Another coaching legend was dragged out of his office and drop-kicked off campus the other day. The sad truth: This hardly qualifies as news any more.
They did it to Bobby Bowden. They were in the process of doing it to Joe Paterno until scandal made it easy. Now they’ve done it to Mack Brown.
Welcome to the new world of college athletics, where administrators, trustee members and string-pulling boosters are often at one with seemingly every drunk frat boy on a message board or with a Twitter handle.
“I think I read it once in a book: Money is the root of all evil,” Falcons guard and former Texas All-American Justin Blalock said, smiling. “It does introduce new urgency into the sport, whereas in the past people respected traditions and there was more of a community feeling. These are historical, iconic coaches that really became more affiliated with the program than even the team name. You’re not going to see much of that any more.”
Brown led Texas back to prominence and won a national championship in 2005, the first in 36 years in Austin. But he stepped down as Texas’s football coach, or more accurately was pushed down the stairs after weeks of rumors of his imminent firing (and Nick Saban’s hiring, haha).
I’m sure thousands of Texas fans celebrated Brown’s exit. After all, it had been eight years since Texas won a national championship (the last non-SEC school to do so). Eight years. That’s, like, an eternity.
This is the adjusted mindset. These are people who can’t form thoughts longer than the average length of a sports talk radio rant or a 140-character Tweet. These people don’t view Mack Brown as an icon. They view him as an impediment.
As the late, great Furman Bisher once said to me, in self-effacing humor, "People look at me like I'm in a museum or something. It's like I'm one of those stone things, talking to you. A talking statue."
Fans often lack perspective. That’s hardly new. The only difference between fans now and those of decades ago is social media, blogs and radio provides them with platforms. The real problem is that too many decision-makers have lost perspective and have become as knee-jerk as the masses.
Georgia coach Mark Richt is familiar with this pressure. He watched Bowden, his mentor, get pressured into retirement. He has known Brown for more than 25 years. He also has endured the pressures of being an SEC coach and going from winning two conference championships in his first five seasons to going 6-7 in 2010.
“I try not to think about it,” Richt said when asked about the pressures that have accompanied the changing landscape in college athletics. “If you think about it on a daily basis, you’re not doing right by players and coaches and the university.”
But he wasn’t happy seeing what Brown had to go through, and was even more upset when it happened to Bowden.
“I think we all understand that the bigger the job is, the bigger the pressure,” Richt said. “You hate to see anybody go through that. But you know that’s a part of it. It’s something that we as coaches can’t control. Our focus has to be on our job and the responsibility we’re given. We’ll let others decide our fate.
“Obviously with coach Bowden, I love him at a different level than other coaches I have as friends. Anything that affected him in a negative way affected me, and I wasn’t thrilled about it. But he knew, as we all know, that it goes with the job.”
Richt said this has not caused him to re-evaluate how long he wants to coach.
“I’ll give the Bobby Bowden answer: As long as I’m healthy and enjoy it and it’s what God wants me to do.”
Pressure to win, especially at major programs, is a given. But the Texas situation was handled with thumbs. Coaches with the stature and class of Brown deserve better than the backroom manipulation and clearly orchestrated media leaks that were meant to pressure him out.
Do you really believe those Nick Saban-to-Texas rumors were just some media creation?
Saban and his agent certainly were seeking leverage in negotiations at Alabama, but power brokers in Austin seized on that possibility and started the fire and it spread. The ultimate objective: Force Brown out.
Blalock has a tattoo of a Texas longhorn that stretches across the top of his back. The tips of the horns wrap over his chest. He was born in Dallas and spent five years in the program with Brown.
“Given the state of the program when he came in, and then what he accomplished, I never would’ve envisioned this [forced exit],” he said. “But it’s difficult to think about the end game with long-term planning when everything is now, now, now.”
Perspective: obliterated.
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