Outlined against a blue-gray February sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. In the inspired typewriter of Grantland Rice 68 years ago, they were the legendary Notre Dame backfield of Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.
Earlier this month, however, they were the dazzling combination of phone, fax, mail and memo. The cause of this rarely equaled outpouring of communication was a brief item that appeared in this space Feb. 9. It tweaked Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz for a statement he made while Irish quarterback Rick Mirer was pondering whether to return for his senior season or enter the National Football League draft.
”You make a commitment to a school, you ought to honor that commitment,” Holtz said.
Our response: ”Wonder what he said when he left Minnesota with time left on his contract.”
The response of Notre Dame fans was swift and sure. Lou Holtz, they said/ wrote, had a clause in his five-year Minnesota contract freeing him should he be offered the Notre Dame job.
These respondents must all be lawyers, for they reduced to legalities what is a moral issue. Holtz was saying Mirer had a moral commitment to his college, so we applied that yardstick to the coach, who left Minnesota in 1985 after just two seasons there. Had Mirer left the Golden Dome for NFL points unknown, he would still have spent one more year in South Bend than Holtz did in Minneapolis.
Not that Holtz is a particularly bad guy for leaving the thereafter not-so-Golden Gophers just two years into his era. That`s business as usual in his profession, and besides, many a college has fired many a coach when he had time left on his contract.
The point here was that Holtz in the above statement seemed irked that Mirer might leave prematurely to pursue a dream when Holtz had done the same at Minnesota, even when doing it meant leaving behind players he had recruited only a year or two earlier.
The real issue, though, goes well beyond Holtz and Notre Dame and cuts to the core of what`s wrong with college athletics, a great game between the lines but too often a sorry one outside them. For instance, some of the respondents to the Feb. 9 item seemed not to understand that a college athlete`s scholarship is renewed annually at the pleasure of the school. It is not a four-year agreement. Mirer, in other words, was not in danger of breaching his own contract.
So when you hear a coach with two years left on his contract complain about lack of security, think about his fourth-string sophomore left tackle, who may find out he`s going to have to pay for the last two years of his education or transfer. That happens relatively infrequently (partly because it`s bad public relations), but it happens.
And it`s going to happen more frequently because the maximum number of football scholarships allowed each school is dropping from the current 95 to 85 by 1995. In basketball, it will drop from 15 to 13 by the 1993-94 season. Increasingly, a player will pay for a coach`s recruiting mistake by being told to take a hike. It`s known as ”running off” a player, and if it conjures up images of a cattle drive, it should.
It typifies a system that is consistently stacked in the schools` and the NCAA`s favor, not the athletes`. Take, for example, the letter of intent Mirer and players like him sign to formalize their college choices. The letter binds an athlete to initially enroll at the college he signed with, even if the head coach who recruited him has departed.
This is usually not a problem in football because most coaching changes take place before the first Wednesday in February, the beginning of that sport`s signing period. Basketball is a far different story because it has an early signing period in November, before its season begins. About 75 percent of the top college basketball prospects sign early, and some regret it when the coaches they signed with change schools or are fired after the season.
When one of those players demands to be released from his letter of intent, he is reminded by the Collegiate Commissioners Association (which administers the letter) that he signed the document with the school, not with its head coach. He will be further reminded that the letter clearly states he is bound by it even if that coach leaves.
Once again, we get legalities instead of morality, not to mention logic. It may make college educators and athletic administrators feel better to say an athlete signed with a school, not its coach, but that thinking is right out of the Mad Hatter`s tea party.
For a scholarship athlete in big-time sports, the coach is as important as the school-and at times more important-in the athlete`s college choice. It would be a better world if that were not the case, but it is.
The hypocrisy in the colleges` position was best evident in some coaches` response to recent reductions in the number of face-to-face contacts they can have with recruits. The reductions stink, some of them complained, because they make it harder for them to establish personal relationships with athletes, a key part of recruiting.
Gee, and here I thought the school was the only important factor.
When it comes to what`s best for the athlete, I guess it is.
