Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306140114
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: E12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: IVAN MAISEL AND STEVE RICHARDSON DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: DALLAS LENGTH: Long
For the members of the American Football Coaches Association, success has brought rewards unfathomed even a decade ago. In 1982, when Texas A&M signed Jackie Sherrill to coach Aggie football for about $260,000 per year, faculty members screamed.
The fact that at least a dozen head football coaches now make more than $300,000 annually no longer is news. Heads did turn, however, when the Duke head basketball coach - Krzyzewski (Shuh-SHEFF-Skee) - signed a $5.6 million, 15-year contract (plus a $1 million signing bonus) just to promote Nike shoes.
The average coach can diagram a shoe contract or a TV-and-radio deal as quickly and easily as a pick-and-roll. Throw in summer camps, speeches and endorsements, and the coach's office becomes the base of a financial fiefdom.
The increase in money and fame, however, has not come cheaply. It has been joined by equally daunting increases in responsibilities, restrictions and scrutiny.
"Quite honestly, coaching is probably the easiest thing I do," said Arkansas State basketball coach Nelson Catalina. "It is probably the least thing I get to do."
The typical NCAA Division I basketball coach or Division I-A football coach is a public relations man charged with filling seats. The two revenue-producing sports must bankroll the expansion of women's athletics as well as other men's sports.
The coach must recruit players who have a chance to graduate. He bears an ever-increasing accountability for their behavior off the field. Yet the NCAA has restricted the amount of time the coach may spend with players while they are recruited and once they get on campus.
"In the past, the coach has always been like the policeman or the clergy," said John Robinson, who returned to coach Southern California football after 11 years in the NFL. "Now he's questioned not only where a coach is questioned - `Did he lose the game? Make a stupid decision?' - but in how he is doing it. How he practices, how he treats people."
The players may be the root of the biggest change of all. There may be no "I" in team, as the coaching maxim says, but coaches believe there is more "I" in the players. Team rebellions at several universities in the past year alone resulted in coaches' resignations and public embarrassments.
"Twenty-five years ago, players ran through walls" Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz said. "Now they want to know, `Why? How many bricks? How long will it take?' "
What once had been "motivational speaking" turned into "verbal abuse." Employers used the latter phrase to describe the behavior that cost Colorado State football coach Earle Bruce and California basketball coach Lou Campanelli their jobs.
When South Carolina lost its first five football games last season, the players held a meeting in which they asked coach Sparky Woods to resign. Woods, 39, faced down the players, who, having vented their spleens, won five of South Carolina's last six games.
"You want to have something happen where we'd have a year to adjust," Woods said. "Now we get two or three [problems] a month . . . It's a more important job than it ever has been. There are more problems than we've ever had."
The profile is certainly higher. College basketball coaching began to change in the late 1970s, particularly after the 1979 NCAA title game that featured Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. The Michigan State-Indiana State final pulled a record viewing audience.
CBS bought the rights to the tournament in 1982 and expanded coverage, further popularizing the sport and increasing financial incentives for schools to win. ESPN began to take root in America's dens, dorms and barrooms. The NCAA expanded the tournament field from 48 teams to 64 in 1985.
The media exposure of major-college coaches grew exponentially. The icons became nationally identifiable - John Thompson's towel, Bob Knight's scowl, Tark the Shark, Coach K.
Texas basketball coach Tom Penders said he has 230 speaking engagements per year. Kansas coach Roy Williams is in constant demand after taking the Jayhawks to two of the past three Final Fours.
"He may be the state of Kansas' best asset at this time," athletic director Bob Frederick said. "Everybody wants him to be every place all the time."
Everybody, maybe, but no entity milks the coach's standing moreso than the university itself. Coaches constantly sell their programs and their personalities and the school to willing alumni and donors. It is that way for new Arkansas football coach Danny Ford.
"I'm starting over," said Ford, who had been out of coaching for nearly three years before Arkansas hired him as an assistant last fall. "We don't sell out and we need money for support and we need scholarship numbers. There's no way to do that. I hit 50 cities in two weeks, six or seven stops a day."
Ford blamed the Razorbacks' recent fortunes for his schedule. But it's the same at the top. Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, second in victories among active I-A coaches with 227, recently completed a six-week, 30-city national tour. He went as far west as Los Angeles and as small-town as Thomasville, Ga.
The cult of personality had been part of college football for decades. Bud Wilkinson ran for the U.S. Senate in Oklahoma in 1964. Paul Bryant turned down overtures to run for governor in Alabama two years later. But football coaches also saw the world close in on them in the 1980s.
ESPN dived into college football, too, with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1984, the court ruled that institutions owned their own television rights and didn't have to cede them to the NCAA. Football took over the fall Saturday afternoon TV schedule like kudzu.
More people watched college sports, and not all of them liked what they saw. When university presidents built the current reform movement in the late '80s, they held coaches responsible for much more than their record.
"It is not only winning," Sun Belt Conference commissioner Craig Thompson said, "but winning nice."
For every Krzyzewski, who has taken one of the toughest academic schools in the nation to six Final Fours and two national titles in eight seasons, there is a Jim Valvano.
The late North Carolina State coach, a close friend of Krzyzewski, parlayed the 1983 national championship into becoming one of the highest-paid coaches in college basketball in the 1980s. However, held accountable for NCAA rules violations and the low graduation rates of his players, Valvano resigned under pressure in 1990.
A year earlier, Oklahoma forced out its celebrated football coach, Barry Switzer. Though he had led the Sooners to national titles in 1974, '75 and '85, Switzer left after several arrests of his players for drug-dealing, sexual assault and a shooting.
In both cases, the behavior of the players suffocated the coaches' winning records. The famous coaches of the previous generation, men such as Bryant and Adolph Rupp, Woody Hayes and John Wooden, didn't put up with players who didn't adhere to their strict rules.
But all those coaches were asked to do was win. The difference between the current reform movement and earlier ones is that this one has attempted to reform the quality of life of the student-athlete.
When an NCAA-commissioned study showed that student-athletes felt isolated from other students, the NCAA limited the weekly time devoted to the sport to 20 hours. The student-athletes said that recruiting had been bothersome; the NCAA limited the number of visits that coaches may make to prospects.
To contain costs, the NCAA cut one assistant basketball coach and four assistant football coaches. With fewer assistants and less time, the coaches have more responsibility.
"That's the most frustrating part," Penders said. "We have less control than ever, and we are expected to be more in control of their actions. We are expected to make fewer mistakes recruiting a player."
If coaches could choose one rule to change, it would be the amount of time they may spend with recruits and players.
"At Fordham," said Penders, who coached the Rams from 1978 to 1986, "one at a time I would have a kid over for dinner once a week. You get to know the kid. You head off problems to start with. Now, if you have the whole team over more than once a season, it may be a violation."
Even if the coaches didn't have the extra responsibility, they would have a smaller margin of error. In the interest of cost containment, the NCAA has cut two basketball scholarships and by 1994-95 will have cut 10 football scholarships.
A mistake in judgment in playing ability means fewer players are available to pick up the slack. From the moment the judgment is made, however, the university - and therefore the coach - will be held responsible by the NCAA for that student-athlete's graduation.
Graduation rates became an important measure of an athletic department's efficacy in the 1980s. While most departments have set up elaborate tutoring systems to help their players, the coach often bears the brunt of criticism when the rates are low.
"Twenty years ago," said Holtz, whose Fighting Irish have always ranked among the top in graduation rates, "if an individual did not graduate, it was presumed that he didn't want to take advantage of the opportunity."
That presumption is no longer valid. The university has taken the responsibility and with good reason, according to Terry Holland, the Davidson athletic director who took Virginia to Final Fours in 1981 and '84.
Holland said if graduation rates become the barometer of a coach's success, a coach will do anything to get the student-athlete to graduate. Or he will recruit only athletes who fit the profile of the university.
While few coaches have come around to Holland's way of thinking, they understand the message.
"People don't like to hear that guys don't graduate," Ford said. "If those guys don't graduate, they're just going to get you fired. I'd like my kids to graduate, too."
The coaching profession is changing more rapidly than at any time since the 1960s, when no campus enjoyed immunity from the changing society. There are headaches that even money can't alleviate.
"The coach is getting handsomely paid," said Xavier (Ohio) basketball coach Pete Gillen, "but he is getting painted into a corner and has to walk a tightrope like never before."
And if you've ever tried to walk a tightrope after being painted in a corner, you may understand the difficulty of the job.
by CNB