Turbulent channel flow and homogeneous shear flow have served as basic building block flows for the testing and calibration of Reynolds stress models. In this paper, a direct theoretical connection is made between homogeneous shear flow in equilibrium and the log layer of fully developed turbulent channel flow. It is shown that if a second‐order closure model of the standard type is calibrated to yield good equilibrium values for homogeneous shear flow, it will also yield good results for the log layer of channel flow provided that the Rotta coefficient is not too far removed from one. Most of the commonly used second‐order closure models introduce anadhocwall reflection term in order to mask deficient predictions for the log layer of channel flow that arise either from an inaccurate calibration of homogeneous shear flow or from the use of a Rotta coefficient that is too large. Illustrative model calculations are presented to demonstrate this point which has important implications for turbulence modeling.