Coaching Burnout: When the Losses Exceed the Wins

A few weeks ago, Bobby Johnson threw in the towel as head coach of the Vanderbilt Commodores football program. He announced he was leaving immediately, no longer able to muster the necessary emotion to lead his team.

Johnson's retirement received far less attention than Nebraska's switch to the Big Ten or Texas' decision to save the Big Twelve. That was understandable. We sports fans focus on winners, focus on big stories.

Johnson had fashioned a measure of adequacy for the Commodores; he groomed quarterback Jay Cutler and offensive tackle Chris Williams into first round NFL draft choices and delivered the school's first bowl victory since 1955. Truth is Vanderbilt, a small private school with challenging academics, has no real chance against regular Southeastern Conference foes like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, LSU, and Tennessee.

This brings me to the dirty little reality we sports fans so often brush under the rug. For some people in sports, the pain of losing far exceeds the joy of victories. This can happen when one attempts the impossible: making a consistent winner out of an overmatched Vanderbilt.

At this juncture, this essay apologetically swerves into a bit of self-indulgence: I worked in public relations and promotions for a NASCAR race team in the early 1990s. We had a decent not great driver in Elton Sawyer and an owner who worked like crazy, but our team was drastically inexperienced. Frankly we weren't very competitive even in the second-tier NASCAR Busch Series (now NASCAR Nationwide Series).

Even though my efforts had next to nothing to do with the team's on-track performance, the tedious succession of 23rd place finishes—the NASCAR season is outrageously long—took a real toll on my spirit. Our one heartbreaking, near-win early in the year was long forgotten. It became almost intolerable to lose so often, unable to finish inside the top 10 week after week.

That race season mercifully ended, and I soon took off to visit friends and enjoy a Penn State football weekend. On Friday evening, I was introduced to Bruce Parkhill, the recently resigned men's basketball coach of the Nittany Lions. Parkhill had raised Penn State to a level of mediocrity the team had not enjoyed in some years. But, he couldn't lift the Lions, stuck in bucolic central Pennsylvania far from fertile inner city recruiting mines, to the quality he aspired to. So, like Bobby Johnson, Parkhill walked away from a somewhat hopeless situation.

Parkhill and I got talking that night about how losses can damage a competitor so much more than the wins can boost him up. I was surprised; I guiltily thought I might be the only person privileged to work in sports who felt that the losses so outweighed the wins. Not so. Bruce Parkhill felt it, and I suspect Bobby Johnson did as well.

Fortunately for me, my NASCAR experience quickly turned better. Ward Burton was brought in as driver midway in the next season, the crew picked up some additional talent, and two years later when we were preparing to move up to the premiere Winston Cup Series (now NASCAR Sprint Cup) Ward won a bundle of Busch awards for the most poles won and laps led. At Atlanta, Ward passed the highly-talented Mark Martin to win the last Busch race our team would compete in.

I eventually moved to MBNA America Bank, a sponsor of Joe Gibbs Racing, and enjoyed playing a very small but very enjoyable role in Bobby Labonte's 2000 Winston Cup championship season.

Bobby Johnson may never get to enjoy his taste of a championship. I hope he does.

--Bob Boyles

View From Bennett Avenue

Recently my wife Ginny has been watching DVD collections of the first few seasons of the television show Friday Night Lights. I tried to watch the damn thing but could not maintain interest in what is really a soap opera masquerading behind a sports show. Every week this little town has a bucket load of crap land on it with more than half of the story lines involving relationships and other material that has nothing to do with sports. Unlike a good soap opera however, this show touches on major topics but then throws them out after the week is up. The issue of steroids pops up one week but then never rears its ugly head again. So too racism. And where are the linemen? No room for them. Silly.

In the midst of my wife's marathon viewing of FNL I happened to see the movie Jim Thorpe-All American for the first time in a long time. Now it is difficult to compare a movie made in the 1940s with a television show produced today, but it is easy to see that the then 30-something Burt Lancaster would be selected first overall in a pickup game of members of both casts. It was not easy to play one of the greatest athletes in history and only Lancaster could do the role justice. The little guys populating the cast of Friday Night Lights? They do not look any tougher than Minka Kelly (although in fairness to them she looks about a dozen years older). Thorpe/Lancaster would have had the pleasure of speeding by them, when not bowling them over. The movie was not only more enjoyable to watch, it properly handles plenty of tough material. Thorpe's life had plenty of rough moments and the film presents them with only a little gloss. You will get much more out of the 107 minutes of the Thorpe bio than hours and hours of the television show.

I Think They Missed a Spot

More than one source of college football news, including The New York Times, used the phrase "cleaning house" when discussing the hiring of former Trojans quarterback Pat Haden as new athletic director, which struck me as rather odd. Yes, Mike Garrett is out as AD and I do not think anyone will miss his bluster and they-are-picking-on-poor-USC stance regarding first the investigation into wrongdoing at the athletic department at Southern Cal and then the subsequent penalties. But how is Haden representative of a soon-to-be clean slate when Haden is not only a member of the school's board of trustees, but was considered an insider at Heritage Hall who supposedly had more say in the recent hiring of Lane Kiffin as head coach than Garrett, who had earned figurehead status after the numerous scandals, large and small, that developed under his watch? And even if it is not true that Haden had a role in Kiffin's hiring, how can anyone give the Trojans credit for cleaning house when Kiffin still resides in the coach's office?

Give credit to the school for cleaning house when they, in fact, remove everyone who was part of the establishment there of a climate that fostered, at best, a situation where higher ups looked the other way when cheating occurred.

Real Scourge of the SEC

Alabama defensive end Marcell Dareus, shown here making the acquaintance of Arkansas quarterback Ryan Mallett, made a national splash in January with his performance in the BCS title game. He was defensive mvp and enjoyed two memorable plays: knocking Texas quarterback Colt McCoy out of the game and scoring a TD on a 28-yard interception return. Not bad for a player who only started four games last season. Sadly, for Marcell and Alabama, that game may be the last one he plays for the Tide thanks to a party held early this summer in Miami.

Marcell, and quite a few other big name college football players, were not in South Beach celebrating the Miami Heat's acquisition of LeBron James. They were in Miami to attend a lavish party hosted by agents, one that is acceptable in any other arena of American business but deemed illegal by the NCAA. Now the eligibility of any player at that party is in question.

That this current issue is plaguing the SEC is appropriate, I feel, as the conference has benefited greatly from a recent perception that they are the number one conference in the land--with no number two--and that their placing as best is based on having a huge advantage in the collection of talent. But while everyone has been celebrating the SEC for its recent domination of the BCS title game and for its numerous award winners, the dirty little secret is that many of the players constituting the great collection of talent are marginal students, at best, and are on campus solely to work on their NFL futures. And make no mistake about it, the recruiting process to get these kids to campus resembles the recruiting process agents use to sign up the same kids. The big SEC schools make these kids into celebrities and then cry foul when they make this kind of mistake. And this pointing fingers at everyone but themselves posturing by Saban and others is ridiculous. Saban went down this road before with Andre Smith, who was suspended for dealing with an agent. Smith came to the Tide from Huffman High School in Birmingham, the same school that produced Marcell Dareus.

Pay attention Saban. Not paying attention, or looking the other way is what got USC in its current mess.

As far as the rest of the SEC, and for now one member of the ACC in North Carolina, the word is that there were quite a few star athletes at that party. South Carolina and UNC have already been called out, while the NCAA has set up an on-campus visit to Georgia. Meanwhile the Florida Gators are also dealing with accusations that former player Maurkice Pouncey took $100,000 from an agent last December. Coach Urban Meyer's ridiculous response? Pouncey told him that he did not take the money and Pouncey never lied to him before. So until these coaches stop acting like Pete Carroll I will not feel sorry for them if they lose wins and scholarships, etc. Sure the agents can be sleazy and the NFL does not really care about the NCAA, but take care of what you are responsible for before pointing fingers.

View From Bennett Avenue

I am belatedly saying farewell to Don Coryell, who died earlier this month. I am too young to remember his days coaching San Diego State but old enough to remember clearly his NFL days with the Cardinals and Chargers. Coryell was an excellent offensive coach and is the only coach in history to win more than 100 games on the collegiate level and in the pros. While I cannot speak to his successful days with the Aztecs, I can acknowledge the great job he did converting a mediocre Cardinal squad into a power in the NFC, despite taking over while Eastern rivals Dallas and Washington were seemingly at their peak. But Coryell's passing offense exploited the aging defenses of his rivals and allowed his team to quickly improve from also-ran to contender. The Cardinals last went to the playoffs in 1948 prior to Coryell's arrival in 1973; by 1974 they won the division, a feat they repeated the following season. Players like Terry Metcalf, Jim Hart, Mel Gray, Dan Dierdorf and Conrad Dobler became stars and expectations increased so rapidly that Coryell was surprisingly fired in 1977 because he only managed a .500 record. St Louis's loss was San Diego's gain and "Air Coryell" made Hall of Famers out of players like quarterback Dan Fouts. The Chargers employed arguably the greatest collection of passing targets ever in wide receivers John Jefferson, then Wes Chandler, and Charlie Joiner, tight end Kellen Winslow, and backs James Brooks and Lionel James. Perhaps San Diego could have won a Super Bowl if they did not have to trade star defensive end Fred Dean in 1981 because of a contract dispute. Not winning a title is keeping Coryell out of the pro Hall of Fame (he is already in the college one), which is ridiculous as he changed the way the sport was played as much as any other individual since the merger with the AFL.

The recent piece on him in Sports Illustrated reminded me of one of my favorite diatribes against those who think that the NFL is much more creative and dynamic than the college game. Where do you think these ideas come from? As the recent use of the "Wildcat" by NFL teams, the professional game has been borrowing from the college one since the beginning of the sport. The article mentions that Coryell's offensive philosophy was basically lifted from a book written by former TCU coach Dutch Meyer, who won a national championship with the Horned Frogs in 1938. He also shared the national championship in 1935. Meyer's love of the short, quick striking pass game was the forerunner of what is now called "West Coast" offense and he was one of the first to spread ends out wide in search of mismatches.

The article, which is an excerpt from the book Blood, Sweat and Chalk by Tim Layden, also gives credit, once again, to Tom Osborne for the hugely successful variation off of Coryell's offense by Washington coach Joe Gibbs, who coached under Gibbs in college and in the pros, called the Counter Trey. A running play, the Counter Trey, featuring a big back following an even bigger tackle into a huge hole, was perhaps the preeminent play used by the great Redskins teams of the 1980s and was lifted from the Nebraska playbook by Gibbs and his staff.

There are plenty of other examples like these, in which a popular NFL play is nothing but a reworked college maneuver. The advantage for the pro team can be that you could keep someone like Peyton Manning for 15 years and develop your offense around him as he matures. But as Gibbs proved in Washington, you can save a lot of money by creating a system and then interchanging the parts when a player gets too old, injured or expensive. That is another concept lifted by men like Gibbs and Bill Walsh from the college game. The college game must replace starters every 1-4 years and so the system is king and a coaching staff must recruit players that fit that system. The smart NFL teams do the same thing.

Johnson Exits Nashville Stage

The college football coaching world lost another Bobby this week as Vanderbilt head man Bobby Johnson retired for personal reasons. Arguably the finest coach in history with a 29-66 record at the FBS level, Johnson had the near-impossible task of building a winner with the Commodores while playing in the SEC. Johnson's finest season, by far, was 2008 when Vandy beat conference foes South Carolina, Mississippi, Auburn and Kentucky en route to a post-season berth for the first time since 1982. Vanderbilt beat Boston College in the Music City Bowl to wrap up a 7-6 season. Last season's squad struggled with injuries and finished 2-10 with losses in the final eight games.

The timing of Johnson's announcement has surprised some folks, but in this day and age when is a coach supposed to retire? It goes without saying that August through early January is out as the season is paramount. January? Nope, that is the final stretch for recruiting. February? No, as you will be ripped for lying to the new recruits. March and April? No, that is spring practice time. Which leaves June and July. Perhaps Johnson waited this long to guarantee that the rest of the staff would stay in place for the 2010 season. And assistant head coach Robbie Caldwell was given the head job on an interim basis with the school announcing that they will reevaluate the position after the season. Who knows? Hopefully Vanderbilt will remain competitive against the bigger schools while maintaining their high standards for student-athletes.

View From Bennett Avenue

The dreaded summer months. Until college football kicks off Labor Day weekend, we all have to be patient while hoping the depth charts of our favorite teams do not need to be reshuffled due to injury or suspension. While most teams reach opening day without too much turmoil--after all, while the examples of players getting arrested or suspended or injured seem to number a few dozen, the actual number of kids playing college football is so great that the percentage of players lost in the off season is extremely low--a program can really get sidetracked by the losses. Think UCLA in 2008 when the top two quarterbacks on the depth chart were lost to injury. I can remember as a young fan of the sport, in 1974, when Notre Dame's hopes to repeat as national champions were severely impacted by the loss of seven starters due to suspension, injury and transfer during the time period between January and September. The best college programs have the depth to withstand injury, as Virginia Tech proved one year ago by turning to young Ryan Williams to replace star running back Darren Evans when Evans tore an ACL last August, but a rash of losses can overcome even the best squads.
So while you are watching a baseball game or two or catching up on some reading, keep an eye on the coverage of your favorite team. At this time of the year, no news is good news.

Happy Fourth

I hope everyone had a great Fourth of July weekend.
Conference and team previews begin soon, so tune in.