Coaches’ tenures depend
on wins, not character

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Several years ago, University of Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles was asked if he would still like head football coach Ken Hatfield if the Razorbacks finished a season with four or five victories and six or seven defeats. Broyles smiled and said, “Yes. And I would miss him, too.”
He said it as though he were kidding, but–trust me on this one–he wasn’t.
I am reminded of Broyles’ honest answer every November when, only a few weeks after the leaves, college football coaches also begin falling to the ground.
At press time, Louisiana State coach Gerry DiNardo was canned after the Tigers had lost their eighth consecutive game, and Edinboro University changed the locks on coach Tom Hollman’s office after the Fighting Scots ended their second straight losing season with a 65-16 loss to Bloomsburg. And in a rather strange turn of events, University of Houston coach Kim Helton was fired despite the Cougars’ second winning season of his seven-year tenure.
Oh yes, more coaching casualties will follow. For as some astute observer once noted, “There are two kinds of coaches: those who have been fired and those who will be fired.” I’d bet the farm that the meter is running for Notre Dame coach Bob Davie.
I bring this up because the water around Syracuse University football coach Paul Pasqualoni has been getting warmer and warmer. It began to bubble after the heat was applied when the Orangemen lost to an 0-9 Rutgers team.
The natives became increasingly restless, prompting SU Chancellor Kenneth Shaw to whip off a letter to the editor that appeared in the Syracuse Post-Standard earlier this week. In it, Shaw defended and supported Pasqualoni and urged the public to do so as well. But in doing so, he pushed one of my hot buttons.
He wrote, “While competition in football and men’s basketball has become an important part of the fabric of life in Central New York, it is only a part. The University takes pride in its teams and coaches, win or lose, just as it takes pride in the many hundreds of other aspects of its presence as a part of the community.”
Look, this might be a tough pill to swallow for you passionate, die-hard alumni with the painted faces, but on the phony meter, big-time college sports ranks right up there with medicine shows and television faith healers.
Pasqualoni’s record at Syracuse is impressive: 74-30-1, with a game at Miami left in his ninth season. The Orangemen are 4-2 in bowl games (bowl games are college-football-speak for “money machines”). In other words, right now there is nothing on Pasqualoni’s resume that Shaw can’t “take pride in.”
But let SU football slip to the depths of the LSU program and show me what Shaw will “take pride in.” Let’s see what happens if the Orangemen have a couple of 4-7 seasons and don’t go to a bowl, and the Carrier Dome is half-full instead of bursting at the seams.
Under DiNardo, LSU was 4-7 last season and 2-8 this year. In Baton Rouge, losing is the only unpardonable sin. The LSU athletic director said simply, “Basically, he just didn’t win enough football games.”
May I point out that Joe Dean said nothing of DiNardo’s character, honesty, work ethic, personality or player graduation rate. Neither did he mention whether DiNardo was a devoted husband and father, whether he went to church every day, made generous donations to charity or had found a cure for the common cold.
The reason Dean didn’t bring up any of that stuff is because it doesn’t matter one bit. “He just didn’t win enough footballgames” says it all.
As for the poor guy in Houston, it’s pretty obvious that the UH hierarchy had its mind made up last summer. My guess is Kim Helton’s team could’ve gone 11-0 and they would’ve canned him.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association likes to refer to “student athletes,” inspiring college sports programs to subscribe to their collective goal of helping young people become well-rounded, productive citizens. What they don’t tell you, though, is that they are more inclined to help if a young person can outrun a motorcycle, and not only bite the rim on a basketball goal, but also shoot the three.
And hey, if he can read, great. If not, we’ll deal with it.
Speaking of reading, Dexter Manley, after he had been a star for the Washington Redskins for some years, admitted that he could not read during his four years at Oklahoma State.
And then there were the courses taken by former Buffalo Bills wide receiver Ronnie Harmon, who became a star in San Diego. Near the end of his eligibility at the University of Iowa, it was reported that Harmon’s class load was something like Modern Coaching Techniques, Theory of Volleyball, Dynamics of Table Tennis and History of Croquet. Presumably, he aced them all.
So there will be new coaches at LSU and Houston and Edinboro. They’ll smile and gush with enthusiasm and say all the right things when they are introduced to the local media, and the ADs will tell us how lucky they are to have these people. They’ll toast the dawn of a new era and all will be sweetness and light.
And somewhere in an office in another building on campus, somebody will watch it on the six o’clock news and quote Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis: “Just win, baby, just win.”
(Rick Woodson’s column appears each Thursday in the Rochester Business Journal’s Daily Edition on the World Wide Web at www.rbj.net.)

11/26/99