COACHES HOT SEAT BLOG

Before we get to the blog post on the Winningest Active Coaches at their “Current Schools” we must say something about all of the comments that have been made about ”the kids” at Clemson that were put under so much stress or even wronged when Tommy Bowden “resigned” from his head coaching job.  We always get a great laugh and are very troubled by the fact that people that should no better, including many former head football coaches, who say that “the kids” are incredibly impacted by a coaching change and that it is disaster for those “kids” because their head coach got fired.  We laugh at the notion of the stress on these “kids,” because a number of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have served in the military and we remind everyone, including all of these former coaches that are crying for the fired coach and the “kids,” that the young men and women in our armed forces that are on the front lines all over the world defending our country are the same ages as “the kids” at Clemson and in other collegiate athletic programs around country.  If our fine young men and women in the United States Armed Forces can handle the stress that comes with going into battle, then “the kids” at Clemson can handle a coaching change as they live and go to school on a very nice college campus in the middle of South Carolina.  No, Clemson University is not Iraq or Afghanistan and people that are calling these 18 to 22 year olds “kids” need to realize that playing football on scholarship or as a walk-on for a major college football program does not compare in any way with the sacrifices made by our young men and women in the Armed Forces and that work in very tough and difficult jobs in our society.  Many of these young men and women would love to have the opportunity to attend a school like Clemson, especially if they were on a full athletic scholarship, so both the Clemson football players and the people commentating on the situation at Clemson with the firing of Tommy Bowden need to make sure that their comments reflect the realities of the real world that many of our young people have to deal with everyday. 

 

What really makes the comments calling these 18 to 22 year old football players “kids” really becomes silly when one reflects upon the sacrifices made by our young people in World War II, who were mostly the same age as “the kids” that were put into such “stress” because their head football coach was fired.  Please.  Throughout every year about a dozen of us here at Coaches Hot Seat read the same book so that we can discuss what we thought of the book and if we are coming to the same or different conclusions from the author or with our own perceptions of the book.  Many of us try to put our hands on as many books as possible individually each year, but we collectively read about 10 books a year during the same time, approximately one book a month, and the book that several of us have just finished is Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Liberation Trilogy), which is Atkinson’s second book of three books on the US and British Armies Liberation of Europe.  Atkinson’s first book in this trilogy was An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy (The Liberation Trilogy) which was a terrific book on the US and British’s efforts to get their forces together that would be necessary to win back Europe from the German and Italians and the early Allied campaigns in North Africa.  An Army at Dawn is a great book, but the book we have just finished The Day of Battle may even be better and we would like to quote from a couple of sections from The Day of Battle to remind the people that call these 18-22 year old college athletes “kids” that they are not in fact “kids,” but the same age of the young people that liberated Europe in World War II.

 

The Day of Battle

The following is from Chapter 2, The Burning Shore, “Land of Cyclops” on the Allied Invasion of Sicily, July 1943:

 

Pg. 79

 

  “The first Americans waded onto the beaches at 3:35 A.M. on Saturday, July 10, fifty minutes behind Patton’s schedule.  With a vicious pop, a mine tore open the chest of a Ranger company commander.  “I could see his heart beating,” said his first sergeant, Randall Harris.  “He turned to me and said, ‘I’ve had it, Harry,’ then collapsed and died.”  Harris dashed forward only to have another mine shred his abdomen and legs; after flicking grenades into a line of pillboxes, he sprinkled sulfa powder on his protruding intestines, cinched his web belt to keep his innards in, and wandered down to the beach to find a medic.  Harris would win a battlefield commission and the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry.

  If stunned by the Allied invasion, the defenders appeared unsurprised.  With a great roar and a shower of masonry, Italian demolitionists blew up a long segment of the thousand-foot Gela pier.  Italian gunners trained their fire on the Twenty-Sixth Infantry as the first wave closed to within a hundred yards of shore.  “The water jumped and heaved” under the lashing bullets.  Soldiers sheltered behind the LCT splinter plates and anchor winches, narrowing their shoulders and elbowing one another as rounds sang overhead or pinged off the hull.  A barrage balloon torn free in the storm abruptly drifted overhead, weird and stately.  “I’ve been wounded but there’s so much blood I can’t tell exactly where,” one soldier muttered.  As another boat dropped its ramp, a Sixteenth Infantry rifleman felt a weight slump against his leg.  “Somebody left his pack,” he called out, then saw that the inert bundle was a sergeant who had been shot in the head. 

  Shouts and curses swept the beaches, swallowed by gunfire.  A shower of Italian grenades landed around a Sixteenth Infantry lieutenant, who escaped from the encounter with sixty-six small holes in his uniform shirt, a ruptured eardrum, and a pierced upper lip.  Sappers chopped at the barbed wire with long-handled snips, and soldiers fell flat as trip flares bathed the shingle in magnesium brilliance.  Searchlights swept the waterline, only to draw salvo after salvo from destroyers racing parallel to the shore like angry dogs along a fence.  An Italian soldier “crept from a pillbox on all fours and ran down the hill, screaming and sobbing.””

 

Pgs. 87-88 – The Day of Battle

 

  “Landing craft ground ashore in the early light.  Voices sang out:  “Down door!”  Then:  “Sicily, everybody out!”  Fire from shore batteries proved modest, except of course for those it actually struck.  “The water had a sea of blood and limbs, remains of once grand fighting men who would never be identified,” wrote Able Seaman K. G. Oakley, who saw a landing craft shattered in the Fiftieth Division sector.  From the surf Oakley pulled “a man whose arm was hanging on by a few bits of cloth and flesh.  He cried, ‘My arm! Look, it’s hit me.’”  Like tens of thousands of others on that Saturday morning, Oakley reflected, “So this is war.”

  Ashore they swarmed, scrambling through the dunes and across the coastal highway.  A Scots regiment entered Cassibile skirling, in defiance of orders that bagpipes remain on ships.  A pungent smell briefly triggered gas alarms and fumbling for masks, until more sophisticated noses realized the odor came from wild thyme churned by bombs.  While some troops built makeshift jetties with stones salvaged from a beachfront vineyard, other darted between doorways, shouting the Eighth Army challenge – “Desert Rats!” – and listening for the proper parole:  “Kill Italians.”  A Sicilian peasant charged from his house and fired an ancient shotgun at approaching Commandos, who killed him with return fire.  “Sorry we had to shoot that farmer,” a British soldier remarked.  “He had the right spirit.”

  Eighth Army had prepared for up to ten thousand casualties during the first week of combat on Sicily; in the event, they would sustain only 1,517.  But even those who escaped without so much as a sunburn shared a Royal Engineer corporal’s view:

           

We had learned our first lesson, mainly that fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy.  With the same callousness as Army orders, without fairness or judgment, “You and you – dead.  The rest of you, on the truck.””

 

End of that section, The Day of Battle

 

 No, the young men on the Clemson football team are not “kids” and if our current US soldiers can be on the front lines around the world today and our soldiers can liberate Europe over 60 years now, both working under incredibly difficult circumstances, then the players on the Clemson football team can handle a head coaching change without falling to pieces.  If the Clemson football players cannot handle a coaching change without falling apart then we have a far different group of young people on our college campuses than are in our armed forces, and that is a damn scary thought.  People that claim some coaches are asking too much of their players, or that they are scrimmaging them to much, or that they are working them to hard, need to understand that our young people in the prime of their lives can do amazing things and in fact there is very little that a football coach or anyone else could ask of them along the lines of achievement, or excellence, or in getting difficult things done, that they couldn’t do.  No, these are not “kids” that are playing football, but rather men that need to be treated like men, because in the kind of world that we live in today it would be impossible for anyone to predict the kind of great challenges and important responsibilities that will be asked of these young men in the coming years.

 

On a more humorous note, below is another section from The Day of Battle in a scene that is also from the Invasion of Sicily that involves one of our favorite generals, George S. Patton.  If you have sensitive eyes or ears, we would recommend that you not read this passage:

 

The Day of Battle, Chapter 2, The Burning Shore

Pg.  104

 

“Patton returned to the beach late in the day, still in full throat and impeccable despite having been bombed, strafed, and shelled.  During the afternoon he had tracked down Ted Roosevelt in Gela – rebuking him for failing to seize Ponte Olivo airfield already – and later he smoked a victory cigar while visiting Allen’s command post.  He ate his K ration lunch with a portly, white-haired brigadier general named William J. Donovan, a millionaire Wall Street lawyer whose resume also included the Medal of Honor and three Purple Hearts in World War I and whose friend Franklin Roosevelt had appointed him director of Office of Strategic Services.  Donovan had come ashore from the Samuel Chase and spent the day shooting at Italians, “happy as a clam,” a First Division captain reported.  “You know, Bill,” Patton said, “there are two things in life that I love to do – fucking and fighting.”  Donovan nodded.  “Yes, George, and in that order, too.””

 

End of Day of Battle excerpt

 

Yes, General George S. Patton was quite a character as was William Donovan who ran the Office of Strategic Services, which of course was a precursor to the modern day CIA.

 

We wholeheartedly recommend both of Rick Atkinson’s books (with another one coming), on the liberation of Europe, An Army at Dawn and the book that we quoted from in this blog post, The Day of Battle.  Rick Atkinson is a great writer and a terrific storyteller and you can find more about his writing and books at www.liberationtrilogy.com.  Thanks Mr. Atkinson for some great reading, and we look forward to your third and final book on the Allied liberation of Europe, which will no doubt begin with the preparations for D-Day and the invasion of Europe in France. 

 

Now on to the real reason for this blog post!

 

One of the most interesting rankings that we compile here at Coaches Hot Seat is the Winningest Active Coaches in Division I-A, which we believe is the best snapshot of how college football coaches are performing against their peers in their conferences and across the country.  When you get right down to it the job of a college head football coach is to win football games and it is our belief that some coaches have within them the innate ability to prepare their football teams to win football games and that ability to win games shows up directly on the Winningest Active Coaches Ranking.  One of the problems of the Winningest Active Coaches Ranking is that it does not recognize that some coaches have spent portions of their career at schools that did not have great winning traditions or the coaches took over schools that were in deep trouble when they first arrived.  Another way to look at the Winningest Active Coaches Ranking is to compare the winning percentages of coaches at their “Current Schools” and below we list the Winningest Active Coaches in Division I-A at their “Current Schools” (Only coaches with a current winning percentage above .600 are listed):

 

#	Coach	Current School	Yrs.	Record	Win %
1	Chris Peterson	Boise State	3	29-3	.906
2	Paul Johnson	Georgia Tech	1	6-1	.857
3	Les Miles	LSU	4	39-7	.848
4	Pete Carroll	USC	8	81-15	.844
5	Jim Tressel	Ohio State	8	80-17	.825
6	Bob Stoops	Oklahoma	10	103-23	.817
7	Mack Brown	Texas	11	110-25	.815
8	Todd Graham	Tulsa	2	17-4	.810
9	Urban Meyer	Florida	4	36-9	.800
10	Jeff Jagodzinski	Boston College	2	16-4	.800
11	Mark Richt	Georgia	8	78-20	.796
12	Brian Kelly	Cincinnati	2	15-4	.789
13	Bobby Bowden	FSU	33	305-86-4	.772
14	Bronco Mendenhall	Brigham Young	4	34-11	.756
15	Phil Fulmer	Tennessee	17	150-49	.754
16	Joe Paterno	Penn State	43	380-125-3	.748
17	Bret Bielema	Wisconsin	3	24-9	.727
18	Gary Patterson	TCU	9	69-26	.726
19	Troy Calhoun	Air Force	2	14-6	.700
20	Nick Saban	Alabama	2	14-6	.700
21	Tommy Tuberville	Auburn	10	84-36	.700
22	Kyle Whittingham	Utah	4	32-14	.696
23	Frank Beamer	Virginia Tech	22	172-87-2	.689
24	Chris Ault	Nevada	24	195-88-1	.687
25	Mike Bellotti	Oregon	14	111-54	.673
26	Bill Stewart	West Virginia	1	4-2	.667
27	Larry Blakeney	Troy	18	140-70-1	.664
28	Mike Leach	Texas Tech	9	72-37	.661
29	Jeff Tedford	Cal	7	54-28	.659
30	Ralph Friedgen	Maryland	8	61-33	.649
31	Jim Leavitt	South Florida	12	85-48	.639
32	Dennis Erickson	Arizona State	2	12-7	.632
33	Butch Jones	Central Michigan	2	13-9	.619
34	Mark Dantonio	Michigan State	2	13-8	.619
35	Pat Hill	Fresno State	12	89-57	.610
36	Tom Amstutz	Toledo	8	57-37	.606
37	Charlie Weis	Notre Dame	4	26-17	.605

 

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