COACHES HOT SEAT BLOG

As the Greatest Sporting Event in America rolls on tonight, the NCAA College Basketball Tournament, Ivan Maisel of ESPN.com reports that (Three-point stance:  93 percent of coaches like BCS): 

“93 percent of coaches like BCS!”

 That the coaches like the current bowl system and the BCS doesn’t surprise anyone here at Coaches Hot Seat because long before the BCS came along “mediocrity” was being celebrated in America.  Yes, going to a bowl game with a 6-6 record is the very definition of “mediocrity” so the college head coaches in football should stand proud and proclaim to the world:

 “We rather like mediocrity!”

Please, if you are going to celebrate the bowl system and the BCS we sure the Hell don’t want to hear any of you coaches telling your players that excellence and performance on the field is what counts, because then you would be a massive hypocrite.  Calling something that is real that isn’t real doesn’t make it right and when you are rewarded for mediocrity, with college football being the only sport that rewards such mediocrity in our country, is not right and the coaches know it is not right.

Yes, the NCAA College Basketball Tournament rolls on and the football coaches in college cower in fear that they might actually be held accountable for making or not making a post-season tournament in football which would only raise expectations and put more of them on the Hot Seat.  Why do you think the basketball coaches are all for expanding the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams?  Because they know that if they can claim they “got into” the NCAA Tournament, no matter what kind of mediocre job they did during the season, they can hold onto that job for at least one more year.  Yes, that is what the BCS, the bowl system and this asinine push by some to expand the NCAA Tournament is really about, holding onto jobs.  People can claim that it is about money, but please, what do you take us for, absolute morons?  Yes, expanding the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams would raise more money but if more money is all that the NCAA is about then they might as well shut their doors and close the whole Damn operation down. 

Face the facts:  Excellence in America has been dumbed down for decades in America and even now extends onto many sporting fields and with people that only want to further dilute the difference between actually achieving something in life and being average are not only hurting themselves and their players, but the country as well……  Although, we don’t expect anyone to understand that reality when they are having to deal with the pressures of holding onto a job that has a lot of pressure attached to it….  Oh, but that is the way it is for all of us in the Real World, either perform or hit the road, but we are not hauling down multi-millions of dollars for doing something that a lot of people would do for minimum wage and the right to pitch a tent and live on the practice field.

Getting back to the Greatest Sporting Event in America where REAL MEN lay it on the line and rise and fall with how well they perform, not how many of their friends in the coaching business they can convince or cajole to vote them higher in a bogus poll (Is there really anything as stupid and obscene as a group of coaches that vote on their own sport?  Please, would someone point out where a championship is decided in any sport on the Planet where the people coaching in the sport then rank the teams?  Didn’t think you could conjure up one which makes the Coaches Poll not only a joke but idiots of the people that run it and claim it is legitimate…which is every Candy Ass lover of the Bogus BCS!)

Sigh, we digress, back to a sport with REAL MEN not a bunch of Pussies that get to a 6-6 record and jump around like they have accomplished something and yell, “Bowl eligible, Bowl eligible!”  Oh, the MADNESS!

What about this great lineup we have over the next 2 nights in the NCAA College Basketball Tournament?  Magnificent!

March 25, 2010

Syracuse vs. Butler

Washington vs. West Virginia

Xavier vs. Kansas State

Kentucky vs. Cornell

 

March 26, 2010

Northern Iowa vs. Michigan State

Tennessee vs. Ohio State

Duke vs. Purdue

Baylor vs. St. Mary’s

Does it get any better than this?  No, it doesn’t!  For all you Pussies out there that rather like “mediocrity” while you are telling your players to pursue excellence, please sit your sorry Asses in front of the TV tonight, tomorrow night and over the weekend and see how REAL MEN decide a CHAMPIONSHIP!

That especially goes for you Candy Asses that like building floats made out Roses, crowning beauty queens and generally acting like a Pussy instead or earning and winning a Championship on the field of play!

No, there is not a chance in Hell we would allow our girls 9-10 year old soccer team decide the champion of their league with something like the Bogus BCS.  Reason?  Our daughters are not Candy Asses, unlike the
93 percent club” and they know that Championships are earned and won on the field of play and for all of the “93 percent club” of coaches that don’t have the guts to decide the National Champion in the same way that every other sport in America at all levels determines its champion, I think you know where we think YOU CAN GO!

Yes, our 9 and 10 year old daughters know the difference between a Championship that is earned on the Field of Play and something that is Bogus but the Candy Asses throughout the game of college football and most sadly, wearing the headsets on the sidelines most certainly do not…. 

93 percent that are for the BCS and bowl system = You are a CANDY ASS!

As for anything beyond a 16-team post-season tournament in college football that would crown a Legitimate National Champion we could really care less if teams play in a bowl game or not.  If there are companies out there that are willing to pay good money to pair up Podunk U and Popcorn U after they have both gone 6-6 or 7-5 (often including a win over a I-AA team) then more the power to you!  We frankly would not allow our daughters to play a meaningless exhibition game in the post-season and claim that something was actually being accomplished because to do so would be for us to lie to our children.  Play those meaningless exhibition games if you like, but sure the Hell don’t claim that you are doing anything but playing in a meaningless exhibition game.

In our last CHS Blog Post we listed the top sporting events that ACTUALLY DECIDE A CHAMPIONSHIP that we most like to watch or attend.  In that list we ranked the Bogus BCS Games as 12 TH behind 11 other sports.  What if the Candy Asses running the BCS got their act together and put together a 16-team post-season tournament that would determine the National Champion in college football on the field of play…Where would we rank that 16-team tournament among the sporting events we like to watch or attend?  Let’s see….

1.  College Football Post-Season Playoffs and National Title Game

2.  NCAA College Basketball Tournament

3.  NFL Playoffs/Super Bowl

4.  The Masters

5.  MLB Playoffs/World Series

6.  NBA Playoffs/NBA Championship Series

7.  US Open Golf Championship

8.  British Open Golf Championship

9.  The Summer Olympics

10.  The Winter Olympics

11.  College World Series

12.  Tour de France

From first to last?  Yes, it be so!  Do the Candy Asses running the BCS have any idea of the possibilities that would exist if they we played a post-season tournament that would end in a Final Four and then National Title game in college football?  Please, these twits can see beyond their noses, or rather beyond the fancy little crowns they like to put on beauty queens!  The Candy Asses rule….but not for much longer Boys, not for much longer….

 

Ivan Maisel and Consultants/Search Firms

There was another little piece in Ivan Maisel’s Three-Point stance today that we need to clear Ivan up on.  Here is what Ivan wrote:

“After Oregon athletic director Mike Bellotti resigned last week, I mocked the practice of athletic directors who hire consultants to help them find head coaches. A current athletic director pointed out to me that consultants provide cover for schools that hire and for coaches interested in moving. But there always have been hiring ADs and coaches with wandering eyes. I believe consultants are just another example of profligate athletic spending. Maybe I’m naïve.”

No, not really naïve Ivan, just uniformed.  When a company or athletic department is making a big and very public hire it is very smart to hire a “go between” to both prequalify and screen candidates so that when the principles involved in the hiring decision get down to considering the final candidates they have all the facts on the table. 

First of all, a “search agency” can approach candidates for jobs to gain their interest with the athletic department not being directly involved.  This seems like a very small thing, but there are a lot of candidates that are approached every year about job openings in college football and basketball that never make into the press and public domain and that is to the benefit of both the athletic department and the coach being approached.

Second, a candidates background, credit, work history, resume must be completely checked out by someone other than the athletic department because the “search agency” can do this with permission from the candidate without the people in the athletic department getting involved in the personal details of the candidates.  A “search agency” can very effectively research everything about a potential new head coaching hire that in the past was not done and led to things like the George O’Leary situation at Notre Dame.  Once the final candidate(s) is/are identified then the athletic department can address any issues directly with the candidate because they already know that the person is interested in and in most cases would take the job if offered.

All companies of medium or larger size in the private sector use “search agencies” to help in finding people to fill key spots because finding the right people has never been more important and doing that search in a confidential manner is vital to the candidates being considered because they don’t want their current employer to know they might be out their shopping their resume until they have a job offer in hand.

Of course, the “search agency” can be and often is undermined by agents that will leak all kinds of info, both bogus and real (we have one agent in mind that has all kinds of people in the news media on speed dial and will say about damn anything to get his clients more money, often at their current schools even when the coach was never up for another job!), that will then be reported in the news media and create what we all know as the Coaching Carousel.

If we were running a college athletic department not only would we hire a “search” agency to help us hire new coaches, we would not make a move until the “search” agency had been given the scope of the job, what we were looking for, the names of the candidates that we were thinking of and the type of coach we wanted to hire, and the “search” agency had come back to us with a preliminary list of coaches that were interested in the job.

That is why a consultant or “search” agency is hired by athletic departments to hire new coaches Ivan.

 

Meanwhile in the real world….

There has been so much written about the recently passed and signed into law Health Care Reform Bill that it is hard to know where to begin, but the comments on both sides of the political spectrum have often missed the mark.  It would be hard for anyone to argue that the Health Care system in the United States doesn’t need a major overhaul because we have way too many Americans that are locked out of health care for all kinds of different reasons and the costs of Health Care are spiraling out of control and those costs are really affecting the bottom-line of companies in the private sector. 

Americans that have full-time jobs and don’t run businesses and get their health care with their job, or fall under one of the government health care plans like Medicare, probably don’t understand the full-blown crisis that is now facing our country as both the cost of Health Care goes up and more and more Baby Boomers are retiring and using more and more of that expensive health care.  We do have a magnificent Health Care system in America, for those that have access to it, and most doctors that we run into work very hard to serve their patients but they also realize (and tell us over beers) that something has got to give soon, or even the fully-insured health care system will fail due to the costs that are being shifted around all over the place.

Several of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have looked through the new Health Care Reform bill and we don’t really see a whole lot of “socialism” as some on the right would claim, but we also don’t see very many things that will do anything about the fundamental problem that is plaguing our Health Care system:  The rising, no the exploding, cost of Health Care in the U.S.

Yes, you would need to be a truly stupid person to believe the Congressional Budget Office’s projections that the Health Care Reform bill will reduce the deficit in the coming years.  Reduce from what?  The Ten Trillion Dollars that the President and Congress say that we are going to add to the current 12+ TRILLION in debt that the US now has on the books?  Please, the American people are not morons and the Democrats need to quit lying with this claim that the Health Care Reform bill is going to “reduce the deficit” or in fact do anything but add HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in debt in the next decade and TRILLIONS in the decades beyond that. 

When you add 32 million (it will be a lot more than 32 million because larger employers will send many of their employees to the health care exchanges and just pay the penalty which will not cover the cost of the subsidies that the gov’t will then provide as people end up buying insurance on their own) people to the health care rolls and many of those people will get subsidies from the government to buy that insurance then deficits and debt will go up and we believe in a very big way.  That deficits and debt will increase under this Health Care Reform bill is just Economics 101 and people in Washington DC need to quit lying on that fact.  The American People are strong and the people running the country need to follow the advice of Abraham Lincoln:

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.” 

Just give us the real facts and we can go from there, but most of all quit lying to the American People about things that are just flat-out bogus and we know they are bogus!

Yes, this new Health Care Reform bill will get health insurance to a lot of Americans that currently don’t have access to the health care system, which is a very good thing.  It is not just the poor and jobless that are locked out of the Health Care system, because we personally know someone here at Coaches Hot Seat that is bringing down a few hundred thousand dollars a year as a private consultant and he cannot buy health insurance for any price if he did not have access to the COBRA program.  His family’s story is very instructive:

Our friend took early retirement (code for being forced out) in his mid-50s from a tech company a couple of years ago from a job where he was making over $1 million a year.  Once out of his job he tried to get health insurance by buying it on his own and since he has high blood pressure (like most people in executive jobs) and his wife had a minor and non-life threatening years ago he was denied health insurance by 3 different companies in California.  Our friend had to then continue his health insurance through the COBRA program at a very high price and deal with the fact that when the COBRA opportunity ran out he would not be able to buy health insurance at any price.  Since our friend had saved money during his entire life to pay for his kids’ college education and for retirement, because he was not able to buy health insurance for he and his family he was putting at risk his family’s life savings.  It is just unacceptable in a country like the United States that a very healthy guy that runs and works out almost everyday cannot buy health insurance and that is why something had to be done to reform our health care system.

Will this Health Care Bill reform our health care system in a positive way?  Who the Hell knows!  We do know that there will be higher taxes on the rich, that in 2014 that most Americans will be brought into the health care system with a health insurance policy of their own, that the US Government has just created two new entitlement programs when we are piling up debt at a astonishing rate already (www.usdebtclock.org), and that for the first time in history the government is going to force individuals to buy a product from private company (no car insurance doesn’t count since you don’t have to drive). 

Overall, there are some good things in this Health Care Reform Bill.  There are also a lot of uncertainties like we don’t see anything to slow down the exploding cost of health care and it takes way too long to be put into place (2014?  The United States defeated Germany and Japan in four years and thus setting up health care exchanges should never take more than a few months to get up and running…which raises some damn interesting questions to why that is….If that was done for the reason of holding down the cost of the Health Care Reform bill then shame on everyone involved, because no matter what anyone says in Washington, if this was a real priority and very important it could be up and running very quickly, easily by the beginning of 2011).

The Republican Party was outflanked on health care by the Democrats primarily because the Republican leadership in Congress and Bush II quit acting like Conservatives and Republicans in the first 6 years of this decade as they exploded the size of the government and forgot that they were supposed to be serving the People.  Many of the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill need to be replaced with people that actually act like Republicans if the Party is going to have any chance to make significant gains in the mid-term and 2012 elections, because these folks talk one game in public and act like Democrats in private.  What the Hell good is having one political party in Washington DC, which for all the hand wringing and fighting between these two parties, we rather doubt that either Party cares much about anything more than getting re-elected.  The current Republican mantra that “This Health Care bill will not stand!” is an absurd way to deal with the fact that the Republicans got their asses handed to them by Obama and the Democrats over Health Care and the very same consultants that have led the Republicans to this point are whispering in their ears right now for passing along a lot of money by the way, passing along unmitigated BS and making a lot of money for their Bogus efforts. 

We here at Coaches Hot Seat are a part of the American People and if the Republicans want to know a way to beat the Democrats in November and take back the White House in 2012, jettison those idiots and email us here at CHS and we will give you some straight advice that is not typical Washington BS!:  info@coacheshotseat.com

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