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Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Gailey, Tech AD not using same playbook
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
This isn’t to suggest Dan Radakovich and Chan Gailey ever actually pondered a food fight in the Georgia Tech cafeteria. But it certainly looked like a symbolic snapshot on the state of Tech football when the athletics director and coach sat down for lunch Tuesday at adjacent tables at the same time — back to back, a foot apart, looking in opposite directions.
Then again, there’s really not a lot for them to talk about these days. Between Radakovich’s increasingly evasive, if not chilly, comments on Gailey’s future, and the Yellow Jackets’ increasingly suspect performances leading up to this week’s Georgia game, these aren’t great circumstances to bond at the salad bar.
Radakovich is the boss. Gailey is the employee he inherited. It starts there. It always starts there.
College athletics have changed significantly over the past few decades. There’s more television, more opportunities for revenue, increased recruiting pressures and a greater demand to win. Now.
The ripple effect: Because the lines between college and pro sports are blurred, athletics directors are more like owners or general managers. They want to put their own imprint on a program. They want to hire their own guy.
This doesn’t mean Radakovich is either shortsighted or an egomaniacal administrator (or both). But at the very least, he is like anybody else who runs a business: He wants employees who match his level of passion, his energy and his style.
An insurance salesman who rises at 5:30 a.m. tells himself, “Somebody is going to buy something today,” and is in the office by 7 — he will hire clones one day when he’s in charge.
Gailey and Radakovich couldn’t seem more different. One wants to win. The other makes it a mandate. One has desire. The other moves through the day like his hair is on fire.
Both are good men. Both want the same thing. But when Radakovich rises at 5:30, and is sitting in his office at 7, and is trying to figure out how to get people excited about Georgia Tech football, do you really believe he is thinking about Gailey?
Radakovich came from LSU.
He worked with Nick Saban.
He liked Nick Saban.
Why? Because Saban charged into his job daily like Radakovich charged into his.
This is the South. Football’s kind of big. Maybe the success and the visibility of Tech football hasn’t always been there, but Radakovich isn’t going to accept that it can’t always be there. In his mind, things get better or he has failed. He wants the guy who lives in Midtown to walk down the street on a college football Saturday and buy a ticket. He doesn’t want empty seats. He doesn’t want seats filled by opposing fans (which will be a problem this week).
Tech-Georgia hasn’t been competitive. The Bulldogs have won six straight meetings, the past five when it’s Gailey vs. Mark Richt.
The Bulldogs are coming off wins over Florida, Auburn and Kentucky, maintain hopes of an SEC title game and could be headed to the Sugar Bowl. The Jackets are coming off unimpressive performances against conference flotsam Duke and North Carolina and are looking at the Emerald Bowl. Not hard to guess which fan base is jacked up.
Rivalry games define success. But when asked Tuesday about the impact of winning or losing such games, Gailey said: “I don’t know that I have the answer to that question.”
Make no mistake: These losses have been huge. It’s one more thing for Radakovich to think about. It speaks to direction.
At this point you wonder if even an upset Saturday would sway Radakovich to conclude that Gailey is the guy he wants for this program. It wouldn’t seem there are many people on the fence about Gailey. Fans are pretty well entrenched on one side or the other.
Now it’s up to Radakovich. Asked about being left hanging by his boss, Gailey said: “Hey, my job is to do the best I can to win football games, and do what’s right for the kids and right for the program. Anything else I can’t control.”
The coach sets the tone for his program.
The athletics director sets the tone for his coaches.
Right now, there’s little reason to think two-part harmony.
Permalink | Comments (152) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
Glavine greater than sum of his parts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
There’s more to Tom Glavine than a left arm, not that that should come as a surprise to anybody who knows him. It came through in the news conference the other day reintroducing him to an audience with whom he was already familiar. What he did was something I’ve never heard any baseball player do before. He said he wasn’t sure he was worth what the New York Mets were offering.
His projected salary, I should say. It was there. All he had to do was take it, a $13 million option to pitch another season on Long Island.
“I wasn’t sure I was worth 13 million,” Glavine said. “I’m not a No. 1 starter any more. I didn’t have the feeling that I could go out and pitch like a $13 million guy anymore.”
This is utter violation of the athlete’s code. You don’t get such honesty in this day and age of the agent and his pawn. What Glavine was saying, as he took his vows with the Braves again, was that “if it meant going back to New York, I don’t think I’d have pitched again. That would have been it.”
So in the end it was take a $5 million cut in pay to live and pitch where his home and heart are. You never felt that deep down inside he was a real Met. Look at the record. He had two losing seasons before finally breaking even, a man with his job one place and his heart in another, flying family to and fro to have a few hours together.
Glavine hadn’t wanted to leave, but with the Mets’ offer of three years at $10 million a season, he gave the Braves a chance to match it. There was no response. John Schuerholz turned a deaf ear. (Too much shouldn’t be made of Frank Wren’s ascension and the change in general managers, since this is his regime and Schuerholz’s absence at the head table was noticeable. There was a heart-rending reason. Schuerholz’s mother had died that morning.)
What it was like for Glavine in New York was, as he put it, “hard to describe. I still lived here. Our home is here. It was two worlds, one family. It has been a juggling act.”
He had five days after the season ended to declare himself, if he wanted to continue as a Met. “Five days were not enough for me to make up my mind, so I opted out,” he said.
Now there are doubters that Glavine is the answer to what the Braves need, though once pitcher-poor, they now look pitcher-rich with John Smoltz, Tim Hudson, the probability of Mike Hampton’s return, Glavine, and in the deep shadows, Chuck James. When Damian Moss was having the best season of his life here, Glavine was an instrumental factor. He could be of the same tutorial value to James, a sort of carbon copy of Glavine’s style.
I put nothing into Glavine’s rocky wind-up in New York: three blown starts, including one tormented one. His mind was at work on other matters. He knew he was pitching his way out of a Mets uniform, and his head was getting mixed signals.
Now all the disturbing doubts are gone, and here is a man with a freedom of mind. He’s home again. He drives to Turner Field to an old familiar parking space. Walks into home, not the visitors clubhouse, greets old pals and familiar faces. That should add years to his happiness and his ERA.
Yes, the contract is only for one year. With Glavine’s well-ordered lifestyle, his deep faith, and the ease with which he delivers his 82-mph fastball, change of pace and slider, his trim body should be good for two or three more seasons.
Home again. There’s nothing like being home again.
Permalink | Comments (74) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Vick’s lawyers were no help
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN…
(Or: Things I don’t want to write a whole column about …)
10: There’s usually a financial arrangement when Sun Belt teams play SEC teams. Just wondering: Did Louisiana-Monroe get $500,000 to play Alabama, or was it the other way around?
9: And Nick Saban: Officially a nut job. He said Alabama must rebound from the “catastrophe” of losing to Louisiana-Monroe, just like the U.S. had to rebound from 9-11 and Pearl Harbor. “Changes in history usually occur after some kind of catastrophic event. It may be 9-11, which sort of changed the spirit of America relative to catastrophic events. Pearl Harbor kind of got us ready for World War II, or whatever, and that was a catastrophic event.” And no, these aren’t off-the-cuff remarks. They’re well-prepared remarks for the week of the Auburn game.
8: Bottom line: A loss is humiliation. War is catastrophe.
7: Seems to me one of the biggest advantages to making a lot of money is having the means to hire the best attorneys. They would know how to navigate courts, manipulate judges and get me one those Lindsay Lohan, 84-minute sentences. But the guys Michael Vick hired? I wouldn’t trust them to advise me on whether to SuperSize.
6: I’m not absolving Vick of any blame for anything foolish that he’s done. But have we ever seen so many legal missteps for such a high-profile client? It was Lawrence Woodward, Vick’s long-time attorney, who failed to settle HerpesGate quietly, creating one of Vick’s earliest PR disasters. Woodward also kept advising to Vick to fight the dog fighting charges rather than addressing the matter with possibly sympathetic Virginia officials - long before the feds ever got involved. And now, we have Billy Martin …
5: I understand Martin is one of the highest paid defense attorneys in the country. Explains why he dresses well. But he’s done nothing for Vick to this point. He miscalculated the government’s evidence and load of witnesses, and Vick ended up taking a painful plea deal - the case never came close to going to trial. Neither Woodward or Martin presumably ever warned Vick about drug testing, because Vick tested positive for marijuana while awaiting sentencing. And now …
4: Vick checks into jail early Monday, hoping to soften up the judge before sentencing Dec. 10. Question: If this is such a good idea, why wait until now? Vick took the plea deal three months ago. Sentencing guidelines are 12 to 18 months. You don’t need a law degree to ascertain that the sentence probably will be longer than … three months.
3: Such a stark difference in play by the Thrashers. But if they can play this hard with Don Waddell behind the bench, you have to wonder to what extent they laid down for Bob Hartley. Somebody get these guys a mirror.
2: If Evander Holyfield (45) insists on fighting again, he will do so with yet another different promoter. Main Events’ Kathy Duva, who orchestrated Holyfield’s last title shot - a loss to Sultan Ibragimov for the WBO title in Moscow - is out of there. Duva wrote me in an e-mail: “We have mutually agreed to part ways.”
1: The mother of all NFL point spreads could be five weeks away: Miami (0-14) at New England (14-0).
Permalink | Comments (117) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
