with no-name musicians who are better musicians than famous, award-winning ones. It's so common, it's a cliche. That's because becoming a music star is only one part about talent, the rest is a matter of getting the right patronage, the right marketing, and the right moment to coincide and then leveraging it into the public mind. The craft of music is a 1,000 miles apart from the game of marketing music and creating an image.
Not so with football. Guys who have the ability play in college play in college. And the intense physical demands of being a college level defensive football player - the need to be the one who ends plays either by physically bringing another man to the ground (often a huge person), catch them with speed or force them out of bounds are such that the person who hasn't had to confront and take down elite athletes can't really relate to what it is like. Which is the entire reason that literally no other FBS football program in the modern era has ever hired a DC that didn't either play the game at the college level or prove himself at lower levels of the game before he got his shot in FBS.
A virtuoso music performer who simply never made it big can address all technical aspects of performing and the experience of performing in front of people just fine.