You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (4 page)

This is not a blanket condemnation of both institutions. The GOP shouldn’t disregard its core financial principles and all of its social beliefs to chase alienated voters. By the same token, MLB shouldn’t alter the essence of its traditions and beliefs. Both entities are fully capable of rebounding with an influx of fresh ideas and progressive leadership.

The overriding message, however, is clear: wealth, tradition, and historical relevance do not guarantee never-ending success. Sometimes hidebound institutions need to understand that reaching out, taking risks, embracing new technology, and engaging new communities is not selling your soul.

Evolving is not conceding. It’s not a desperate act or a refutation of values or a bow-down to a passing fad.

The GOP and MLB think the path to cool lies in that Affliction T-shirt. When the occasion permits, they grab it out of the drawer, pull it over their heads, and strain to tug it down over their potbellies. They swagger into a club, just a couple of 60-year-olds with no self-awareness, and expect the rest of us to want to hang out.

Sorry, guys—the party’s over here.

There was billowing smoke, fresh skid marks, and debris scattered across the highway. A fender and a door panel were tossed halfway across the lane, and an ambulance siren could be heard in the distance. People were driving slowly, rubbernecking as they passed. This was almost exactly like any ugly accident; it happened suddenly, without warning, but the aftermath was bound to last forever.

The only difference? This pile-up happened on the radio.

University of Wisconsin basketball coach Bo Ryan was a guest of
Mike and Mike
, and they were discussing the relevant topic of player transfers. It’s a situation coaches face regularly, and it was pertinent to the moment because Ryan was dealing with a Badger player named Jarrod Uthoff, who had expressed his desire to leave Madison for another program.

These things happen. No big deal, right? Couples break up, employees change jobs, kids leave and change schools. In college sports, of course, coaches make their names in one place and immediately jump ship to land in more glamorous and lucrative ships.

The college-recruiting process is built largely on an artificial premise. Players choose schools based on showy, manipulative weekend sales pitches. Once on campus, when faced with the reality of bad weather, 8 a.m. classes, and militaristic coaches, some of them decide they’d rather be somewhere else.

Once word spread that Ryan was blocking many of Uthoff’s choices, there was bound to be tension between the coach and the radio hosts. Ryan was grumpy, which is understandable when a talented player decides to bolt. But that doesn’t excuse what followed: roughly ten minutes of arrogance, delusion, defiance, and
that special brand of bad public relations that made you wonder if the rest of the Badgers’ athletic department—or at least the branch that could have prevented this—was suddenly deciding to take the rest of the week off.

Ryan took shots at one of the hosts for having never played the game, which apparently prevented him from understanding the issue. He inferred that multimillionaire coaches are the victims and the unpaid college players should be held to their word. He was rigid and mean when the moment seemed to call for at least a semblance of nuance and compassion.

It was radio gold for
Mike and Mike
.

It was verbal quicksand for Bo Ryan.

I’m guessing I was less surprised than most. I had not only heard that special brand of arrogance and defiance—Freud’s id, ego, and superego packed into one radio segment—but I had seen it repeatedly from other members of that same group of men: college basketball coaches.

They hold a unique place in the coaching world, one filled with unsurpassed, unchallenged power that over time grows into a delusional fiefdom. They challenge university presidents and boards—their
bosses
, remember—to public verbal fistfights. Their arrogance knows no bounds.

Roy Williams once angrily dismissed a reporter, Bonnie Bernstein, on live national television, for having the audacity to ask if reports that he was leaving Kansas for North Carolina were true. Several hours later, Williams was on a private jet heading toward his new coaching destination.

Bobby Knight reportedly threw a potted plant at someone in his office over a disagreement. Jerry Tarkanian asked boosters to declare war on his school president while he was coaching at UNLV. Many of these men, like UConn’s Jim Calhoun, express their
on-campus omnipotence by demanding to name their replacement after their ruling power subsides.

Can you imagine another public employee believing this to-the-grave power is not only acceptable but a God-given right?

These are just the incidents we know, the few that make their way out of the almost hermetically sealed dictatorships. Behind the curtain, the Oz goes about his business in an even more power-hungry and deluded fashion.

Why? What created this culture, and what allows it to persist?

The best way to look at the phenomenon is by comparison: college basketball coach vs. college football coach.

Start with Gary Williams, the longtime coach of Maryland in the basketball-obsessed ACC. He won the 2001–2002 NCAA championship, but he finished five of the next nine years unranked. After that title, he never finished with a higher ranking than 17 in the other four. That’s nine years of absolutely average basketball in the preeminent basketball conference in the country, for a school that is competing for recruits with North Carolina and Duke, not to mention Georgetown and other Big East schools. And yet he sort of slithers out of his job and into retirement. He wasn’t forced out. People remember the championship year far more vividly than the nine that followed it.

The corollary to Williams is Gene Chizik at Auburn. The man won the national title and was run out of town two years later. Two years! How’s that for institutional memory? Les Miles has won 85 percent of his games at LSU—85 percent!—and half the state wants to run him out of town. John Cooper averaged 9½ wins at Ohio State over his final six years, was No. 2 in the country twice over those six years, and won the Rose and the Sugar Bowls against excellent teams. And yet Cooper was run out of town because he couldn’t beat Michigan. I would contend that North Carolina
coach Roy Williams could lose to Duke ten straight times and still keep his job as long as the Tar Heels make the NCAA Tournament and finished in the upper third of the ACC.

What does this mean? College football coaches need either the press or public sentiment on their side. They need to at least
try
to exhibit some level of basic human decency. The only way a college football coach at a big-time school can survive a couple of bad seasons is to draw on the reserve of goodwill he’s built up during the good years. Basketball is a huge revenue-producer in only a select number of schools. The money in college sports is all—all—in football. Even basketball powerhouses like Duke, Kansas, and Syracuse fire terrible football coaches because you at least have to be viable in football to make money. Yet there are several college football powers—Penn State, Georgia, USC—that seemingly ignore their basketball programs. They just hope they don’t hemorrhage money. The bottom line? You can survive with a bad basketball program as long as your football program is successful.

Can the average sports fan even name Georgia’s basketball coach? How about Auburn’s? The schools don’t care that much because the money is on the football field. And what does that mean? It means the pressure is on the football coach. He lives in constant fear of losing his job. He needs the public on his side. He needs the media on his side. Outside of Nick Saban, you can get run out at any time in college football because you need to make money and you need to win because it carries every other college sport.

Every college football coach is a season away from unemployment. They know it and they accept it. Mark Richt has won ten games in eight of his twelve years as football coach at Georgia. He’s coached the team to three BCS bowl games, which is the football equivalent of the Elite Eight. He’s won 75 percent of his games in the toughest conference in the country. And yet
he’s constantly on the verge of being fired. In fact, it’s probably a miracle that he’s still there.

Even at a non-SEC school, in a place with as weird a relationship with football as Berkeley, the football coach has to get results—or else. Jeff Tedford took over one of the worst programs in college football in 2002, won more games than any coach in school history, and came within one win of a spot in a national championship game in 2004. Can you imagine that: Cal in the BCS Championship game? A 23-17 loss to USC that year was the only thing that kept it from happening. Tedford rode the goodwill generated from turning around the program to a $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium and the construction of a first-class training facility. He finally got the trappings he thought he needed to compete nationally for recruits, and what happened? He got fired after he went 3-9 in 2012.

Almost every BCS school is a football school first and foremost, and the ones that aren’t want to be. At a school where college basketball is important, the coach is more powerful than the athletic director. And if the coach is smart, and most of them are, he’s got his formula down pat: he schedules the first ten games at home, picking the opponents to make sure he’s going to win nine or ten of them; he recruits well enough to finish slightly better than .500 in conference, which ensures he’s going to get a spot in the NCAA Tournament. If he can do this often enough, if he can repeat that formula, he becomes flameproof. You can’t fire him. How do you fire a guy who has six straight tournament appearances? It’s really, really hard.

Sometimes college basketball coaches can’t even lose for losing. How’s that for a great gig? When a team of exalted stature gets upset in the first round of March Madness, as Syracuse did when it lost to Vermont in 2005, it’s celebrated as another example of the glory
of the NCAA Tournament. Anything can happen. It’s the Magic of Madness. There’s an entire mythology built up over games like that, so the coach of the high seed who loses doesn’t feel the same kind of heat that Nick Saban did when his heavily favored Alabama team lost to the Utah team in the 2009 Sugar Bowl. Saban was ripped for that game—he lost to Kyle Whittingham?—even though Utah ended the season as the only undefeated team in the country.

Which brings up another point: not all bowl games are created equal, and a bowl game is not equivalent to an NCAA Tournament appearance. The fourth-place finisher in the SEC West will go to a bowl game, might even
win
a bowl game, but that’s not how they define a good season. The coach at Nebraska can go to the Humanitarian Bowl, but he better not make a habit of it if he wants to keep his job. Richt is twelve for twelve in bowl games at Georgia; you think anyone in Athens is impressed by that? You think they even count the Chick-fil-A, Music City, and Liberty? The only guy who does is probably Richt’s agent.

On the other hand, a college basketball coach can finish fifth in the ACC, go to the tournament as a No. 8 or 9 seed, win a game in the tournament, and head home a minor hero. That’s a good season. Coaching basketball at one of America’s major universities and consistently putting one of the top sixty-eight college basketball teams on the court is a great way to keep your job. However, coaching football at one of those universities demands more. You have to be better than top 68, because being No. 40 might put your team in Boise, Idaho, for a bowl game rather than Pasadena or Miami. And that simply doesn’t work. You do it too many times and you’re gone.

Off the top of my head, I can name a dozen untouchable college basketball coaches: Coach K, Jim Boeheim, Roy Williams, Rick Pitino, Mark Few, Billy Donovan, Tom Izzo, Rick Barnes,
John Calipari, John Thompson III, Bill Self. They’re the kings of the court. They’re bigger than life. In some of them, the atmosphere creates incivility, arrogance, and a false feeling of omnipotence. They almost can’t help it. Even college basketball coaches shrouded in controversy—Knight, Tarkanian, Calhoun—fight back like cornered raccoons.
They go after the school president
. Think about that. It’s unbelievable.

I’m generalizing here, but that doesn’t make it any less true. A college football coach who is in trouble—say, Mack Brown—is praying to survive. Even a legend like Bobby Bowden, who was just trying to get a few more wins and another year for his resume, would consider it outrageous to attack the school president.

It’s hard to attach the word
humble
to Lane Kiffin, but why does Lane Kiffin text me repeatedly? Because Lane knows ultimately he has to win. He knows every game matters. In college football, each game is celebrated. It’s a three-month sport, whereas college basketball has devolved into essentially a three-week sport. Lane’s USC team was the consensus No. 1 entering the 2012 season, and the Trojans ended up playing in the Sun Bowl in El Paso. Do you think the USC boosters look at that and say, “Well, Lane made it to a bowl game, so it’s a good year”? Of course not. It was a terrible year, and Lane knows it.