COLLINGWOOD coach Mick Malthouse has endorsed assistant Mark Neeld as a prime candidate for the vacant Adelaide coaching job.

Neeld, with other AFL assistant coaches Scott Burns, Leon Cameron, Brenton Sanderson and Simon Goodwin, has been linked to the role from which Neil Craig resigned on Monday.

The Ocean Grove-based assistant was reported to have rejected an offer to join Chris Scott's team at Geelong in the off-season of last year because he was contracted to the Magpies for 2011.

Malthouse said Neeld was better placed than former Magpies assistant and now North Melbourne coach Brad Scott was when he was in the mix for his first senior role.

"In many respects, he's probably further advanced [than Scott] because he's coached his own team and even though it was a local team, he's won four premierships in a row, which is pretty hard to do," he said on Thursday.

"He's coached an under-18s side, and he's brought to them discipline, good structure and good methodology."

Neeld, who played 48 games for Geelong and 26 for Richmond between 1990 and 1996, came to Collingwood in late 2007 with an impressive coaching resume.

He had just finished three seasons coaching the Western Jets in the TAC Cup, and before that, spent one season with St Joseph's Football Club in the Geelong Football League.

In the four years prior, he led the Ocean Grove football club to four consecutive flags in the Bellarine football league after coaching the Old Geelong Football Club in the Victorian Amateurs.

He also held the position of head of health and physical education at Geelong College for seven years.

He had a major health scare during the finals last year and had to undergo surgery in the days after the Pies' premiership win to remove blood vessels that had travelled from his ear to his brain.

Malthouse said Neeld's effort to coach through the condition, which nobody else at Collingwood knew about, was impressive.  

"It was a massive operation. He was not ill, but it was quite an extreme operation that came about because of a football injury," he said.

"He handled it very well given the circumstances of the operation."

Malthouse, who said in his column in The Australian last week that he wouldn't be at another club in 2012, said his position had not changed since Craig's resignation.