Matthews holds Scott in very high regard as a player, but admits he is as in the dark as anyone as to how those qualities that served him so well over a 215-game career will transfer to coaching.
"To get the opportunity to coach Geelong would have been so magnificent in the last four years," Matthews said. "So it's good in the respect that you've got a talented team to coach, but I don't think anyone in their right mind would think that Geelong is going to win 80 per cent of its games over the next four years.
"They have been on such a high, so he gets the opportunity to take over a team that is playing well, but it's also a team that has had such an unbelievable period of success that it's hard to fathom that they could live up to that same level in the years ahead.
"That's just the two-fold nature of coaching Geelong at this point in the club's history."
While Matthews says Scott will have to tread the same uncertain path any new coach is required to, the man he labels "smart" and "a thinker" has many of the traits commonly associated with successful leaders.
"What I really liked about Chris at the Lions was he was a savage on-field competitor and a mild-mannered bloke off the field. I love that combination," Matthews said.
"Leading into the 2003 grand final he had groin problems but was still available to be selected. He was the 23rd man and there was some doubt over Nigel Lappin's fitness. Lappin's inclusion was only decided an hour before the game, so Chris had to be the player next in line who really didn't know until very late whether he was going to play.
"I think that kind of adversity is always a good test of a person's character. The way he handled it was just another tick for the kind of person he is."
Chris joins twin brother Brad in the AFL coaching fraternity and while Matthews understands the level of interest that will attract he says it would be wrong to assume the Cats are getting basically the same coach that North Melbourne employed a year ago.
"They are very different people, they are not the same person, but the common denominator is they are confident but not arrogant, that's important," Matthews said.
"They've got an understated confidence rather than an arrogance which makes you enjoy being around them or working with them.
"There will be that curiosity that they're both coaching, but the one common denominator for me is that I've got an enormous amount of time for both of them."
Chris joins an ever-growing 'coaching tree' of players to have learned their craft under Matthews during the highly-successful Brisbane Lions triple premiership era or as part of Collingwood's 1990 flag side.
The Scott brothers, Michael Voss and Tony Shaw have all gone on to coach AFL teams thanks in part to the highly-regarded 'coached by Leigh Matthews' stamp of approval on their resumes with Nigel Lappin, Blake Caracella, Shaun Hart and Justin Leppitsch all currently serving apprenticeships.
"You do have that sense of fatherly pride that one of your boys, in a way, has actually got one of the big jobs," Matthews says.
"I was in my mid-40s when I went to the Lions and I had children who were older than a lot of my players, so you tend to have a fatherly, next generation sort of situation."
