Back In My Day (Part II), or And We Liked It, by Mick Shaffer

This is the conclusion of a two-part article. For the first half, click here.

Talk about bad strategy, how about hitting a player at halftime?  That’s what former South Florida head coach Jim Leavitt is accused of doing.  The player’s father claims Leavitt grabbed the sophomore walk-on by the throat in the locker room and then slapped him in the face for a missed assignment on special teams in a game against Louisville.

In a clear sign that they were begat from at least half tough-guy ancestry, the player and his father later downplayed the event saying Leavitt only grabbed the player’s shoulder pads.  Too late.  By then, investigators had already heard the same story from five teammates.  And Leavitt had already asked witnesses to lie about it.

Leavitt—who had been the only head coach in South Florida Bulls history—was about to have a successor.

I’m sure if Leavitt had to do it all over again, with all the cocky wide receivers and cornerbacks in the world, I doubt he would’ve cashed in his “physical abuse card” on a kid specializing in punt team coverage, receiving zero scholarship money.

But, no matter whom it was cashed in on, it was wrong.  And he was fired.  Still, you could even argue what physical abuse is in this case.  Sure, smacking a kid across the face qualifies.  But, what about demanding your special-teamer to run all-out, full-bore into a wall of gigantic opponents on kickoff coverage?  That would hurt, too.  In fact, I would take 10 slaps to the face before I would make one attempt at “wedge-busting” college football players.

Of course, that’s a horrible argument that only gets mentioned due to my tendency to play both sides of the fence.  But that doesn’t mean that type of reasoning isn’t resting deep inside a football player’s concussion-filled mind.

I can handle this.  I’m tough.  I’m a football player.  Coach is just trying to make me better.

And that’s just it.  If a player really believes the coach has his best interest in mind, you would be shocked at what a kid can put up with.  If the slap to the face was followed up with an apology, an explanation, perhaps even a man-hug then Leavitt would likely still be employed at South Florida.

Because players know.  Players know when a coach is being a dick because he’s passionate and sometimes gets caught up in the heat of the moment only because he wants to see the player and team succeed.

And players know when a coach is being a dick just to be a dick.

We’ve all seen it.  I had a basketball coach once who would ride us like rented mules (And we liked it!).  We couldn’t do anything right.  The IRS took no more pleasure in pointing out mistakes than our coach did.  While it was never physical, I did get compared to a member of the female gender on a daily basis…and that has its own kind of pain.  But we would’ve thrown ourselves in front of a bus for him.  We could tell how much he cared.  We knew he was there for us.  Thus, for some reason, I would’ve done anything for that man, despite the number of times he called me Becky.

If a coach balances it out with honesty, support and a relationship with his players, chances are he can be as mean, boorish and abusive as he wants.

Good strategy.

Oh, Leavitt eventually apologized to the player…12 days after the incident and one day after Mark Mangino got fired.

Nine days before Leavitt’s firing, Texas Tech dropped the axe on head coach Mike Leach.  If you know anything about Leach, you know his coaching ability is rivaled only by his quirkiness.  For instance, he’s 49 and he loves pirates.  Loves ‘em.  Talks about pirates all the time.  To his team.  To the media.  Pirates.

Anyway, Leach suffered his own Mutiny on the Bounty recently when he was let go by Tech after an investigation into Leach’s treatment of receiver Adam James.  Leach allegedly confined James to a cramped equipment shed with the lights out during practice after James was diagnosed with a concussion.

Quirky.

Leach hid behind the sometimes-used treatment of placing the concussed in a dark, cool, quiet environment.  But, really, he’s just weird and subscribes to the theory that a lot of coaches do: by embarrassing an injured player, you’re “motivating” him to get back on the field sooner.

There were two factors working against Leach.  First of all, James is the son of former college All-American/NFL running back/ESPN analyst Craig James.  And that’s one Daddy schools will pay attention to.

Secondly, Leach got caught up in the Mangino/Leavitt firestorm.  College football is a copycat sport.  When Leach first got the job at Texas Tech, the Red Raiders were about the only ones running the Spread offense.  Now, every team from South Carolina to Southern California jogs out five receivers and throws the ball all over the place.

That imitation extends beyond the football field.  Just like that first accuser made others feel safe to air their grievances at KU, one school firing its coach for misconduct made it all right for others to do so.

The schools are hardly free of any blame here.  They’ll sit on damaging information until they find an agenda (losing) and use an “internal investigation” to strong-arm their head coach.

But in each of these three examples, the head coaches were given opportunities to admit their mistakes or change the way they do things or heed warnings of impending unemployment.  They didn’t do it.  Of course, joblessness for these three means multi-million dollar buyouts.  I think they’ll avoid the soup kitchen.

Others could be heading for a beheading as well.  And who knows what this will lead to?  The “line” is on the move again.  In 40 years, today’s college athletes will likely still be reminiscing…

“Back in my day, they used to make us…run.  Seriously.  One foot in front of the other as fast as we could go.  It would usually result in this strange liquid seeping from our pores that we called sweat.  And we liked it.”

I’ve got a little bit of old-timer in me.  I think things should be how they were in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  Of course, I’m not that naïve to think there weren’t people like me writing these same columns in the 1970’s and 1980’s…only on typewriter, for FlipCollective bi-monthly magazine. But they were still have been talking about how soft the sporting world has gone.

The “line” is always going to be shifting.  Sometimes at glacial speed, sometimes at cocky wide receiver speed.  Coaches will always have the same objective: get good players to play hard for you so that you can win games and preserve yourself.  They’ll just, at times, have different parameters.

And as long as the players determine those parameters, I think I’ll be ok with it.  Not the old-timers, the athletic administrators and not even the coaches.  It sounds crazy to say, but let the kids decide.

Here’s where I’ll play for you.  Here’s the line.  Here’s where I won’t play for you.  Here’s where I’ll bring litigious action against your awful, soulless, cold-hearted self.

Players know.  Not necessarily the few players on every team that whine about everything.  No, the core group of kids that will work their asses off for you.  As a coach, you always know which ones those are.  They’re the ones who do a job and rarely ask questions later.  You know, the ones who, I guess, will eventually become old-timers.

Shit.

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