Coaches Make the "Program" not the School

In college sports the coach trumps everything. Traditionalists and commentators like to talk about "programs" and "schools" as the major reference point for intercollegiate athletics. If we are honest, however, coaches are far more important than schools. Coaches recruit the talent, they motivate the players, they call the games. Coaches win games and become  the face of the university far eclipsing presidents and faculty. This reality defines the world of college athletic "programs."

Programs and schools do not garner wins, good coaches do. Programs and schools do not recruit students, good coaches do. And in a critical twist for me as an academic, programs and schools do not get students graduated, good coaches do. Schools like Penn State, UCLA or Michigan State do not rise in national stature through their academics alone, they rise on the coattails of iconic coaches such as Duffy Daugherty, John Wooden or Joe Paterno.

In a capitalist system, which intercollegiate athletics resembles on the field of competition, successful individuals will be rewarded. In a winner take all system, which intercollegiate athletics is in its purest sense, the "winners" will reap disproportionate rewards. Today more than forty D1 football coaches make more than 2 million dollars a year, and the percentage will continue to rise. The salaries of just decent coaches at second level BCS schools dwarf salaries of university Presidents, state governors or anyone else in states except for investment bankers and Presidents of successful companies. This makes a perverse sense because good coaches of highly successful college football and basketball programs--the only two programs that may make money or count in terms of visibility and reputation--act as CEOs of sprawling staffs, constantly work to appease shareholders (boosters and fans), generate profits via media exposure and present the image of the university to the public at large.

The predictable rise of elite and highly paid coaches can create the illusion that programs and schools still matter. For instance the great program of Bear Bryant, Alabama, rules collegiate football from the tightly coiled heights of Nick Saban's steely will and intelligence. This year legendary Notre Dame has been restored to the top of the football heap under Brian Kelly's inspired guidance.

Yet both schools illustrate the very issue that the school matters far less than the coach. Notre Dame struggled for 15 years through mediocrity and chaos with a succession of at best good coaches and would be saviors until they got Brian Kelly who longed for the job Alabama had suffered through many years in the wilderness, winning a random championship here and there, but struggling until it offered Nick Saban the highest salary in college sports as Saban looked for an excuse to flee the NFL.

Basketball reflects the same dilemma. Kentucky sits atop the greasy pole with its corrupt but untouchable coach who spits in the eye of every academic ideal the NCAA professes. But until he arrived with his baggage of vacated championships, Kentucky went through coaches like water. UCLA still lives in the shadow of John Wooden with no coach able to match his legacy. North Carolina suffered through a series of failures after the dynasty of Dean Smith despite its superb reputation until they got  Roy Williams from Kansas. Williams, the coach, restored the "program's" glory and position. Schools really don't matter in the end; coaches do.

All this reduces to the reality that for an intercollegiate program what matters is not tradition or stature, but money. The top ten paid coaches in D1 football track the relative wealth of the programs with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, LSU etc remain powers at the moment because they have invested hugs sums of money in fine coaches and continue to pay top money to them. Alabama does not possess the sheer bulk or wealth of these schools, but like most SEC schools spends an inordinate amount of money on their football programs due to booster support beyond the size and status of the entire program.

That high salary usually reflects the ability to recruit and win which will usually determines the top contenders for national football honors. Basketball tends to be a more chaotic world. Although an oligarchy clearly exists, the sheer number of D1 schools, over 300, and the ability of schools to mount strong programs with eight players plus the surplus of young talented coaches means that the distribution or unpredictability of the talent and competitors is more widely distributed and more surprising than football.

But money alone will not guarantee success as professional baseball regularly demonstrates. Texas and Oklahoma pay some of the highest salaries to their coaches and are regularly in the hunt for the Big12 championship but not for the national championship for awhile. At the moment  legendary and fine coaches like Mack Brown at Texas may not be long for the conference. Smart and patient schools can hire up and coming coaches or be patient enough to invest in a long term program and coach and reap success with smarts and work.

Now a really smart and wealthy program can actually make this work to create the illusion that the school/program matters more than the coach. Ohio State has done this seamlessly with the implosion of Jim Tressel and the hiring of Urban Meyer. Michigan could have but precipitously fired a fine coach in Lloyd Carr, squandered their program with a misfit hire, and finally seemed to have recovered with another hire. Florida another rich school and smart school lost Urban Meyer and immediately went out to steal  coach in waiting Will Muschamp who got tired of waiting at Texas. USC a wealthy but not uber rich school hides its data since it is a private school, but stumbled for years before hiring Pete Carroll and is now stumbling with Lane Kiffin who may or may not grow into a fine coach,

The point to remember is that the name, tradition or pedigree of the school matters far less than the wealth of the program. This matters even more as the time for coaches to turn around programs shortens. The blood bath has begun this year with 12 coaches fired before the first of December, two after one year and one after two years. But all of them especially Gene Chizik of Auburn who won the national championship only two years ago requires huge buyouts.The SEC alone ran up over 20 million dollars in buyout costs in two years!

The NCAA has no power over coaches salaries as court cases have demonstrated. The salaries rise because university presidents and regents continue to pay them. But the NCAA has recognized the centrality of coaches and coaching responsibility in its  new reforms. Almost all the academic reforms aimed at pushing students toward graduation have the incentives of the coaches as their target. So schools that do not move students along to graduation lost scholarships which have direct impacts on coaches. The Calhoun and Connecticut penalties including banning from the NCAA tournament again target coaches for academic failure. The newly targeted suspensions and published graduation rates again target coaches as do the new laws to make coaches responsible for the activity of their cheating assistants all focus on the coach's centrality.

 Universities are not dominant athletic powers in a strong organizational sense at anymore. What matters is the quality of coaching at the top and the quality of assistant coaches and recruiters and conditioning staff. The key to building a college program that endures is either to get a great coach and keep him, the Penn State or Nebraska model. Or find the best coach money can buy for as along as you can afford him, the Florida model. Alabama created a model followed by many-- cycle through a coach every three years until you either find somone who sticks, or give up and go to the Florida model as they did with Nick Saban.

During the off season select coaches suddenly get new extensions; buy outs are increased; all to seal off coaches from the market. This means that the salaries of all coaches continue to rise. The relation between the coach and the university community thins out even further.

If there is a saving grace in all this, and I doubt it, it reminds us that there are no automatic passes based upon institutional status. Individuals and teams of individuals build quality institutions. Institutions do not continue on top just because they have a name. They have to earn it, every day, every year. Institutions do this with high quality people, not with reputation and inertia.

Fan's Dilemma: Love the Team: Disrespect the Coach

I have followed Michigan for years. My years living in Ann Arbor and teaching in the Michigan system marked me as a Michigan fan. I lived through snow howling Michigan/Ohio State games and would sneak into Bo Schembechler's Monday morning press briefings. I endured the taunts of my Washington colleagues when Michigan lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl. I had the immense pleasure of being in the Kingdome when Michigan with the fab five won the NCAA championship .

Watching Michigan's fall over the last decade has been painful. Basketball  never recovered and seems perpetually mired in mediocre hires, scandals, unable to rise to a level of excellence that makes it worthy to watch; but I still root for them. I could follow Michigan with pride and heart break as the football team played excellent football, won a national championship and lost to hated Ohio State five times in a row. Lloyd Carr exemplified an honorable and good college coach who coached well, recruited well and helped his players grow as people, students and athletes. The NFL is seeded with his players.

Now Michigan has scraped through a series of admitted NCAA violations around having too many coaches and excessive conditioning time. I have written about these and the NCAA let them off with a slap but not a punch by extending their probation one more year. They let them off on the critical issue that Coach Rich Rodriquez had created a culture of noncompliance.

The NCAA should have come down harder and let the coach and school off on the technical issue of intent of coach, but the NCAA ignored the negligence of the coach in not even knowing the rules and internal procedures as well as ignoring them. This would not have happened under Carr's watch.  Carr was pushed into involuntary retirement by a craven administration caving  to boosters. Rich Rodriquez emerged as a back up choice after several humiliating turn downs for he school. His philosophy and success at West Virginia with a spread offense never felt like a good fit and as many groused he was definitely not a "Michigan man" meaning an updated version of Schembechler. See Jim Harbough at Stanford for a modern mutation of the archetype.

The problem arises not because the Michigan team team struggles. A good fan stays with their team through winning and losing. The team is starting to win although unevenly, but rather to me the coach does not seem to be an honorable coach. The leaks on conditioning violations came from players. The extra coaches existed under his watch and he denied responsibility, when it is clearly his. With help of his AD, he threw his director of compliance under the bus.

Rodriquez makes clear to his players that playing and conditioning are their first, second and only priority. Professors teaching the football players notice a difference between the new culture under Rodriquez and the old under Carr. Players are essentially penalized for taking academics too seriously.

What does a fan do when the team and school remain an object of loyalty  but the coach does not deserve your respect? Even as Michigan turns around and starts winning, it would still not raise my respect for the coach or assuage my ambivalence about winning. Maybe at Kentucky you can swallow your principles and honor and unabashedly root for a team coached by an untrustworthy climber like Calipari, but I can't. Most Michigan fans prided their team on doing it the right way, on being different in a good way, and they will struggle with the same grudging issue.

So how can a fan handle this dichotomy? I simply cannot root for Michigan to lose so that Rodriquez will get fired for the wrong reasons--he can't win. But I can't really hope they rebound because this means the school will ignore the lack of character and the denial or responsibility and the lack of commitment to academics and keep him on.

When I watch the maize and blue, I root for them. I enjoy the football and color and nutty helmets. I glory in the full big house even though I am not snuggled up with spiked cider against the wind and snow. I am glad when they win, although I mistrust the offense. The real difference is when they lose. I can't get too upset. I sorrow for the young men who play, but don't care about the coaches and have the sense that the University is getting what it deserves, even if the young men are not.

I can only hope Michigan recovers its principles and vision of itself and does the right thing about the wrong coach.

NCAA Needs Program Wrecking Sanctions I & II

Reggie Bush returned his Heisman this week. A sad, symbolic, meaningless gesture that does nothing to take away the besmirching of a great heritage award.  At the same time new NCAA President Mark Emmert announced that he expects the NCAA to continue pursing major violators. More centrally he  agreed with the program crippling sanctions imposed upon USC for ignoring Bush's relationships with agents.

Soon the NCAA will pass judgment upon Michigan's football program for excessive coaches and  practice time. Soon they will dismantle North Carolina's program for cheating athletes & tutors  and a passel of players who consorted with agents. Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia etc etc. are all under investigations for agent related charges. Calipari's Kentucky is bound to give them an opening soon, he can't help himself. It is vital for the health of college sports that the NCAA not lose courage and continue with aggressive program wrecking sanctions.

I said program wrecking, not program destroying. The NCAA has been hamstrung for years by its obsession with the A-bomb of sanctions, the dreaded "death penalty" that it once applied to SMU. The point of the game is this obsession made the decisions too stark, all or nothing. Better to simply wreck a program, not destroy it.

What do I mean by wreck a program? The violations must strike at the program's ability to sustain a level of competitive excellence in the highly competitive environment. The USC sanctions demonstrate this in a way. They stripped titles and awards; but this is palliative. They took away bowl games; this matters; they cut a lot of scholarships; this matters profoundly. What they did not do but the NCAA needs to do more of is cut the TV money.

The reason the bowls, scholarships and TV matter is how it impacts recruiting. Programs and great coaches attract kids; but there are a fair number of good programs and a number of great coaches. Students will want to play for bowls, titles and TV exposure. The key impact  lies in the competitive recruiting disadvantages that sanctions generate. It becomes much harder for even great coaches to recruit top players if other great coaches can offer them bowls, TV exposure and scholarships. I know, I watched the Washington program stumble and stagger for years after its major probations.

Emmert can build upon the USC decision. The NCAA needs decisions that wreck programs; only wrecking programs will finally get coaches' attention. He has met with the barons of college football coaching to remind them that their own programs now lie at risk of carpet bombing just like USC. Finally the coaches, who are often more powerful than their putative bosses, college Presidents, now are vulnerable. When Nick Saban correctly calls agents pimps, he does so from self interest and outrage. Now  Emmert can harness that coaches' self interest as well as outrage to take on the agent and other issues.

It's time to act consistently, aggressive and massively against the programs; nothing else will change behavior. I will discuss this in the next post.

For years the NCAA enforcement lay supine; every now and it roused itself to  to take action, but never systematic and patterned. The enforcement staff remained a well intentioned backwater and with remarkably indifferent leadership and mediocre competence. My own experience arises from watching them botch a sure case against Washington coach Rick Neuheisel by not following their own rules. They turned a strong case into a multimillion dollar settlement with a corrupt coach on the basis of slipshod work. Programs worried about investigations but seldom feared them.

The new NCAA President Emmert can  change this by building on the USC success. He is radically altering the enforcement leadership structures. The number of investigators has risen to 23 from 12 in five years. The NCAA SWAT team to investigate the cesspool of college basketball recruiting and AAU teams has doubled; however that can be just a down payment given the magnitude of the problem. Emmert has made clear that he will continue to beef up the staff. More importantly he has removed the leadership obstacles to hiring a higher quality and more aggressive staff and legal counsel. The NCAA has been hamstrung by mediocre legal quality of its own staff and its outside representation for years.

Increasing staff quality, quantity and competence is critical. Emmert has made clear that even if he cuts the NCAA's staff, he will not touch enforcement. But that is only half the equation. The NCAA must create serious program wrecking penalties.

USC is the harbinger. The penalties put superstar coaches on notice that no one is immune. More importantly it let them know that not only will the NCAA "vacate" titles and games, but will aggressively chop scholarships. The vacated games did not matter to Florida State; the vacated games and title did not matter to Pete Carroll after he left USC. The vacated games and titles certainly have not stopped John Calipari.  No the vacated games are only a start. Take away  bowls, deny championships and above all reduce scholarships and reduce TV money and exposure; these strike at the heart of a program's ability to sustain itself against other ferocious competitors.

Another key for the new NCAA approach will be absolute accountability for head coaches. They all claim it for themselves to garner high salaries and adulation for their successes. But when something bad happens, suddenly the all-knowing coaches fall into denial mode. These "who me?" "I didn't know" attitudes pervade college sports. Just watch the comments of Rich Rodriquez at Michigan; Pete Carroll of USC  or Butch Davis at North Carolina.

The NCAA must demand absolute accountability from coaches. Creating a portfolio of a coach's history of academics and violations just dips into the water. It will be good to have a public record of academic and compliance success or failure. But no penalties attach to coaches. And no penalties follow them. To be blunt, if coaches win, they will be hired again regardless of the portfolio.

This new accountability that puts whole programs at risk will force coaches to follow up their own rhetoric. This kind of program future accountability will also force ADs and presidents to be more prudent when they hire coaches who can walk away but leave a program in shambles for years.

Enforcing higher standards and program crippling penalties will demand coaches match their rhetoric and power by taking responsibility for the athletes they recruit and build their reputations on. It will force them to protect the institutions they claim to be loyal to. It takes immense self deception and denial to ignore the problems around cheating tutors, agent money or excessive coaches. The program wrecking approaches will force the coaches to do what they should do. They would not accept from players the excuses they offer for themselves. 

Coaches are often beyond the effective control of Presidents and Boards. They usually have their own supporters on Boards limiting Presidents who try to control them. The NCAA has always had the potential to take high profile coaches on but been cowered by its own lack of competence and the need to preserve the TV deals that lionize and make marketable stars of coaches.

Cripple a few more programs. Not the death penalty, just wound them seriously, so the other programs can smell blood and circle around and tear them apart. A few more and the NCAA might once again be taken seriously as the guardian of the games.