Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook
Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.
Every year, a particularly sad-sack college athletic department will try to buy respectability by hiring a big-name football or basketball coach who once was respectable. This, despite overwhelming evidence that such arrangements never work.
A once big-time coach who's available for a job at Podunk U. is available for one reason: he screwed up royally at his big-time job. So only a school as desperate as say, New Mexico State, will take him. In the same vein, a once big-time player who gets hired as a coach based on his name can only do so at a school as desperate as say, New Mexico State.
New Mexico State — with a perpetually lousy football team, and a men's basketball team whose rare successes are usually followed by beatdowns from the NCAA polizei — starts the 2005-06 athletic year with scandal-scarred Hal Mumme as its football coach, and former NBA player and very inexperienced coach Reggie Theus in charge of men's basketball.
Mumme is a Peter Cetera look-alike whose signature during his 1997-2000 tenure at Kentucky was the air-raid signal. First, it was used to mark the frequent touchdowns his high-powered offense scored; later, it was used to alert Mumme and his staff to flee as the NCAA rained down on his ethically deficient program, which had committed such sins as illegally paying a high school coach, and making the Cleveland Browns think Tim Couch was worth the No. 1 pick in the 1999 NFL draft.
Theus, though he played under noted scofflaw Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV, wasn't known for scandal. Instead, he was the (steroid-free) Rafael Palmeiro of the NBA. In a 13-year career that bracketed the 1980s, Theus was an attractive, mustachioed gent who built up gaudy numbers that appeared to mean less than nothing for the mostly lousy teams on which he played. He was an assistant under Rick Pitino in Louisville the past two years, but most of his coaching experience was gained with the Deering High (Ind.) Tornadoes, of "Hang Time." We know, at least, that Theus is a disciplinarian, remembering he suspended the whole Tornadoes team for possessing fake IDs.
Now there's nothing inherently wrong with a school trying to improve its
athletic department by winning a few extra ball games and collecting a few
extra dollars to help defray the women's volleyball team's expenses for
the conference tournament in Reno. But as the saying goes, a tiger does
not change its stripes. Or in Mumme's case, a Wildcat.
A big-name coach whose big name was tarnished due to scandal, endemic
losing or general acrimony suddenly doesn't turn into a genius when he
goes to a school with fewer resources and a lower profile. If a Gerry
DiNardo couldn't win with the abundant resources and enormous fan base at
Louisiana State University, then how did Vanderbilt and, later, Indiana (which fired him after last season) expect him to win with their meager budgets and empty stadiums?
I first learned of the phenomenon of the free-falling coach while writing a story in 1996 for Crain's Cleveland Business about Cleveland State hiring Rollie Massimino as its men's basketball coach. Massimino's Villanova team had won the 1985 NCAA title over Patrick Ewing-led Georgetown (in a preview of Ewing's entire NBA career).
The only reason he was available for lowly Cleveland State was because Massimino had to flee his previous job at UNLV because of his lousy record and the revelation of a secret contract that paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the public was told. (And Massimino had to flee his Villanova job when it became clear that championship season was the flukiest fluke in the history of flukes.)
I found a long history of cases in which tarnished coaches — such as former Giants and Buccaneers bottom-dweller Ray Perkins at Arkansas State, and former Maryland basketball coach and moral relativist Lefty Driesell at James Madison — failed to turn those programs into contenders. Massimino was not supportive of my research. "You don't even know me!" I remember him yelling into the phone. Alas, I didn't have to. Massimino resigned in 2003, leaving his Cleveland State team with an 8-22 record, sluggish attendance and accusations of academic fraud ringing in his ears.
Of course, these situations do not all fall on the coach. The problem is, Cleveland State is Cleveland State, will always be Cleveland State and will never be Ohio State. Athletic departments hiring these tarnished coaches figure it's a quick fix, that big-time recruits and booster contributions will magically appear.
That doesn't happen. First, recruits usually don't know the coach's claim to fame, or don't care. Second, most of these schools have alumni that, shall we say, don't reach a station in life where they have a lot of money to blow on Aggie Club memberships. Third, there are too many unknown and hungry coaches around, working 22-hour days, at similar schools to allow some big name to waltz in and suddenly put a barely Division I school into the athletic stratosphere.
Still, New Mexico State plows ahead. Its commitment to turning chaff into wheat comes from the top of the school. President Michael Martin, installed last year, started his halfway house by hiring McKinley Boston as his athletics director. Boston, you may remember, was last seen conveniently overlooking the recruiting and academic cesspool that was Minnesota basketball under former coach Clem Haskins in the 1990s. Martin maintains that Boston was a fall guy, not an active conspirator.
Boston then followed by hiring Mumme, who took great pains to point out that while Kentucky was put on probation for acts during his tenure — a probation that only expired June 20 — he was never specifically implicated. So Boston and Mumme speak the same language — Carefully Parsed. (As an aside, Kentucky's current football coach is Rich Brooks, known as the anti-genius whose St. Louis Rams won the Super Bowl after he was fired. Not surprisingly, Kentucky stinks.)
Next, Boston hired Theus, who had gained some kudos as Rick Pitino's assistant in Louisville, but who risks becoming the next Clyde Drexler. Drexler was hired at Houston for his big name, and flamed out when it appeared just being Clyde Drexler wasn't going to cut it. Plus, the gambling-phobic NCAA has to love that a recent job for Theus was as an offsite host for the Palms casino in Las Vegas.
The smart athletic departments realize that best kind of unemployed
big-timer is one who was fired for no good reason — like new hires Dick
Tomey of San Jose State and Frank Solich of Ohio. Tomey, at Arizona, and
Solich, at Nebraska, got canned by venal athletic directors too greedy to
accept an average season of 9-2. (Subsequently, both programs headed
quickly down the crapper.)
To see why Tomey and Solich can succeed, look at Ken Hatfield of Rice and Tommie West of Memphis. They have carved successful and satisfying careers after being fired by the know-it-alls at Clemson, making being fired by Clemson a plus on any coach's resume.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
