Sports Ethics: Lying & Deception in Athletic Competition

Juke  Feint   Misdirect   Fake     Disguise  Sneak   

We know all these words and expect them from good athletes. Everyone depends upon deception and lying in sports. How do we square this with the centrality of sportsmanship to defending the worth of athletics? And somehow by teaching deception and lying as a normal part of the game are we undermining the ethics of both players and fans?

Everyone defends sportsmanship. Ethically it is  fundamental to the moral worth of sports. We speak of how athletics teaches loyalty, self-discipline, sacrifice, overcoming odds and working with others to achieve excellence. At the core all these attributes depend upon integrity and the ability to make and keep commitments to oneself and to others. This argument lies at the center of aligning sports with schooling and making it a widespread adjunct to parenting in our society.

Yet at the center of  athletic competition lies practiced strategy of deception. Every competitive sport where athletes play against each other has built in imperatives to deceive the other side. The speed and power of modern elite athletics requires successful athletes to anticipate and act, not just react. If you react to a serve in tennis or volleyball or a feint in basketball or soccer you are too late. So the dynamic of success requires a trained ability to predict an opponent's response to a perceived action. If a player or team can feign or fake that action to get the opponent to commit and then act in a different way, they use deception and misdirection to achieve their goals. Athletic competitive success requires a mastery of deception.

Because success depends upon anticipation, much of sport relies upon disguising actions so that the other side anticipates incorrectly. If I want to succeed in an action, I need to convince my opponent that I am not going to do what they think I am. I try to disguise, deceive or intentionally lie about what I plan to do. If the opponent takes the bait of my fake, then they move out of position. They are not prepared for the action I actually take and  and are caught lunging for a volley or kick. They are out of position on a run or suddenly face a mismatch between one defender and offense player. We spend hours teaching athletes how to fake and feint and create mismatches. We teach athletes to project false intent in their interactions.

Elite athletes watch immense amounts of tape to understand their own tendencies, learn their weaknesses and practice to suppress them. Unless an athlete literally is one of the greatest, they cannot afford to have the other side anticipate and predict what they will be doing. Every athlete facing an opponent tries to avoid predictability and throw the opponent off track of what the athlete may do. The better an opponent can anticipate my action, the lower the probability of my succeeding.

Athletes also  watch tape to anticipate their opponent's best moves. Athletes watching tape seek out the quirks, tells, and ticks that give away an opponent's next move. If you are one move, one split second, one half step ahead, you can win. 

Both sides know they study each other and both sides prepare to deceive the other and project a lie for their actions. Deception and anticipation enable teams with superior game knowledge to overcome superior talent.

We worship sportsmanship but teach deception? We honor effort but play to win?

The only way to make sense of this is to remember sport competition involves a GAME. Games have closed rules. The rules define what constitutes winning and losing. They encompass the range of actions and skills needed to perform well. Athletes must master the physical, cognitive and emotional skills needed to excel within the games rule bound universe of behavior.

To excel good athletes must master pattern recognition of all the players around them. They learn to read other player's signals; they learn to control their own signals and read opponents. The skills of pattern recognition unfold during competition. Deception and feints occur within this world of recognition and competition and rules. The misdirection occurs within the bounded relation of competition. Misdirection, misreading, sneaks and feints, intentionally projected lies, become part of the game. Good athletes even learn to read the signs of feints and you get feints within feints within disguise.

The rule bound world of athletic competition thrives upon deception and anticipation. Any good negotiator or litigator or politician will practice the same strategies within the rules of their own professional practices. This is good competition and strong development of an athlete's cognitive and emotional capacities. But the real boundary world for deception in sports is CHEATING.

Athletes and coaches cheat when they consciously violate the rules of the game and try to disguise it. You see it in coaching when a coach moves beyond mastering the art of deceiving with feints, fakes and misdirection. Instead coaches or team cultures teach athletes to violate rules and get away with it. It falls apart when athletes use PEDs and hide and lie about it. It falls apart when coaches and athletes intentionally violate rules to win.  It falls apart when coaches teach and reward  athletes to intentionally injure opponents.

One is good athletic competition, the other is degradation of the person and sport.

Football as a Means: A Review of Undefeated

The best football movies focus on high school. The players still possess a raw idealism and capacity for self-sacrificing commitment. This visceral passion infuses the game with social power and camaraderie. High school teams are still anchored in real communities where people know your name. These loyalties and sacrifices erode at higher levels. High school players exhibit the devotion and attention to authority that makes 16-20 year olds ideal soldiers. High school movies rule supreme for capturing the power and complexity of football.

Undefeated, an academy award winning documentary, follows the Manassas high school Tigers in North Memphis for one season. The moviemakers earned a level of trust and invisibility that opens windows into the compelling stories and tropes that give football such a unique and compelling American narrative. While the documentary can sometimes feel like Blind Side and sometimes like Friday Night Lights, it follows the true and serendipitous story of a poor and downtrodden football team that had not won a game in 15 years and not won a playoff game in mover 100 years. The story unfolds neither as fairy tale or nursery lessons, but as an abiding portrait of what football can sometimes accomplish through community, authority and challenge to the characters of young men. 

North Memphis exists as an independent character. Roving cameras and inside homes reveal a profoundly broken community abandoned by its job generator Firestone. Dilapidated and abandoned houses, cracked streets and left behind people populate the background and foreground. The young men slouched in a team meeting when we first meet them are cast offs with no future and seldom a real family. Mansassas coach Bill Courtney announces at the meeting:

“ Starting right guard shot, one linebacker shot, two players fighting right in front of the coach, star center arrested for shooting someone in the face with BB gun. For most coaches that would be pretty much a career's worth of crap to deal with. I think that sums up the last two weeks for me."

When the team meets with an ex-NFL player Aaron Hayden and he asks how many of you have two parents who went to college, no hand go up. When he asks  “how many have a relative in jail” every player raises their hand. Welcome to North Memphis.

Six years ago Bill Cartney shows up as a volunteer coach. He throws himself into coaching and trying to save the young men of the Manassas team. He loves coaching; this is clear, and would gladly give up his successful wood products business to do in it full time. His passion drives him at home, and interviews with his resigned and exasperated wife and a few shots of home life with his kids reveal how consuming and costly his coaching obsession can be. One of the film’s untouted strengths is its no nonsense revelation of how hard on family committed coaches can be. I watched Cartney struggle with his own sense of not being there for his own kids. Cartney reflects on how his own father had not been there for him and his coaching other fatherless men help to redeem that absence. I am also reminded of associate head coach telling me, “I spent 22 years being a better father to my players than my kids.”

His coaching extends who he is at work and home. His blunt, outspoken tough love drills through to the abandoned and cast off players of his team. By accident he has become the only caring male model in their lives. He knows it and feels the responsibility deeply. So deeply it starts to undermine his responsibilities to his family.

When Courtney started Manassas had only 17 players. Although the school is brand new replete with state of the art security and metal detectors, the sports facilities are a weed spotted afterthough. A local reporter points out how the real money has flown to the private schools and suburbs, so none of the public schools, despite new buildings, has any real resources to face their massive task of rescuing generations of minority students left behind and cast aside by society.

The only way the team can finance itself is to sell itself to play fodder games with richer schools. They travel hours to go get a payday of 5,000 dollars to support the program. Just like an underfunded FCS team, they make themselves a punching bag for rich suburban teams for the money. After several early season slaughters, the team is usually broken physically and psychologically before playing their district games.

No external motives, no race fairy tales, not story of black white reconciliation here; just a committed guy who loves football and loves coaching.

He spends hours with the team and spends his own money and recruits other white well off assistant coaches to drill and plead for discipline. He organizes fund-raisers to get the team off the treadmill of early season games. He and his cadre of white assistant volunteer coaches truly believe that if the students let it, “football can save your life.” It sounds like the worst form of paternalistic coach-speak. But, in this case, football provides an identity, place of safety away from streets, sense of efficacy and above all male authority figures to young men who have none of the above.

When Courtney and his coaches lose a player, they believe they also lose a soul.

This infuses the football quest with a sense of urgency that all the best high school and college coaches carry—they “to build a platform of character” from which the young men have a chance to forge a life. Courtney and the film prove what players have known forever, what sounds like clichés to outsiders, becomes truth to insiders. Good leaders create mantras and repeat and model them endlessly until they become truths for the players and the coach. In Courtney and the team’s case:

"Young men of character and discipline and commitment end up winning in life. Football doesn't build character. Football reveals character."

It takes time, patience and endless passion pouring into what can seem like a black hole of emotional apathy and resignation in the team. But Courtney has been at this for five years now. He has a core of seniors who stayed with him and slowly committed and grew to trust this large passionate white guy from far away.

The team possess O. C. Brown a large easy-going and very talented player who could earn a scholarship. OC lives with his grandmother and as he says “I’m not very smart…Football is my way out.” But he struggles with grades and above all the dreaded ACT. Almost without noticing it, the film points out how he ends up moving in part time with an well off white assistant coach where he gets tutoring. In the end after failing the ACT once,  he squeaks by with the minimum 16 and earns a scholarship to Southern Mississippi. It felt eerily like scenes from Blind Side without the fairy tale aspect. The coach is direct and to the point, “if I were a piano teacher and found a great talent, I’d try to help.”

I kept expecting the black-white dynamic and subtext of the idea of well off white guys plying their coaching passion with a bunch of underprivileged black kids to dominate the story and reveal the insidious racial paternalism that this could represent. Courtney feels absolutely authentic with the kids. Certainly his blunt language and his “us” against them motivation about how the kids have to overcome the rep of inner city teams who “quit” drives home. We see him visiting the kids in their homes and hugging, cajoling, demanding and helping them keep together during the craziness of high school years.

In the case of Chavis Brown, a talented but troubled young man, the coach suspends him for attacking his own teammates. But Courtney literally chases Chavis to stay with the team and endure a suspension. Chavis does and in one of the profound and wrenching scenes complete with subtitles to help with the kid’s thick north Memphis accents apologizes to the team and gives the teams coveted “uncommon man” award to his teammate Money Brown.

Money is an undersized player who succeeds because of his “mental toughness.” He has a 3,8 but no money to get to college. Worse he injures himself and in scenes reminiscent of every football injury film ever shot. he meets with caring and honest doctors who tell him he cannot play but has a chance if he can rehab.

Money despairs and struggles with losing football and facing the inability to get into college for lack of money. He quits coming to school. Again Courtney’s mantra, “you can’t quite because you are frustrated,” matters. Courtney goes to his house and literally drags him back. Courtney demands and models to them all that “character is revealed in failure.” He knows there are not second chances in North Memphis, if the kids quit, it is all over not just for the team but for their futures.

Character and discipline and team before self. He desperately screams, yells, cajoles and loves them to internalize this in the  hopes they can carry that beyond the high school. At the end it all comes out in football where he yells, “Please remember discipline. Please remember character, and let’s go kick their ass.”

At the end the coach knows he has to leave coaching at the school for the sake of time with his family. His solution, ironically, is to coach at his son’s school and coach his kid’s teams. The documentary really reveals how coaches really are coaches. Coach-speak grows from deep inside and what people may consider clichés, remain deep truths when spoken by a passionate and smart and caring coach to young men struggling, “Success does not reveal character. Character is revealed by failure.” We all hear this ten times in the movie. The coach lives it and the players struggle with it and now and then understand and live it when Chavis returns and Money gets to college and plays in the last game. The team hears it after the first defeat in their first game.

Courtney believes that one way to cut through the apathy and despair is to “reach hearts through something you love.” In this case football is all  he and these young men have. The coach never stops demanding that the kids “get their heads on right” and pay attention to “character” and put “team before individual.” It slowly sinks in to the reluctant and cynical, no cynical is to optimistic, resigned team and to those of us who watch. The coach and team capture the real lesson of football at this level. In a close game, Courtney looks at the team and exhorts them to act with “mind with heart and bodies. Let’s finish this thing.”

The team loses the first game of the season. The team loses the last game of the season in the playoffs to one of the teams that used to pay them as mercenary punching bags. In between they win nine games and OC garners a scholarship; Chavis begins the journey to becoming a functional person and Money rehabs and plays in his last game.

The title reminds us that losing a game is not the same as being defeated. One’s heart and mind and spirit can remain unbroken and undefeated even amid defeat. The coach and players learned the lesson so dear to Courtney’s coaching heart—character endures. To repeat, the true test of character is “not success, but failure.” Character endures, character gets back up, character continues to work and achieve after set-backs.

For Courtney and the committed coaches of high school and college football, that remains the abiding truth, the end for which football is but a means. One hopes the kids when they leave and face that bleak unforgiving neighborhood can remember.

The Precarious World of College Coaches and ADs

As I reflect on the new year I can’t help but think about the 25 college football coaches who changed jobs at the end of last year. About 20 were fired, and the rest moved to new jobs. The coaching slaughter at D1 athletics occurs annually. Sometimes it is richly deserved as with Bobby Petrino for his scurrilous lying and cheating at Arkansas. This year we learned elite college coaches now only have two years to turn around programs with Jon Embree at Colorado. Sometimes it ends a fine career as with Ted Tedford’s ten years at Cal. This predictable year-end carnage got me to thinking of how brutal college athletics leadership has become, and how insecure the tenure is for the senior elite college athletic leaders—coaches and athletic directors. I believe this  remarkable insecurity helps drive  the craziness of recruiting, cheating and salaries in elite college sports.

To get some perspective I thought over my almost eight years serving as a faculty athletic representative in the Pacific 10/12 conference. While my numbers may not be perfect based upon faulty memory, here is the carnage of the 10 original Pac 10 schools over that 8-year period:

Athletic Directors            21

Football Coaches            22

Basketball Coaches         24

30 leadership positions associated with revenue sports—67 personnel changes—200+ percent turnover.

The PAC 10/12 is a destination conference; most leave involuntarily. Only six left voluntarily, one to be a college vice president and one to be a conference commissioner, 2 to the NFL and 1 to the NBA. The rest left under duress. Athletic directors and head football and basketball coaches do not get fired or hired these days without the involvement of the college presidents.  This means all these firings involved the complicity of the President and often regents of the university.

NCAA President Mark Emmert dislikes the locution “business of college athletics,” so do I. Maybe the "enterprise of college athletics?" Not sure, but no words can hide the brittle brutal reality that coaches and athletic directors get fired if they do not win. Winning brings revenue and prestige and can temporarily satisfy insatiable boosters. As I learned, it does not matter how many students you graduate; it almost does not matter how many minor or line skirting violations you have, unless you bring horrible scandal to the university. The reality and incentives for coaches and athletic directors are clear—Win. 

Commentators scream and bemoan the cheating and legal shading and excessive rules of the NCAA. But this constellation is all connected. Coaches and athletic director must win. They know that and despite the rhetoric, little else matters. The frantic drive to win and win fast and continue winning, drives the obsession with recruiting. It drives the obsession with keeping student athletes happy once they arrive. It drives the fixation on high salaries to get the best coaching talent, but also the knowledge of the coach that they can be fired in an instant even for a winning season.  These drives are fed by possessive, obsessive and over-involved boosters who pay for the bloated salaries and new facilities as well as sponsor the skirting of the rules outside of the boundaries of the program. The inordinate power of the boosters also accounts for how little time coaches now have to build programs and how little leeway they have to have a bad season or two.  Even as astoundingly successful coach as Chip Kelly at Oregon finds himself on the outs with boosters because he does not kowtow to their whims.

This win or nothing environment and the reality that a coach or AD can go from hero to pariah in three months shapes the environment that molds coaches and athletic directors.

We all know how tightly strung modern college coaches are. These are not laid back guys; they are driven competitors and hate to lose as much as they love to win.  We see them go off like volcanoes on the sideline sometimes against their own players or assistants. At practices they can sometimes seem almost maniacal in their intensity and demands on 19 year olds. Most morph into unbelievable control freaks focusing upon micro-managing details, recruiting and games. We can watch the living archetype with Nick Saban at Alabama and see the costs of it with what happened with Urban Meyer when he had to take a sabbatical from the game to protect his health and sanity.

We need to remember that coaches are human beings, and most of them stay in college because they love working with student athletes and helping athletes grow as people as well as players. They enter coaching as driven, smart and passionate human beings. But the ultra competitive and hair trigger firing environment shapes them in ways most of them would not choose to grow. Professional sports goes through coaches at a relentless rate; the day after the end of the 2012 NFL season 7 head coaches and 5 general managers were fired. But NFL teams make no pretense to educate, care for and help young men grow. Sadly most college coaches really do care about helping their student athletes grow as humans as well as players, but they also know they are not rewarded for the quality of humanity they instill in their students.

We can bemoan a lot of this, and it has always been with us. Go back forty or fifty years and the same problems existed, the same obsessions and the same corruptions. There was less money and less TV exposure, but college sports, like most things in life, never had a time of innocence.

The point I want to make here is that to a considerable extent the behavior of coaches and athletic directors is shaped by the precarious demands of their jobs and the signals sent to them about winning as the absolute priority. Even worse all the coaches see that moral sluggards like Bobby Petrino gets hired by whomever it was that hired him. 

Despite the craziness most coaches still coach. In most college sports they receive decent pay and graduate students and love their job, their sports and their student athletes. Even at the crazed elite levels of the revenue sports you still can see this shine through in quiet moments or early time before practice or team meetings. But the players are not stupid, they are 19-22 years old, but they know their coaches are on the firing line and they feel their own responsibility when a coach gets fired.

I want to make clear that the problem here ultimately lies with the Presidents and the boosters whom they serve. Every coach who has been fired knows what it is like to be a hero one day and a nonperson the next, wiped out of the history and marketing of the university as thoroughly as Orwell would wipe someone out in 1984.

The good Presidents know they are complicit and feel trapped, riding a tiger of revenue and passion they cannot ultimately control. Most Presidents have far more important and deeper issues to attend to than college athletics, but it takes an inordinate amount of their time and accounts for most of the press their universities receive. Few like or enjoy this, yet they continue to clamor to join Division 1A athletics and football even knowing the costs and losses.

I believe this anger and fear over being trapped accounts for much of the energy driving the Presidents for modern reform. They may never get the TV money monster under control, but they know they have to try. The changes in high school requirements, progress towards degree, the penalties of APR and the new attempts to deny access of NCAA championships tied to graduation rates all create cumulative vectors to redirect some of the coaches’ energy towards education and graduation of students. It also motivates athletic directors to invest more money in academic and student support.

But here again, even as they struggle to inflect academics back into the equations and change the incentive structure for coaches, we know that some president somewhere will reliably hire a moral failure like Bobby Petrino to coach again or that John Caliperi with two vacated championships will be hired again.

At this time of pressure and absurdity, the coaches face pressures and firing windows that exist in no other industry. Yet they stay in. The vast majority live almost nomadic lives moving from team to team when staffs are fired or they have a chance to move up. But the vast majority still care about the student athletes. They still struggle to teach about life along with sport; about learning along with winning.

These leaders live in a toxic system sustained by world class educators. Some make huge salaries, most make good salaries with very unstable and nomadic lives.  They coach from passion and joy in their sport and loyalty to their students. The incentives of the elite level and their putative academic leaders often erode this, but they carry on. I salute them.

Sports Ethics: “Step Up”

“We were down. Coach told me I had to step up my game and I did.”

How many times have we heard this expression from coaches and players: step up.

I think the notion of step up carries real weight as an ethical and psychological moment in sport and represents a model to carry into professional domains.

Think about the metaphor for a moment: step up. It places the person on a step, a place, even a plateau. The notion specifies that the athlete or professional exists at a particular level of performance on an upward climb. The level may be a plateau or it may be a lower rung, does not matter. What does matter: the metaphor urgently states that the present step/level/plateau does not suffice to achieve the goal. Staying at this level, this step, means failure.

Let’s think about some classic situations where a player or coach must step up their play. I am going to use team here but this applies as much to individuals in individual sports as team competition.

• ·      Seniors or veterans have graduated, and the younger players of the team have to step up and perform at a higher level of skill and commitment.
• 
  
• ·      The team has fallen behind in a contest, and the contest verges on getting away from the team. The player must step up and perform to bring the team back from its lethargy and gain energy and focus.
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• ·      The team possesses a lead but the other team makes their expected run. The momentum seems to be shifting, and a player has to step up and stop the run.
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• ·      Players can step up when a window exists to excel to break the game open like avoiding a tackle and finding a fourth gear or making a free throw shot with time running out.
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• ·      Players are challenged to step up when a championship or playoff or chance is on the line.

All these situations differ but carry a common denominator—the existing level of performance will not work and must change. To the point of the game, the performance must rise up from its immediate level.

Step up has two related connotations. First, it might mean that a team is playing below its normal level. The below norm can occur when a team has not prepared for the challenge opponents pose. They took an opponent for granted and must literally snap out of lethargy and step up to their normal level of play. A team might be surprised or tired and is not containing the other team’s comeback. Athletes must change their emotional and mental mind set on the spot and take the game seriously. They need to respond with integrity to the challenge before them.

Second, step up suggests that just being competent or playing at the norm, even if very high, will not work. A team might be playing hard and well, but just not good enough to win. A team may have been playing very well, but the opponent is roaring back, making a run, or they opponents take the lead. This calls for exceptional performance. Exceptional does not demand the impossible but dictates that a player pull it all together and bring the absolute maximum physical, mental and emotional presence that they are capable of at this stage in their development. 

Stepping up means bursting past a performance plateau. This exceptional moment meets the test of the moment. Often players may not know they have it in them, but they achieve it. They step up.

A player can have a career game responding to the quality of the opposition or stakes of the game. They can have a break out performance or a breakout moment—they escape a tackle at a critical moment; they sack a quarterback to end a drive; they intercept a pass; they stop a run with an exceptional block or spike; they perform an extraordinary save. Each action not only personifies a great individual action but galvanizes a team. Stepping up can be contagious, and fellow teammates take heart from the action; they bear down more and give a more attention and energy. Not only does the opponent’s run stop, but momentum shifts as teammates gather up their focus and their collective performance rises.

Players on the verge of giving up recover. Coaches who started to call plays based on minimizing a loss take heart and re-infuse their play calling with risk and energy; they coach up, not down. A team comes back from behind.

Multiple players express their commitment to each other. They cheer and encourage each other. The team as a whole steps up, and the coaches respond in kind with deeper concentration and focus upon plays or the energy they convey to players.

To step up does not mean just to try harder. The player calls upon him or herself to attend more deeply, concentrate more intently and push their body and memory more powerfully. Step up involves physical and mental rising from a baseline to a higher baseline for a moment in time. It may presage a higher level of performance in the future for the player or team, but it succeeds for a moment, that is enough.

Successful stepping up expands a person’s imagination of the player he or she can become. To step up need not be a one shot moment, but a new possibility.

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.