Filed under: Arkansas, Ohio State, Bowl Games
Today’s topic? The rampant insincerity among college football and basketball coaches. Well, that, along with why fans and players should consider dangling these folks over the edge of either the stadium or arena on campus by their toes.
That’s for starters.
So Randy Edsall said what to his UConn football team while bolting for Maryland last weekend? Actually, he said nothing.
Oh, and does John Calipari expect us to believe that he actually believes a former pro player he wants to dribble for his Kentucky basketball team in violation of NCAA rules really wasn’t a pro?
If Edsall and Calipari aren’t doing Bruce Pearl imitations, they are following the script of Jim Tressel and a slew of others among the insufferable during the last few weeks and months.
To be fair, The Disingenuous College Coach in football and basketball has been around for years and decades. We can begin with the 1920s, when Knute Rockne used to suggest that if his Notre Dame players didn’t want spring practices, he’d get rid of the ritual.
Yeah, well. It wasn’t coincidental that the world’s first unofficial Zen master proposed such a thing to his Irish with cameras rolling. He knew the combination of a worldly focus and peer pressure (along with the fear of his wrath) would provide an emphatic “yes” to keep spring practices.
As saintly as John Wooden mostly was, he still yawned in the shadows when UCLA booster Sam Gilbert torched the NCAA bylaws by supplying Bruins players with everything from automobiles for themselves and their families to, allegedly, abortions for their girlfriends.
Woody Hayes? He’d stress discipline to his Ohio State players on the one hand, and then he’d slug somebody with the other.
On and on, we could go about this dance with hypocrisy in the past involving college football and basketball coaches, but the present is either worse or just more publicized.
Likely both.
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