement, Miami’s ownership handed over the reins to Parcells to return the Dolphins back to football glory. Parcells wasted no time in bringing over two of his protégés from Dallas, GM and coach Tony Sparano.

Sparano replaces Cam Cameron, who was only with the Dolphins for what proved to be a disastrous 1-15 season. Sparano, whose head-coaching experience came in the 90s at alma mater New Haven, was most recently the Cowboys’ O-line and assistant head coach and he previously had stints in Cleveland, Washington, and Jacksonville.

Sparano is known as a tough, straight-forward guy and has filled his staff with several assistants who are familiar with the Parcells way of things. Part of his new staff is offensive coordinator Dan Henning, defensive coordinator Paul Pasqualoni, and special teams coordinator John Bonamego. Like Smith, Sparano will have plenty of time to turn things around in Miami.

There isn’t a major rebuilding process going on in Baltimore, but new coach John Harbaugh will look to make some changes to a franchise that was up and down in the latter years of Brian Billick’s tenure.

Harbaugh comes to Baltimore from Philadelphia, where he was previously the Eagles’ secondary coach. Harbaugh, the brother of former NFL quarterback and current Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh and the son of former Western Michigan and Western Kentucky head coach Jack Harbaugh, coached on the collegiate level from 1984-97 before moving to Philadelphia in 1998.

His biggest challenge will be to create some sort of offensive identity, which Billick, for all of his accolades as an offensive mastermind, never really did in his tenure. It won’t be easy though, as the rookie coach has to solidify things at the quarterback position, and the offensive line also has some inexperience, especially after the retirement of Jonathan Ogden.

To help him with the offense, Harbaugh has brought in Cameron as the new offensive coordinator, where the former Dolphins’ head man will be better able to work his offensive magic. However, he kept some continuity on defense by retaining defensive coordinator .

Harbaugh will have a one-to-two year period where the aging defense will allow the team to be competitive long enough to allow the offense to develop, but it won’t be long before he’ll have to rebuild that defense.

In Washington, Jim Zorn’s hire as new head coach for the Redskins is easily the most interesting hiring of all the new head coaches in the league. Redskins’ owner passed over former assistant head coach and former Bills head coach for the rookie Zorn, who had already been hired to be the new offensive coordinator. To many it appeared that it was a mere formality for Williams to take over the job for the retiring , but Snyder, who has now hired six different head coaches since he acquired the team in 1999, chose to go with Zorn.

Zorn takes over after working as the Seattle Seahawks’ quarterbacks coach since 2001. Before his stay in Seattle, Zorn had a stint as an assistant with the Detroit Lions, and he was an assistant on the collegiate level with Boise State, Utah State, and the University of Minnesota.

Joining Zorn on the coaching staff are new offensive coordinator Sherman Smith and new defensive coordinator Greg Blache, who take over for the fired Al Saunders and Williams.

Zorn brings in a West Coast offense, which seems to favor fourth-year QB Jason Campbell. Zorn has given Campbell complete confidence that he will be the starter when the season opens and has made a point to work one on one with the young quarterback, imparting wisdom and knowledge gained not only as a coach, but also as a former NFL quarterback in the 70s and 80s.

Zorn stands to have the most competitive team in the quartet, but also has to work under Snyder, who has shown a lack of patience with his head coaches in the past. It could be a tough start for Zorn as the Redskins open the season on the road against the Super Bowl champion New York Giants and go on to face two solid teams in New Orleans and Atlanta in the next two weeks before going on the road again to face rivals Dallas and Philadelphia.

While it appears that a trend in hiring young and/or inexperienced head coaches might be forming, that doesn’t appear to be the right way to go. Nine of the last 11 Super Bowl winning head coaches have won championships with their second teams. In last year’s Super Bowl, the Giants’ Tom Coughlin beat out the Patriots’ Bill Belichick, both of whom had been fired from their first NFL head coaching jobs.

With that in mind, it will certainly be interesting to see who lasts the longest and has the most success of these rookie head coaches.

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