COACHES HOT SEAT BLOG

George Orwell, the English writer known for 1984 and Animal Farm once said that…

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

That is doubly true in the game of college football and in how the game is reported in the news media.  This past Sunday Los Angeles Times reporter Gary Klein gave new USC head coach Lane Kiffin a Big Wet Welcome Kiss to LA with his article:  New USC football coach Lane Kiffin hopes lights are less bright in big city, and he let all of us know that Poor Little Lane Kiffin was really put-out when he coached at Tennessee  Let’s go to the tape….or the article in this case:

“In football-crazed Tennessee, where Kiffin coached for 14 months, a simple errand to the market or restaurant was impossible. Demands for autographs, photos and just plain old small talk would have kept him occupied for hours.”

Oh, Poor Little Lane Kiffin couldn’t go to the grocery store because he would have had to talk to fans of THE FOOTBALL TEAM THAT HE COACHED!  Oh the Tragedy!  Lane Kiffin would have had to engage in “small talk” with a fan of the Vols, but then when you are a POMPOUS ASS and you have never been told by anyone to shut your mouth and act appropriately in public is anyone really surprised that HIS HIGHNESS Lane Kiffin couldn’t dare be put out by the common folks?  Yes, that is a crock of you know what, but Klein goes on to write in that same article one of the most stunning things we have ever read in a newspaper:

“Easing into a chair inside the USC coaches’ offices a few weeks after he was hired, Kiffin smiles as he recalls how he and another former Trojans assistant, Washington Coach Steve Sarkisian, used to joke about succeeding Carroll.

Both wanted the job; neither wanted to be next.

“Let someone else go follow him and then get fired when they go 12-1 and not 13-0,” they’d say.

But his own reluctance disappeared quickly when USC Athletic Director Mike Garrett called in January after Carroll left to become coach of the Seattle Seahawks.

Kiffin says he wasn’t shocked by the news. He’d always believed his former boss’ competitive streak would lead him back to the NFL. However, he did not expect a call from USC. Not after his one controversy-filled season at Tennessee had ended in a 7-6 record and a loss to Virginia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Bowl.

His wife, Layla, had other ideas.

“You should be the next coach at SC,” she told him. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Garrett, in his phone call, seemed to agree — just as long as Kiffin could bring along his father, Monte, a veteran college and NFL defensive coordinator, and line coach and top recruiter Ed Orgeron.

Convincing his father, Kiffin recalls, “took probably about 10 minutes of conversation.” For Orgeron, “about 10 seconds.”

“I think the line was something like, ‘Coach, I’m getting a plane ticket. I’ll be there today,’ ” Kiffin says.

End of article

Did you catch that? 

“Garrett, in his phone call, seemed to agree — just as long as Kiffin could bring along his father, Monte, a veteran college and NFL defensive coordinator, and line coach and top recruiter Ed Orgeron.”

Lane Kiffin could have the head coaching job at USC – – just as long as Kiffin could bring along his father, Monte, a veteran college and NFL defensive coordinator, and line coach and top recruiter Ed Orgeron.”

Oh, that’s rich and if true makes Lane Kiffin look like the little boy that shouldn’t be allowed out of the house to play unless his Daddy and Big Bad Ed Orgeron comes out with him to protect him from the big kids!  Yes, either this is the Bizarro-World where a head coach at a school like USC is hired on the condition that he bring along two coaches with him, his Daddy and Big Ed or Gary Klein and the folks at USC are making all of this up because there is just NO WAY IN HELL that Mike Garrett hired a head football coach at USC based upon that coach bringing along his Daddy and another assistant!  Oh, Yes it did happen and it is beyond outrageous it puts Mike Garrett’s butt on the Hot Seat as well because if Lane Kiffin is run out of Los Angeles Mike Garrett will be in the seat right beside him (with Daddy and Big Ed in the seat behind them of course!)  Lane Kiffin can’t go anywhere without Daddy mind you….there is that pesky 5 – 15 record in Oakland when Daddy was in Tampa to keep in mind!

Yes, it all now makes perfect sense why Lane Kiffin is the head coach at USC, but then it made such great sense that he was hired by the Oakland Raiders and then at Tennessee….Right?  Uh……, NO NOT QUITE!  Kiffin’s tenure in Oakland was an unmitigated disaster which led of course to Tennessee hiring him where he put up just an average season that any random moron off the streets could have matched and then he kicked dirt on Tennessee as he, his Daddy and Big Ed ran out the door!  What must we be thinking to have Lane Kiffin on the Hot Seat?  We must be idiots, but then we predicted what Lane Kiffin was going to do at Tennessee, pop-off and run his mouth although he has accomplished less in his life than one our US soldiers that has gone through boot camp and then run out the back door when he couldn’t stand making “small talk” with the common folks! 

Listen up you IDIOT Lane Kiffin – It is the common folks that pay your salary, even at USC (please don’t tell us that USC is private because USC gets tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in US taxpayer money every year for its students and school(s)), and if you are too damn good to talk to them then you should not be coaching Pee-Wee football forget about the USC Trojans!  Pete Carroll would talk to anyone and to us many times and Lane Kiffin can’t be bothered….. 

Oh, this Lane Kiffin at USC is going to be great fun!

Of course, after LA Times reporter Gary Klein gave Kiffin a Big Wet Kiss on Sunday he couldn’t help himself and gave Kiffin and the “Better be coming with Lane Gang” a Big Wet FRENCH Kiss on Monday with this article, Lane Kiffin’s first team at USC is a little less than spring-loaded, which had this description of the article:

“Trojans begin first spring practice under their new coach with some formidable talent, both returning and incoming, but also a good share of question marks and areas of concern.”

Oh, Poor Little Lane Kiffin and his “Better be coming with Lane Gang” not only couldn’t handle the stress of coaching in Knoxville but they also have “a good share of question marks and areas of concern” at USC!  What’s next for Gary Klein and the ass kisses in Los Angeles?  NEWSFLASH!  If Lane Kiffin can get USC to .500 and a bowl game in 2010 he will be the second coming of John McKay!  We are watching and waiting for it, because we all know it is coming!

Memo to Gary Klein of the LA Times:  USC is loaded with talent and there are probably not 5 college football teams in the United States that can match or exceed the talent level that Lane Kiffin was given at USC when he took over from Pete Carroll.  How about that?  Quit Kissing Lane and the “Better be coming with Lang Gang’s” asses!  How about it?  Can you just cover USC football instead of working so damn hard to get on the good side of Lane and the Boys over at Heritage Hall?  That goes for everyone else in the LA media that have been little more than lapdogs since Lane and his “Better be coming with Lane Gang” arrived in town!

We have some news for Lane Kiffin, the “Better be coming with Lane Gang” and the folks in the LA Media.  Any random idiot off of the streets of Santa Monica, whether he was a smoker of Gunja or not, could with USC’s 2010 football schedule WIN 9 FOOTBALL GAMES without breaking a sweat and that means that Kiffin and the “Better be coming with Lane Gang” should easily be able to win 10 games plus.  Not that we are counting here at Coaches Hot Seat….(Oh, yes we are counting!) or that anyone in the Los Angeles media will be doing anything for the foreseeable future but puckering up and kissing the asses of the folks at USC! 

Just so everyone remembers “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” here is Lane Kiffin’s record as a head coach:

Oakland Raiders – 5 – 15

Tennessee – 7-6  (With Tennessee playing 8 home games in 2009)

Lane Kiffin’s Overall Record:  12 – 21  (.364)

And this guy is the head football coach at USC?  It is true, even a moron can go far in America, especially if he is required to bring along Daddy and Big Ed with him!  Would Lane Kiffin be the head coach at USC if Daddy and Big Ed were not on his staff?  NOT A CHANCE IN HELL!

By the way, Monte Kiffin’s record as a head in 3 years at NC State (1980-1982) – 16 – 17 – Better than Lane, but not good enough to keep his job!

If you and your “Better be coming with Lane Gang” are such great coaches Lane, how about proving it.  We are betting you along with Daddy and Big Ed will be coaching the Long Beach 70lb league in 5 years, after USC gives you a big payoff to leave town!  Prove us wrong!

 

The Importance of College Athletes Going to Class and Earning a College Degree

There have been a couple of news stories in the past week about college football players not going to class and as often as we think of it we write about the importance of today’s student-athletes going to class and earning a college degree.  The first was on backup QB Star Jackson who evidently was not going to class which led to his head coach Nick Saban saying:

“He’s worked hard, he had a good offseason program,” Saban added. “But the thing that’s going to affect the quality of life more than anything else is graduating from school. … We aren’t going to compromise that for them to play football.”

“Just like my dad did when I was in the eighth grade. I wouldn’t sing in music class and I got a D, he made me turn my basketball uniform in, he took me to the coal mines, took me 500-some feet deep in the shaft and said if you don’t go to school and don’t get an education, this is where you’re going to end up,” Saban said. “That’s the last time I’ve been down there.”

Bravo to that Coach Saban!  Win the National Championship and require the players to go to class?  Yes, we do have student-athletes in American colleges!

The next story was from UCF where head coach George O’Leary suspended NINE players for not going to class:

“Obviously, I held guys out that were missing some classes,” O’Leary said after practice. “They’ve got to obey the rules.”

O’Leary did not set a timeline for the players’ return.

“They’re suspended indefinitely until they start doing the things they’re supposed to do,” he said.

Again, Bravo to Coach O’Leary!  We don’t know what the situation is at Alabama admission wise, but UCF has some very high admission standards, as do all of the large 4-year universities in the state of Florida and if there are UCF student-athletes of any sport that don’t want to go to class then more the power to them, to pay for their own college education that is!

Now all of you student-athletes that don’t go to class…LISTEN UP!

First, in today’s world of limited resources, which is much different than the 35 years old plus America that we here at CHS grew up in, there are a limited amount of seats at all universities not just private schools like Stanford (for the 2010 freshman class Stanford only accepted 2,300 students out of 32,022 applications which is only a 7.2% acceptance rate.  Can you believe that number?  Just incredible…) and in the world of limited resources a student-athlete is almost always taking the seat of another regular student that wanted to go to that college or university.  If a student-athlete is not going to bother to go to class then he is wasting his time, his head coach’s time, the school’s time, his teammates’ time and not fulfilling the obligation he made when he accepted a scholarship to the school that he would be a student-athlete.

This is very simple.  If you are going to play intercollegiate athletics, especially on an athletic scholarship, then you have to go to class.  If you are not going to class, then give up the scholarship and pay for school with your own dime because you are no longer a student-athlete.

Of course, there is a very good reason that student-athletes should want to go to class to earn their college degree and that is a world that has become more interconnected, more involved, and complicated everyday and people with college degrees have a big advantage over just high school graduates.  The US Labor Department Unemployment Rate underscores that fact:

US Labor Department Employment Situation Summary

On the above linked page from the US Labor Department one will find another link:

Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment

On that webpage one will find the following latest US Unemployment Data (there will be a new Unemployment Rate Report on Friday, April 2)

US Unemployment Rates

Less then a high school diploma – 15.6 percent

High school graduates – 10.5

Some college or associates degree – 8.0 percent

Bachelor’s degree and higher – 5.0 percent

Do you see a trend in the above Unemployment Rate numbers?  Yes, that’s it!  The more education you have the lower the unemployment rate and even in the terrible economy that the US is still mired in 95 percent of Americans with Bachelors Degrees are working which is half the Unemployment Rate for people with only high school diplomas.  Now that should get the attention of any kid that is not willing and ready to jump out of bed to get to class!  Yes, you can choose to remain poor or you can get your ass out of bed and get to class and take advantage of that free college education that the state and/or a private school is paying for!

Here are two more good reasons to earn that college degree for all those student-athletes out there:

Percentage of Americans that have earned the following degrees:

 

High School Degree – 84.6 percent

Some College – 54.5 percent

Bachelors Degree – 27.2 percent

Masters Degree – 8.9 percent

Doctorate or Professionals Degree – 3 percent

If a student-athlete earns a Bachelor’s Degree he/she will place himself into the group of 27.2 percent of Americans that have that degree which just by itself will give one a big leg up once one’s athletic days are over.

Education and Earnings

Weekly Earnings

High School Grad – $600

Bachelor’s Degree – $1000

In one year a person with a Bachelor’s Degree will earn about $20,000 bucks more than someone with only a high school degree and over a 40 year working period that is around $800,000 dollars which is the difference between from having a very good life and nice retirement and working your butt off and not having much in retirement. 

As we said earlier…THIS IS VERY SIMPLE!  Go to Class and Earn that College Degree!  You will thank your head coach and everyone else that helped you earn that Bachelor’s Degree for the rest of your life.

P.S. – If a student-athlete is having problems in class, which almost everyone does at one time or the other in college, he should be encouraged to talk to and meet with the educational people in the athletic department as early in the semester/quarter as possible so that the problem can be quickly addressed.  Most students know if they are going to have a problem with a course even before they take the first test, so making sure that problems are addressed early on is very important because the middle of the semester or quarter is often too late to catch-up and get a decent grade in the class.  Hey, if you are going to have to be in class anyway to play on the college team, why not pay attention and get an A, or at worst a B in he course!

 

Coaches Hot Seat Upcoming Items

We are about finished with the Salaries webage/date here at CHS for the head coaches in college football in 2010 and we hope to have that updated on the website and mentioned in the CHS Blog before The Masters gets underway next week.  We also will update the win/loss records for all the current and new coaches at the same time. 

We are having a big Coaches Hot Seat get-together this weekend and on Monday Night for the NCAA Final Four/Championship Game and we will be completing our Analysis and Ranking of the New Coaching Hires for 2010 and we will start posting our predictions for Coaches and Teams in 2010 sometime in April.  Yes, spring football is in full swing and that means that baseball season is almost here and that college football for real can’t be all that far behind! 

First the NCAA Basketball Tournament, then The Masters, then Major League Baseball gets underway!  Yes, this is the Second Most Wonderful time of the year!

Let’s settle a Legitimate National Championship in the next week though in College Basketball before we get ahead of ourselves!  Yes, this has been a Hellava of NCAA College Basketball Tournament and the BCS Boys should be kicking themselves to have let the college football season get to its current state. 

An Earned Championship vs. One Anointed by Elitists that often couldn’t catch a football thrown to them on the best day of their lives!  Which one do you think is the “AMERICAN” way to settle things?  Thought you believed as we do that an “Earned” Championship is on the only way to go, but then there are a few Candy Asses around the American Republic that still drop to their knees when the Queen of England comes by them….  We here at Coaches Hot Seat upon seeing the Queen’s Carriage shout out what every American should shout out:  “Give me Liberty or Give me Death!”  Yes, we do get stares from the assembled crowd at Buckingham Palace and our wives punch us in the shoulder, but we feel good as we retire to the local London pub for a pint….or two…..or three (yes, the hotel is within walking distance and we can whip those royal lovers’ asses in darts!  Another round, but this time the Americans will buy…after all we whipped your asses 235 years ago us buying everyone a drink is probably in order!  Barkeep, drinks all around and put that on the Visa Card!)

 

Book Recommendation from Coaches Hot Seat

If you want a great book to read over the summer and you like US history and the American West you cannot go wrong with the great book, Bear Flag Rising, The Conquest of California, 1846, by Dale L. Walker, which tells the tale of how America captured California and the American West.  Now, our Latino friends will tell us that we “stole” California from the Mexican government, but we hasten to add that…No the senior commander handed over “the keys” to California in June 1846 in Sonoma as detailed in the following excerpt from the book:

Start of book excerpt:

“But even the cuartel was sham.  Sonoma had no garrison, no one to lay the cannons or load the muskets.  The soldiery had been removed during the Micheltorena troubles in ’45 and never replaced.  Mexico City had been of no help – the home country insisting that all its colonies be self-supporting – nor was Governor Pico in Los Angeles of any assistance;  he provided no finances for a Sonoma garrison despite of the unauthorized settlers in the north.

These matters were known to the Onos (the name the American rebels adopted) as they clattered across the bridge between Napa and Sonoma valleys at dawn on June 14, entered the town from the north, rode past the Mission San Francisco de Solano, reined up in front of General Vallejo’s (Mexican military officer in charge of Northern California in 1840s) Casa Grande, and banged gun butts on the door.

Dan Mariano came to the door in his nightshirt.  Arrayed before him, bathed in the yellow lantern light, some still on horseback, some afoot, stood a crew that might have come north from San Pablo Bay off a ship flying the Jolly Roger.  This motley nightmare consisted of “about as rough looking set of men as one could well imagine, “ Kentuckian Robert Semple later said.  Some wore bandannas, pirate-fashion, on their heads, others coon, fox, and coyote-skin caps;  most favored buckskin hunting shirts and trousers, and Indian moccasins.  All were armed – rifles, muskets, pepper-box pistols, tomahawks, hunting knives – and all were tired and agitated.

After a few words at the door, General Vallejo invited the ringleaders into is sala.  As they lounged on his mahogany furniture and eyed the piano and paintings, the general dressed.  His wife Dona Francisca begged him to escape from these banditti through the back of the house, but he rejected this idea;  he would not desert her and their six children.  He sent a servant to fetch his brother-in-law, the Ohio-born merchant Jacob Leese, to serve as translator.

“To what happy circumstances shall I attribute the visit of so many exalted personages?” Vallejo asked Merritt with a witty irony lost on the ruffian with the tobacco-juice beard.

“We mean to establish our own government in California, an independent republic, and are under arms to support it.  You are under arrest, General, as the responsible head of the Mexicans hereabouts,” Merritt stuttered.  He added a point, useful and perhaps even true, asserting that he and his men were acting under orders from Captain Fremont of the United States Army.

Fremont’s name must have convinced Vallejo that these “white Indians,” as he later called them, were not mere bandits.  He handed over the keys to the town arsenal and offered the men food and brandy.  One eyewitness reported that after hearing of their mission, he went to his room and, “following the usages of war, “retrieved his ceremonial sword, which he offered to his captors.  None of the Onos seemed to know what to do with it and so Don Mariano returned it to his room.”

End of book excerpt

See, America got California fair and square!  We asked for California from the ranking Mexican military office on the scene and he gave the Americans “the keys” to the state! 

Yes, there is much more to the story and that is why if you would like to read a rip roaring book on the founding of the Republic of California then you should get your hands on Bear Flag Rising.  The book is so good you will read it right through in only a few days and laugh the entire time at how the world can change on a dime and how fate played such a big role in US expansion into the West.  There is even a cameo appearance in California by future US Civil War General William T. Sherman when he was still coming up in the US Army long before his famous exploits in the Civil War made him an American hero or Bastard depending on which side of the Mason/Dixon line you lived on at the time…or now!

Enjoy!

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For all the Candy Asses BCS Lovers out there, including many in the news media that would write anything verbatim if any idiot in a suit told them something, for all of you that claimed Boise State or TCU could not have beaten Alabama last football season we present to you clueless morons…..

BUTLER UNIVERSITY!

With Butler beating Syracuse last night in the NCAA Basketball Tournament they and all the other “underdog” teams that have pulled off upsets in the post-season over the years PROVE BEYOND THE SHADOW OF A DOUBT that the only way to really determine who is the best team in any sport is to PLAY THE GAMES and decide the CHAMPIONSHIP on the FIELD OF PLAY.

That should be obvious, but then there is the Bizarro-world of the BCS where we have coaches voting on their own and buddies’ teams (absolutely asinine!), meaningless exhibition games between teams that don’t deserve to be playing in the post-season, a “Series” of meaningless exhibition games that include college athlete laying around on beaches, visiting theme parks and doing all kinds of things that have nothing to do with playing collegiate athletics.  Then the Candy Asses and their co-conspirators in the media hold a big Grand-Pooh Bah “Title” game that “excludes” teams that have every right to be playing for that title themselves.  Yes, that all makes perfect sense!  If you are a moron, a Candy Ass, you live in the Bizarro-world, or you like putting flowers in your hair (more on that in a moment!). 

If all of that smacks of elitism and arrogance then you would have defined the Candy Asses that are behind and the run the BCS and certainly there in not a one of them that can possibly look their children or grandchildren in the eyes and say they give two-rips about the Principles and Ideas of the American Republic.

Yes, Fascists, or Communists, or even Socialists would love something like the BCS, but there is no way a red-blooded American that would lay his life on the line for his country and the words penned by one of our greatest Founders, Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence could possibly defend this Bogus BCS:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form…”

That is what REAL AMERICANS believe in not this BS disguised as a legitimate championship aptly named the B(C)S!  What was it Abraham Lincoln said?

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Yes, that about sums the BCS up and if you didn’t know it already if you are a BCS Lover either working for, with, or in a co-conspirator role with the Candy Asses you are in the first part of that quote!

Yes, BUTLER UNIVERSITY!  We have a News Flash for all the geniuses in the media that prop up this Bogus BCS:  Boise State and TCU could have both beaten Alabama AND Texas last season, but we have the Candy Asses behind the BCS to thank for not allowing those matchups to happen.

Yes, the Greatest Sporting Event in America rolls on and after a Great Thursday night slate of games we have 4 more Great Games tonight!  WooHoo! 

Northern Iowa vs. Michigan State

Tennessee vs. Ohio State

Duke vs. Purdue

Baylor vs. St. Mary’s

We have been to many St. Mary’s basketball games living in the SF Bay area and we will be pulling hard for the Gaels tonight!  Give ‘em Hell St. Mary’s!

Rock on Baby because it is “Championship Time” and that would be “Legitimate Championship Time” for you Candy Asses that are now somewhere in Pasadena putting Roses on a float and dreaming of putting a crown on the head of a beauty queen!  Yes, the BCS folks are some serious Candy Asses!  “Hey BCS Boys, how about sending out some of those Roses that you love so much to our wives because they are getting pissed off that we are watching so much basketball lately!  Oh, you say that there are only enough Roses for the floats and that if there are any left over you are going to put them in your hair?”  Yes, for some reason that makes sense……

Candy Ass BCS Boys Theme Song:

As a member of Coaches Hot Seat asked last night as we drank cold beers (why is it that beer that comes out of a washtub filled with ice and beer is better than beer out of a fridge?  Send that question off to Cal Tech!) watching the Great NCAA College Basketball Tournament….”What would John (Bill Murray) from Stripes think of these Candy Ass BCS Boys?  Good Question because Americans are Americans and these Candy Ass BCS Boys are not like any Americans we have ever run into!

“WE ARE AMERICANS WITH A CAPITAL A!”

Hey, that was so entertaining let’s see another!

OK HOTSHOT!

 

And another…

DO WHA DIDDY!

 

You know, a few years in the military would have done these Candy Ass BCS Boys some good, because then they might have learned that Freedom and Liberty are not “Free” and that is downright despicable to set up a system to determine the champion in college football that violates the Principles of the country.  Hell, just 8 weeks of boot camp would straighten these Candy Asses out!  Can’t you just see it, these BCS Lovers would spend 8 weeks at boot camp or 12 weeks at Officer’s Candidate School and these boys would come off the military base singing the praises of a Playoff System and figuring out quick how we could determine the champion in college football in a way so that everyone could say….“WE ARE AMERICANS WITH A CAPITAL A!”

 

Conference Expansion – Realignment

We don’t know about you but to us these are very interesting times for college athletic conferences and it is going to be fascinating to see how all of this conference expansion talk shakes out in the coming years. 

Big Ten – The no-brainer of all time is to add Notre Dame, Rutgers and Missouri and all three of those schools should jump at the chance to join the Big Ten to make it the Big Fourteen.  Notre Dame should be able to cut a deal to protect its football revenues to some extent and it could still play its 3 national games each year, but it would also have a strong conference for all of its other teams.

Pac-10 – Jon Wilner of the Mercury News wrote a couple of weeks back the most complete summary of the Pac-10 expansion situation (although the Mercury News archives were down as of this writing we found most of his article on another site, link) and Wilner wrote that:

“One way to increase inventory, of course, is by adding schools. But which ones?

San Diego State, Fresno State, UNLV, Nevada and Boise State are not part of the equation, multiple sources told me. No way, no how. They don’t work academically and they don’t work in the TV homes/revenue equation.

Unless Missouri or Texas (presumably with Texas A&M) are available — and at this point there’s no substantive reason to believe they are — then only three options exist for the conference: Utah, BYU and Colorado.

And for all practical purposes, there are only two options: Colorado and BYU, or Colorado and Utah.

Utah and BYU together simply will not work.

As I speculated a few weeks ago (and have since gotten confirmation on), you cannot add two mouths and only one trough, especially when that trough is the Salt Lake City market, which is not exactly Dallas-Ft. Worth.

I also wrote previously that the conference has long been opposed to BYU on multiple fronts:

The presidents aren’t interested in aligning with a church-affiliated school (regardless of the church), and they look down upon BYU because it’s not a research institution.

The coaches also have been opposed to BYU in the past because, as one league insider told me, “They don’t want their 18 years olds playing against 25 years olds.”

Now, what the coaches want or don’t want won’t make a lick of difference to the presidents if the money’s right. The question is: Will the money be right with BYU?

Do the Cougars, with their regional fan base, bring enough households that are not currently within the Pac-10 footprint to make the 1/12th split worthwhile?

Or, as one source quipped: “Can you monetize the Mormon Church?”

That’s for the media consultants to determine this spring/summer, but there was serious skepticism on that front among the sources I spoke to.

And if — somehow — the dollars look right with BYU and Colorado … and it ultimately comes to a vote … will all 10 presidents sign off on BYU?

“If BYU’s a home run, I think they’ll pull the trigger,” a source said. “But I’m not sure BYU’s a home run.”

My belief, unchanged over the past few weeks, is that Colorado-Utah is more realistic than Colorado-BYU … although still not as realistic as no expansion.”

We certainly believe that Wilner reported and sourced the above story very well so our problem is with the people in the Pac-10 that somehow believe that BYU and even Boise State would not fit with their “elite” universities.  Please, that’s a crock.  A few of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have been around a few of the “elitists” that make decisions at the Pac-10 schools and most of these folks wouldn’t know an honest days work if it hit them in the Ass and for any of them to exclude a very good school in Boise State that is a bigger city TV market, population wise, and in many other ways than several Pac-10 schools or because BYU because they are “church-affiliated” is OUTRAGEOUS!

The Pac-10 no-brainer move is to add Boise State, Utah, BYU and Colorado which would create a Mega-Conference that would dominate the Western United States for years to come.  TV revenues are going to be larger in the coming years in the Pac-10 no matter what happens and if the folks in Walnut Creek are smart they will put together the above 4 mentioned teams and solidify the Pac-10 for years to come.  Believe us, Boise State and BYU are very good universities and these “elitists” that are running the Pac-10 schools could do worse that be around some of the common sense and non-PC environment that those schools would bring to the table.

The SEC – Mike Slive is sitting in Birmingham, Alabama in the proverbial “Cat Bird” seat but what if the ‘ole sly dog has a trick up his sleeve?  Forget about the Bogus idea of Texas to the Big Ten….what about Texas, Texas, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the SEC?  Or 3 of the above teams and Georgia Tech to the SEC?  Now those would be bold moves and would make the SEC the most powerful conference in the country even if the Big Ten landed Notre Dame.  Texas and Oklahoma in the SEC with the heavy hitters they already have?  Oh, that would be something!

 

Closing of the American Mind

Something that has gotten under our craw here at Coaches Hot Seat in the last couple of years is the “elitist” attitude at some of or universities and the folks that believe it would be crazy for someone to affiliate with a “church-affiliated” school like BYU or Notre Dame.  There is so much going on in America today that it is almost impossible to take the time to consider what is swirling around all of us and our families but taking the time to stop and look around is something that must be done. 

In the first year of the Coaches Hot Seat Blog in 2007 we wrote about the 20 TH anniversary of a book titled: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom and not only do we believe that Mr. Bloom (Alan Bloom, 1930 – 1992) was one of the most important academics in US history, but that his Closing of the American Mind is a great reminder of what the “education” of our kids and young people in the United States should be about. 

Mr. Bloom’s ideas are relative to the college and university of 2010 because of the vital important of learning not only a specific skill or specialty but also getting a broad background in the history of Western civilization and the American Republic.  For some of the “elitists” at Pac-10 schools or elsewhere that are repulsed at the idea of affiliating with a “church-affiliated” school we would remind them that even atheists, agnostics or whatever else would do well to understand the religious traditions in history and to make sure one’s children carried at least some of that knowledge with them when they go away to college or enter the “real world.” 

It is often claimed that Conservatives and thus “its” political party in America, the Republican Party has lost its way in recent years and from where we sit that would be a very accurate statement.  The problem is that the Republican Party no longer has a soul or a set of principles that it stands for and the Presidents that made the Party great in the past:  Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan have been lost to the wind.  Either the Republican Party and its leaders will find its principles again soon, or its current group of leaders will have to be replaced and to those folks that have been driving the Republican Train for the past couple of decades we can only say “the clock is ticking.”  You folks have from right now until the 2012 Republican Convention to get the ship righted or it will be time for real Republicans, not the corporate and Wall Street crowd that now dominates the party, to take it back and provide an alternative to the Democrats.  No, it won’t be the Tea Party or some other small fringe group that will take back the Republican Party, but conservative Republicans that will actually stand up for what they know is right and can also raise more money in a couple of hours at lunch than Obama raised in his last Presidential run.  The “clock is ticking” boys and girls and pretty soon it will be time for BIG changes in the Republican Party, akin to what happened to the Party in the late 1970s which lasted until the “let’s just give away the future of our constituents’ children and the Hell with the principles of the Party” crowd ran the Party in the ditch over the past decade.  Yes, you and we know who you are…  Those days are coming to an end folks because the stakes are too high to leave the major conservative political party to a bunch of buffoons that are in love with Washington DC and the trappings of power….

We will quote from Mr. Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind below but if you have some time you should go by your library, bookstore or Amazon.com and get the book yourself and give Mr. Bloom’s ideas some serious thought because they are more relevant today than they were when they were written in 1987.

A few highlights from the Closing of the American Mind:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modem replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged–a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the onlyalternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness– and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings –is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, “If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,” they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place. It is not that they know very much about other nations, or about their own. The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue–openness.

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family–what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles–required in the United States. This was an entirely new experiment in politics, and with it came a new education. This education has evolved in the last half-century from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality.

The palpable difference between these two can easily be found in the changed understanding of what it means to be an American. The old view was that, by recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers. The immigrant had to put behind him the claims of the Old World in favor of a new and easily acquired education. This did not necessarily mean abandoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean subordinating them to new principles. There was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself.

The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward-looking. It does not demand fundamental agreement or the abandonment of old or new beliefs in favor of the natural ones. It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?

…………………….

Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political roundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus. You had to be a crank or a buffoon (e.g., Henry Adams or H. L. Mencken, respectively) to get attention as a nonbeliever in the democracy. All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal–certainly not in France, Italy, Germany, or even England. There the greatest events and the greatest men speak for monarchy and aristocracy as well as for democracy, for established religion as well as for tolerance, for patriotism that takes primacy over liberty, for privilege that takes primacy over equality of right. Belonging to one of these peoples may be explained as a sentiment, an attachment to one’s own, akin to the attachment to father and mother, but Frenchness, Englishhess, Germanness remain, nonetheless, ineffable. Everybody can, however, articulate what Americanness is. And that Americanness generated a race of heroes Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln and so on–all of whom contributed to equality. Our imagination is not turned toward a Joan of Arc, a Louis XIV or a Napoleon who counterbalance our equivalent of 1789. Our heroes and the language of the Declaration contribute to a national reverence for our Constitution, also a unique phenomenon. All this is material for self-consciousness and provides a superior moral significance to humdrum lives as well as something to study.

But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree–not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922), both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism–the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1933). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist. The bad conscience they promoted killed off the one continuing bit of popular culture that celebrated the national story–the Western.

Thus, openness has driven out the local deities, leaving only the speechless, meaningless country. There is no immediate, sensual experience of the nation’s meaning or its project, which would provide the basis for adult reflection on regimes and statesmanship. Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

The other element of fundamental primary learning that has disappeared is religion. As the respect for the Sacred–the latest fad–has soared, real religion and knowledge of the Bible have diminished to the vanishing point. The gods never walked very tall in our political life or in our schools. The Lord’s Prayer we mumbled in grade school when I was a child affected us less than the Pledge of Allegiance we also recited. It was the home–and the houses of worship related to it–where religion lived. The holy days and the common language and set of references that permeated most households constituted a large part of the family bond and gave it a substantial content. Moses and the Tables of the Law, Jesus and his preaching of brotherly love, had an imaginative existence. Passages from the Psalms and the Gospels echoed in children’s heads. Attending church or synagogue, praying at the table, were a way of life, inseparable from the moral education that was supposed to be the family’s special responsibility in this democracy. Actually, the moral teaching was the religious teaching. There was no abstract doctrine. The things one was supposed to do, the sense that the world supported them and punished disobedience, were all incarnated in the Biblical stories. The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own. The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. It is as monochrome as unrelated to those who pass through it as are the barren steppes frequented by nomads who take their mere subsistence and move on.  The delicate fabric of civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated.

I am speaking here not of the unhappy, broken homes that are such a prominent part of American life, but the relatively happy ones, where husband and wife like each other and care about their children, very often unselfishly devoting the best parts of their lives to them. But they have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world, of high models of action or profound sense of connection with others. The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and perform its function. Its base is merely bodily reproduction, but its purpose is the formation of civilized human beings. In teaching a language and providing names for all things, it transmits an interpretation of the order of the whole of things. It feeds on books, in which the little polity–the family–believes, which tell about right and wrong, good and bad and explain why they are so. The family requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of the heavens and of men. The parents must have knowledge of what has happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order to resist the philistinism or the wickedness of the present. Ritual and ceremony are now often said to be necessary for the family, and they are now lacking. The family, however, has to be a sacred unity believing in the permanence of what it teaches, if its ritual and ceremony are to express and transmit the wonder of the moral law, which it alone is capable of transmitting and which makes it special in a world devoted to the humanly, all too humanly, useful. When that belief disappears, as it has, the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness. People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.

The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. So books have become, at best, “culture,” i.e., boring. As Tocqueville put it, in a democracy tradition is nothing more than information. With the “information explosion,” tradition has become superfluous. As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead, something to which lip service is paid in the vain hope of edifying the kids. In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and–as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible–provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.

Parents do not have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World. They lack self-confidence as educators of their children, generously believing that they will be better than their parents, not only in well-being, but in moral, bodily and intellectual virtue. There is always a more or less open belief in progress, which means the past appears poor and contemptible. The future, which is open-ended, cannot be prescribed to by parents, and it eclipses the past which they know to be inferior. Along with the constant newness of everything and the ceaseless moving from place to place, first radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society. Parents can no longer control the atmosphere of the home and have even lost the will to do so. With great subtlety and energy, television enters not only the room, but also the tastes of old and young alike, appealing to the immediately pleasant and subverting whatever does not conform to it. Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life. Now television has replaced the newspaper. It is not so much the low quality of the fare provided that is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imagining any order of taste, any way of life with pleasures and learning that naturally fit the lives of the family’s members, keeping itself distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded from within the household itself.

The improved education of the vastly expanded middle class in the last half-century has also weakened the family’s authority. Almost everyone in the middle class has a college degree, and most have an advanced degree of some kind. Those of us who can look back to the humble situations of our parents or grandparents, who never saw the inside of an institution of higher learning, can have cause for self-congratulation. But–inevitably but the impression that our general populace is better educated depends on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word education, or a fudging of the distinction between liberal and technical education. A highly trained computer specialist need not have had any more learning about morals, politics or religion than the most ignorant of persons. All to the contrary, his narrow education, with the prejudices and the pride accompanying it, and its literature which comes to be and passes away in a day and uncritically accepts the premises of current wisdom, can cut him off from the liberal learning that simpler folk used to absorb from a variety of traditional sources. It is not evident to me that someone whose regular reading consists of Time, Playboy and Scientific American has any profounder wisdom about the world than the rural schoolboy of yore with his McGuffey’s reader. When a youngster like Lincoln sought to educate himself, the immediately available obvious things for him to learn were the Bible, Shakespeare and Euclid. Was he really worse off than those who try to find their way through the technical smorgasbord of the current school system, with its utter inability to distinguish between important and unimportant in any way other than by demands of the market?

My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material, not from outside or from an alien perspective, but believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance. There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief. 

I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but clichés, superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.

The moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the world is “disenchanted.” Otherwise, education becomes the vain attempt to give children “values.” Beyond the fact that parents do not know what they believe, and surely do not have the self-confidence to tell their children much more than that they want them to be happy and fulfill whatever potential they may have, values are such pallid things. What are they and how are they communicated? The courses in “value-clarification” springing up in schools are supposed to provide models for parents and get children to talk about abortion, sexism or the arms race, issues the significance of which they cannot possibly understand. Such education is little more than propaganda, and propaganda that does not work, because the opinions or values arrived at are will-o’-the-wisps, insubstantial, without ground in experience or passion, which are the bases of moral reasoning. Such “values” will inevitably change as public opinion changes. The new moral education has none of the genius that engenders moral instinct or second nature, the prerequisite not only of character but also of thought. Actually, the family’s moral training now comes down to inculcating the bare minima of social behavior, not lying or stealing, and produces university students who can say nothing more about the ground of their moral action than “If I did that to him, he could do it to me” –an explanation which does not even satisfy those who utter it.

This gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes in the souls of the young accounts for the difference between the students I knew at the beginning of my teaching career and those I face now. The loss of the books has made them narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what is and despairing of ever escaping from it. The longing for the beyond has been attenuated. The very models of admiration and contempt have vanished. Flatter, because without interpretations of things, without the poetry or the imagination’s activity, their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around. The refinement of the mind’s eye that permits it to see the delicate distinctions among men, among their deeds and their motives, and constitutes real taste, is impossible without the assistance of literature in the grand style.

So there is less soil in which university teaching can take root, less of the enthusiasm and curiosity of young Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, whose eros makes him imagine that there are splendid satisfactions in store for him about which he does not wish to be fooled and for knowledge of which he seeks a teacher. It is much more difficult today to attach the classic books to any experience or felt need the students have.”

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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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The greatest sporting event in the United States gets underway today across the country and over the next few weeks ALL of America will in some way be connected to the fabulous NCAA College Basketball Tournament.  As opposed to I-A college football that shuts down its top teams for four plus weeks at the end of its regular season, the NCAA College Basketball Tournament honors the best traditions of our Republic, the chief one being that championships are won and lost on the field of play (not in the back rooms with Greedy Candy Asses that wouldn’t last five seconds on a football field with REAL MEN making all the decisions!)

Earlier this week Coaches Hot Seat sent out a request to our members to list the top sporting events that ACTUALLY DECIDE A CHAMPIONSHIP(S) that they most like to watch or attend.  Let’s get to the results of our internal poll:

1.  NCAA College Basketball Tournament

2.  NFL Playoffs/Super Bowl

3.  The Masters

4.  MLB Playoffs/World Series

5.  NBA Playoffs/NBA Championship Series

6.  US Open Golf Championship

7.  British Open Golf Championship

8.  The Summer Olympics

9.  The Winter Olympics

10.  College World Series

11.  Tour de France

12.  Bogus BCS Games

That’s right, you got it, that sickening creation (the BCS) by the Greedy Candy Asses that wouldn’t know UP from DOWN is way down the list of sporting events that we like to watch or attend, and judging by every poll that has been done in the past decade, the American People agree with us TOTALLY (DUDE)!

Imagine for a moment that the NCAA College Basketball Tournament shut down the college basketball regular season the way these Buffoons running college football do after the conclusion of the regular season and championship games.  Instead of the First Round Games of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament being played 4 to 10 days after the final games for Tournament teams if something like the IDIOTIC BCS reigned in college basketball the NCAA Tournament would not tip-off until April 16!

March 18 – NCAA College Basketball Tournament Tips-Off because a group of Greedy Candy Asses are not holding the game of college basketball hostage.

April 16 – (Average 33 days between last game and BCS bowls begin) When the NCAA College Basketball Tournament WOULD START if the same type of Greedy Candy Asses that are running college football were allowed to take over college basketball.

Yes, we can all give a big thanks to the fact that the Greedy Candy Asses are cornered in the game of college football, but maybe not for long…maybe not for long Candy Asses….

Our only advice is…Keep all those emails and correspondence and by all means we encourage you to tell the truth if someone from the government shows up at your door and asks you a question that centers around the BCS Boys conspiring behind the scenes to limit competition in Division I-A football.  Don’t forget the wise words of Richard Nixon (paraphrased):  “It is the lie or cover-up that eventually gets you, not the underlying crime.”  Of course, a group conspiring to limit competition in Division I-A football would be a crime, even if every conference signed onto the committing of the conspiracy (crime).  You see, if all the Mafia families in New York get together to divide up the NY Metro area it is still a crime that ALL of them have committed together because breaking US law as it pertains to criminal activity or the purposeful limiting of competition in college sports is still a crime.

Yes, keep all those emails!

Besides, is there really anyone, and we mean someone with a working brain that is not having his pockets stuffed by the Candy Ass BCS Boys, that really thinks the BCS is a legitimate way to determine the champion in college football?  Sadly, our educational system has terribly failed our country in the last couple of decades and there are a lot of stupid and very gullible people running around in the American Republic.

Several of us here at Coaches Hot Seat are playing golf in the San Francisco Bay area today….

….and then we are heading down to the San Jose HP Pavilion this afternoon/evening for four First Round Games and then we are going to play some more golf on Friday and then attend the Second on Saturday.  Yes, nothing like the NCAA College Basketball Tournament and March Madness and nothing like March Madness in person!

March 18, San Jose HP Pavilion

Vanderbilt vs. Murray State

Butler vs. UTEP

Marquette vs. Washington

New Mexico vs. Montana

March 20, San Jose HP Pavilion

Second Round Games

Now that should be some great college basketball…and just think instead of bogus bowl games involving mediocre college football teams, these games will ACTUALLY MEAN SOMETHING because it is WIN OR GO HOME BABY! 

Just like it should always be when deciding championships in sports in America….

….and how it will be you Candy Ass BCS Boys!

Let’s Tip-It Off and decide a CHAMPIONSHIP!

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With the season long suspension of Oregon QB Jeremiah Masoli in 2010 by his head coach Chip Kelly (and the other trouble that college football players seem to be getting into on a regular basis these days), the Coaches Hot Seat “Quote of the Day” today is an excerpt from Allen Barra’s book on Paul “Bear” Bryant, The Last Coach (which is below).  We rarely quote from books in the CHS “Quote of the Day” but we thought it was appropriate because of how important we believe it is for coaches in collegiate athletics to fully realize how important discipline is to the success  of his/her program.  There are a lot of great lessons to be learned from the suspensions at Oregon, mostly by the players themselves, and if anyone really believes that the motivations, desires and needs of college athletes were a lot different in 1963 than in 2010 then that person does not understand basic human motivation and what it takes to build a championship program.

Excerpt, The Last Coach, Allen Barra

“A few days before the final game in ’63, Bryant heard a rumor he couldn’t ignore.  Apparently Joe Namath has been involved in an altercation in a parking lot in front of a convenience store.  Bryant, who was preparing to fly to Tennessee on a recruiting trip, went instead to the dorm looking for Joe.  He was seated in the dining room drinking coffee when Namath came in; Bryant asked him to come back to the room he kept at the dorm for private conversations.  Whatever exactly Namath did, according to Bryant he admitted it.  In late years, Bryant would insist that Namath’s offense wasn’t major, but “I believe if you have rules you abide by them.  You can’t make exceptions.”  What he did not know for months, he later admitted, was “that other players were involved.  They let him take the rap alone.”  Namath never mentioned the names of the other players who were with him.

Bryant told Joe he was suspending him.  How many days?  Namath wanted to know.  Until the end of the year, was the answer, “or forever.”  Or until Joe proved something to him.  He would help Namath go to another school if he wanted to, or help him  get into the Canadian Football League, or allow him a chance to get back on the team if he stayed in school and proved that his transgression was just a bad mistake.  The choice was up to Joe.  Bryant then called a meeting of his coaches and told them of his decision.  All of them, except one,  argued for finding a way to keep Joe on the team;  a few of them might have been considering the extra bonuses they would receive – which amounted to about a month’s salary – if Alabama won its Sugar Bowl game, an unlikely prospect without Namath.  The lone dissenter was Gene Stallings.  Bebes was unyielding:  “If it had been me, if I had been the player, you would have fired me, wouldn’t you?”  he asked his boss.  Bryant had to admit that he would have.  “Then let him go,” said Stallings.

Bryant politely dismissed his aides and sat in his office for two hours, ruminating.  Finally, he called Namath and Assistant Coach Sam Bailey into the office.  He told Namath, he would give his right arm not have to do it, but if he didn’t, he would be hurting both Namath and the team.  He told him the university could reverse his decision, but if they did, he would resign.  This was Bryant’s own account, and it sounds like hyperbole to anyone that did not know his history, anyone who did not know that he had done precisely that at Maryland under precisely the same circumstances – or that he would later do it again at Alabama.

Namath teared up and begged his coach not to consider resigning.  He had a favor to ask:  would Coach Bryant call his mother and tell her before the news hit the papers?  Of course he would.  Mrs. Namath cried over the phone and begged Bryant to reconsider, but he told her his decision was final.  That night, unbeknownst to Bryant, Namath had dinner at the Bryants’ home with Paul Jr. and Mary Harmon, who tried to him to comfort him.  Some credit Mary Harmon with saving Namath for Alabama.  “I sent for him,” she revealed some years later.  When he arrived, she hugged him and said, “Joe what happened?  You couldn’t do anything bad.  You’re just too good of a boy to do anything bad.”  What Joe had been doing, according to at least once source was not only drinking but directing traffic in downtown Tuscaloosa – not exactly a low-profile pastime for Alabama’s most easily recognized football player.

As it turned out, the suspension of Joe Namath was to set the stage for one of Alabama’s and Bear Bryant’ most legendary improbable finishes.  At first, the lost of Namath seemed like a devastating blow.  Bryant’s players did not doubt that he had done the right thing, but at that moment no one could see how they would get through the games with Miami and Ole Miss.  The team pulled together in large part because Namath accepted the suspension – at least, he made no public complaint.”

The 1964 season, when Alabama did win a national championship but finished on a sour note, made for an interesting contrast with 1963. 

Namath now officially listed as “Joe Willie” in the Alabama press guide, came out roaring, complete sixteen of twenty-one passes and running for three touchdowns in an easy 31 – 3 season opener win over Georgia.  By the time Alabama was ready to host North Carolina State in the fourth week of the season…..”

The Last Coach, A Life of Paul “Bear” Bryant, Allen Barra

Paul “Bear” Bryant suspended Joe Namath late in the 1963 season for the final game and the Sugar Bowl.  What was Alabama’s record over the next three years you ask?

1964 – 10 – 1 – SEC and National Championship (Led by Joe Namath at QB.  Namath’s record as the starting QB at Alabama was 29-4)

1965 – 9 – 1 – 1 – SEC and National Championship

1966 – 11 – 0 – SEC Championship (Did not win National Championship even though Alabama was the only undefeated and un-tied team at the end of the year.  The story of the 1966 Alabama team is detailed in the great book, The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football’s Most Elusive Prize, by Keith Dunnavant.

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