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AFM Magazine


Your Take – Today’s Football Coach

by: Mike Lopresti
National Columnist for Gannett and USA Today
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You are a college football coach.

Some days, you might as well be a flag waving in the wind, for all the control you possess over your fate. You have season plans, practice plans, game plans. You have a system and a strategy, tested both with time and toil. Every hope and dream are in place.

But then the tailback goes down with a torn ACL, and your world changes. The phone rings in the middle of the night, and your world changes. One of your key players acts like the teenager he is, in the company of strangers – or even worse in 2011, in the company of strangers with cell phone cameras – and your world changes. 

We on the outside might never have a full grasp of the intricacies of your game. What this X means, what that O doesn’t. But it seems to me, what we ought to appreciate is the uncertainty of your lot in life. How fate has even more whims than fans do. 

Maybe that is part of the reason there are 120 head coaching jobs in the upper tier of college football, and 24 had new faces this season, an attrition rate of 20 percent. Some of the reasons were sound, some rash. Some departures were neat, others messy. Some were hardly noticed. But then there was Jim Tressel at Ohio State, and no matter his mistakes or misjudgments, one must have sympathy for any man so publicly defrocked. And his family. There are flesh and blood between those headphones. “To me,’’ Michigan State’s Mark Dantonio mentioned, “it’s tragic.’’

You are a college football coach. There might be a question of how much your game has changed, but there is absolutely no question that the culture around you has. That includes the good stuff.  Cushy salaries, for some of you. But it includes the bad stuff, too. The 24/7 scrutiny, the hyperventilation of some of the public. You are No. 2 on the pecking order of those get blamed. You come right after the quarterback. Or maybe it’s a tie. But gee, someone even went after the trees at Auburn.

Social media has its magic, but also its peril. Nothing goes undiscovered for long. There is, in 2011, no place for you or your program to hide, even when it needs to.

Listen to Joe Paterno. He has been around a few blocks, and he understands kids are kids and the challenges are the same, but the world that is always looking over his shoulders and in the windows is not. “The old days when I first started to coach, I lived four blocks off the campus . . . I used to get a telephone call from one of the campus cops. He’d say, ‘Hey coach, you better come up here and get ahold of Mike. Too much to drink, making a lot of noise.’  I’d get up at 2 in the morning, grab Mike, put him in bed, get him up at 5 in the morning, run his rear end off for a week. The outside world never heard about that.”

“Socrates, 400 BC, said ‘The kids are terrible today. Tyrants. They don’t pay attention.’ That’s 2500 years ago, OK?’’ That’s even before Paterno started at Penn State. I think.

You are a college football coach. Your life’s work is studied by initialized judges. The NCAA and BCS. ESPN and ABC and CBS and AP and USA Today. We are, in many ways, a nation of spinners, especially when something goes wrong. Spin the boss, spin the teacher, spin the public. We cannot get through the day without a couple of good rationalizations.

But you understand who is impossible to spin. That big thing at the end of the field, with lights and numbers on it. The scoreboard doesn’t listen to spin. The scoreboard chews rationalizations up and spits them out.

If the scoreboard has bad news, there is nothing to do but try to forget and make it better. You need both a good memory and selective amnesia. Sometimes, all you can do is try to laugh.

“My wife told me that most hotels don’t even have a 13th floor and that was my 13th season, so I should have skipped it,’’ Mack Brown said of Texas’ off-key 2010. “Some people thought I did.’’

You are a college football coach. You deal with players’ fears and fantasies. Sometimes, you even deal with death. Sometimes you are CEO and sometimes a crisis control manager, and always you hope for the next practice or game to make everything better. Your program must be ethical and stand for something, and that’s just the way it should be. But at the end of the day, you are paid to win, and that’s just the way it is.

Some of you are better than others at both. But all of you must love it, or you wouldn’t last. To be sure, it is never boring. Going through a minefield never is. You are a football coach and every intention is there on paper and on film. But the phone rings or the trainer knocks at the office door. You are suddenly a flag, and today you’re wondering which way the wind will be blowing.
 
Mike Lopresti is a national columnist for Gannett and USA Today.   






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