COACHES HOT SEAT BLOG

Several members of Coaches Hot Seat recently gathered before the Emerald Bowl at one of San Francisco’s oldest bars, the Balboa Cafe’ to toast some of our favorite souls that left the Earth in 2007, and as usual it was a good time for all.  There really is only one way to honor people that have lived the good life, and that is to find a good bar and drink some good Kentucky bourbon whiskey, which was Maker’s Mark for this gathering.  2007 was a tough year for some of our best people, and one has to start and end a tribute to the fine men and women that are laying it on the line for us around the world, which is of course the members of our US military.  In 2007 we have lost 899 people in Iraq, and we want to wish Godspeed to each and every one of them, and we hope that God is taking care of their families, especially the one’s that left young children behind.  Overall, we have lost 3902 men and women in Iraq, and each one of them are precious to us, and their sacrifice should never be far from our minds.  Thanks to all of you that pull on that US uniform everyday, because your sacrifice allows us to live in peace at home.  Let’s all pray for an end to this conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, but no one anywhere should doubt our resolve to fight and die for this country of ours and this grand experiment we call the United States of America.

On to the fine people that we toasted on a foggy night in San Francisco:

Art Buchwald - You made us laugh for years and there is a lot to said for that!

Molly Ivins - Another person that we could not help but laugh with and at, and someone that could give as good as she got.

Arthur Schlesinger - A chronicler of the Kennedy White House years, and a true man of the world.  To be in Arthur’s presence was to be around a mind on fire, and what magnificent vigor he lived his life with.

Eddie Robinson – A giant in the game of football and life, and a man that was not going to allow the color of his skin determine how he lived his life.  A true American hero, that was also one of the classiest gentlemen you would ever want to meet.  We are all much richer from your time on this earth Mr. Robinson. 

Terry Hoeppner- A true joy to be around, and a hell of a football coach to boot.  Was anyone having more fun than Terry Hoeppner on this Earth?  We don’t think so, and don’t think for a second that Terry is somewhere with a huge smile on his face from the play of his beloved Hoosiers this year.  Coach Hoeppner made life fun, and he is terribly missed by a lot of people.

David Halberstam- We lost David to a car wreck here in the Bay area and that news story crossing our computer screens is still a shot to the gut.  Always open, always willing to talk and to and learn from anyone, David is irreplaceable and his absence from the grand stage that is America has been palpable.  Here’s to you David for a life well lived!

Boris N. Yeltsin - A man of incredible courage and guts just when his country needed courage and guts.  Let’s just hope that Yeltsin’s actions don’t go for naught in his country that is increasingly looking more like the Soviet Union than the Russia that Yeltsin built.  Thanks Boris!

Tom Snyder – To people old enough to remember Tom, they remember a great interviewer who also had a wicked sense of humor.  Tom lived the last years of his life in the Bay area, and if you happened to run into him at a store he would be mad if you didn’t say hello.  Here’s to you Tom!

Bill Walsh – An incredible football coach, and an even better man.  Bill Walsh had time for everyone, and that included any average Joe that ran into Coach Walsh in public that might have a question or two about his offense or what was wrong with the 49ers.  To say Bill Walsh was unique is to not do justice to what he accomplished and how he lived his life on this Earth.  If we know Bill Walsh he is having great fun talking over football with the dozens of great coaches that he studied in his career, and from our point of view you can put him right at the top of any list when you are talking about the all time greatest.

Merv Griffin - Merv is another guy that only people of a certain age will know about, but when Merv was on top of his game he was the tops.  When we think of Merv, images of lots of laughs and great guests on the daytime Merv Griffin show fill our minds, and truly Merv was a man that loved life completely.  What a great American life you lived Mr. Griffin.

Norman Mailer - Lots of people believe The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, or the Executioner’s Song were his best work, but for our money Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and Harlot’s Ghost were works of art that will live forever.  Norman also participated in one of the most bizarre moments in TV history when he appeared on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 with Gore Vidal.  Mr. Cavett recently described the scene in his blog on the New York Times, and it is as funny to read about as it is strange!  To be in the same room with Norman Mailer, especially in his younger days was to be with a wild animal who could do or say anything, because this was a man that lived a large and outrageous life.  Norman certainly had the Steve Spurrier disease, in that there was not filter between his brain and mouth, and we were all richer for his brutal honesty.  If you want to understand American life from World War II to the end of the 20th century, then Mailer’s books are a must read.  Here’s to you Norman for a great life lived!

There are so many other greats that we have missed, and millions of other terrific people that have passed on from this Earth in 2007.  In so many ways death gives meaning to life, because we all know that we have a finite time on this planet, and if that doesn’t focus your attention nothing will! 

We here at Coaches Hot Seat want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and Good Luck to you and yours in 2008!

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UCLA fired Karl Dorrell to hire who?  Please, don’t tell us that Dan Guerrero fired Karl Dorrell to hire Rick Neuheisel, but indeed that is what Rece Davis of ESPN has been saying all afternoon.  As several members of Coaches Hot Seat sat around CHS Central tonight and watched the Patriots go 16-0, we were all still stunned that Neuheisel to UCLA is not some kind of crazy dream.  A few of us here had the opportunity to interact with Neuheisel when he was the head coach at Colorado and Washington and our experiences with Neuheisel were consistent, and troubling.  If you have ever met Bill Clinton in person, then you know exactly what it is like to meet and interact with Rick Neuheisel, and we always wonder with both men if they would not do or say anything to achieve their goals in life.  In the press release announcing Neuheisel’s hiring Neuheisel says, “I made some mistakes earlier in my career and I take responsibility for those mistakes. I have learned from that experience and I would never do anything that would reflect negatively on UCLA.”  Really?  Since Neuheisel is a graduate and former football player at UCLA, he has already embarrassed his school dozens of times with his actions in his career, and now all of the sudden he has seen the light?  Please, that is an absolutely outrageous statement to make when everyone knows that the only school around that would dare hire Neuheisel as a head football coach is UCLA.  An even stranger thing from this hire is just who in the hell is now occupying Dan Guerrero’s body, because the Dan Guerrero we know would not tolerate someone in his organization that had committed the transgressions that Neuheisel has in his career.  Of course, if one paid attention to the trial where the new UCLA head coach sued the University of Washington and the NCAA, one would find all kinds of troubling comments by Neuheisel and his former bosses over Neuheisel’s actions while at UW.  Why in the world Dan Guerrero would want to hire someone at UCLA that has such a troubling past is absoultely stunning, but what may be even more incredible is that UCLA had few options but Rick Neuheisel.  It is time to face facts:  UCLA football is now nothing more than a marginal Pac-10 team that cannot draw more than scant attention from actual qualified candidates, and when UCLA got right down to it, the head coaching job was going to be offered to a current assistant coach who had 1 game of head coaching experience, a secondary coach for a NFL team, and Rick Neuheisel.  That my friend is what a former resident of Beverly Hills, a Mr. Jed Clampett would call, “Pitiful, just pitiful.”

Why is UCLA such an unattractive job to people that would interest UCLA.  You can start with the salary that UCLA is offering.  Brian Dohn, the UCLA beat reporter for the LA Daily Breeze reports that Neuheisel will make $1.25 million per year.  What?  That is practically poverty wages in Los Angeles, and BankRate.com’s cost of living calculator tells us that if Nick Saban wanted to maintain the same standard of living that he has in Tuscaloosa, Alabama making $4 million, he would have to have a bump in pay to $7.1 million per year.  Likewise Neuheisel’s $1.25 million salary at UCLA is worth around $700 K in most of America, and you cannot hire a first-rate coach for $700 K.  To see just what a fantasy Mike Bellotti was for UCLA, the reported salary that Bellotti will be making in 2008 at Oregon is around $1.75 million, which would have to be around $2.4 million in order for him to keep the same standard of living in LA that he has in Eugene.  There was not a chance in the world that Bellotti was going to move to LA, or that UCLA was ever going to pay a decent wage for this job.  On top of all of this Tom Dienhart of the Sporting News reports that two things that are a must for UCLA to compete in the Pac-10:  1. Loosened admission standards; and 2. Increased pay for assistants are not going to happen.  Who in the hell does UCLA think they are?  Stanford?  Cal has a number of players right now on their team that we have been told could not have gotten into UCLA, and if that is true then those loons in the UCLA admissions department need to join the rest of us on planet Earth.  Yes, they are high and mighty when they are spouting their politically-correct crap on creating a more “diverse campus,” but when a football player shows up from a disadvantaged background who happens to not have grades that are equal to the rest of the student body, the PC people cannot be found.  They believe that UCLA is too good to allow these marginal students into their precious school, but then we turn around and find out that those same kids are getting admitted at Cal?  Please, the actions of the admissions department at UCLA are beyond hypocrisy and border on outright discrimination against kids that have a talent that is not playing a violin, dancing on a stage, or kissing everyone’s butt through high school to pad their college applications.  No, these kids are not member of the glee club, but they happen to have the ability to play football, and if a kid can get cleared by the NCAA through their academic clearinghouse, then they should have the opportunity to attend a publicly supported state university.  This has nothing to do with lowering standards, but rather the admissions people at UCLA coming to the realization that a kid that can throw a football is as valuable to an university as someone that can play the cello or has done nothing but stick his nose in books for four years of high school.  Dozens of public universities prove every year that there is a place for athletes at their schools and just because a kid happens to play football, shouldn’t mean the admissions department dismisses them out of hand.

So where does all of this leave UCLA?  They fired a mediocre football coach who was paid a below average salary, and they hired a guy that has a checkered past and they are paying him a below average wage.  How nice for UCLA, because it now has the distinction of being one of the few major universities that continues to field a 2nd rate football program, and they have hired a man that no one here at Coaches Hot Seat would hire to coach our kids pee-wee teams.  You see, we feel that people that coach our children should have some integrity and stand for something, and in our opinion Rick Neuheisel doesn’t meet that requirement.  To be frank, we don’t trust the guy, and we cannot understand why UCLA believes he is going to act any different than he has in the past.  No one else would have dared hire Rick Neuheisel for very real reasons, and one of the main reasons they did end up hiring Neuheisel was because UCLA is, let’s just go ahead and say it, INCREDIBLY CHEAP.  Yes, UCLA is Costanza-type cheap, and is the kind of guy that always dodges paying the tab, and when it comes right down to it, they are rather proud about being cheap.  How sad for both UCLA and it’s fans, because there is just no excuse for a school that has such a wealthy donor base to be paying their most public face such disgraceful wage, but we will let you in on a little secret…..There are a lot of people at UCLA that don’t want the football team to win big, and those people tonight have two things to crow about.  The first is the fact that UCLA sacrificed its integrity to hire Neuheisel, and second that Neuheisel and his assistants will not be making a respectful wage.  How pitiful that there are people jumping for joy at UCLA imagining the possibilities of disaster that might happen under Neuheisel at UCLA, and that those football bastards will not be making more than the pointed-head blowhards that don’t generate one penny in real revenue for the school.  Pitiful, just pitiful.

UCLA Motto:  “We hire 2nd rates coaches and pay them 2nd rate salaries so you don’t have to, and we are proud of it!”

Here is the UCLA 2008 Schedule:

 We wonder what the over/under on how many wins for Neuheisel in 2008?  We don’t see a “for sure” win on that schedule, so this might get very ugly in Westwood next year, and if it does you know exactly who to blame.  That being the people that hired a guy in the head coaching position that if we drew up a list of 100 potential coaches for the UCLA job, he would not be on that list.  To us that is just unexplainable.

We will have more on Neuheisel’s hiring in our Coaching Changes Analysis in the coming days.

Happy New Year to everyone! 

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