One chilly afternoon this autumn, Pittsburgh football coach Walt Harris walked onto the practice field and noticed some of his players were wearing spandex under their pads. Harris asked an equipment manager why.
“It’s cold, coach,” the manager said.
Harris turned his gaze on the manager.
“I’ll tell them when it’s cold,” Harris said, and he immediately was dubbed Walt the Weatherman.
A few years ago, as the Kansas State football team was having dinner at a road hotel, coach Bill Snyder walked up to a K-State athletics staffer carrying a pile of foil-covered butter packets. When the official, who was in charge of team travel, asked what was wrong, Snyder told him.
“We wanted whipped butter,” he said.
During Gerald Ford’s presidency, the former Michigan captain once dropped in on a Wolverine football practice and wandered onto the field. As the players lined up, they found a Secret Service agent standing right where the play was to be run. Coach Bo Schembechler asked the agent to move, but he wouldn’t. The players glanced nervously at Schembechler, who barked, “Run the guy over if you have to!”
The agent barely got out of the way as a ton of football players stampeded toward him.
“Nothing,” Schembechler wrote in his autobiography, “interferes with practice.”
There’s probably a little bit of control freak in coaches in all big-time sports. But as coaches in other sports have been forced to adapt to changing societal mores and the needs of their athletes, many college football coaches cling to the autocratic approach that has gripped the game since the start of the century. Such as when University of Chicago coach Amos Alonzo Stagg made his players sign pledges mandating they keep their living quarters clean and refrain from drinking alcohol and using tobacco.
College football coaches want to be like Mike–as in Ditka. They are the last dictators in sports.
“You go through the history of great college coaches, and they have this history of being totally in control of everything,” says Murray Sperber, a sports historian at Indiana University. “In fact, I can’t think of many successful coaches who haven’t been control freaks.”
Woody Hayes was a control freak. Lee Corso wasn’t. Understand?
The college football coach determines who is on his team through recruiting. On many campuses he determines who his team will play through scheduling. He determines what uniforms his players will wear and what they will eat at training tables and what movies they will view on road trips. He may even try to determine what they study.
“They need structure,” Washington State coach Mike Price says. “They need to be told how to act.”
The Berlin Wall has been gone eight years. Twelve-foot screened fences still surround football practice fields on campuses across the country.
“Football is a coach’s medium, just as movies are a director’s medium and fascism is a dictator’s medium,” wrote Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. “I sometimes think the last stand of dictatorship in this world is the college football coach. His word is law, his rule is absolute, his power is unlimited.”
It’s fair to ask whether so much control makes the slightest bit of difference on the field. When it’s fourth-and-long in the last minute on Saturday afternoon, does it matter whether there was whipped butter on the training table Friday night?
“Eighty percent of the games are won by the guy with the best players,” Corso says.
One reason college football coaches retain their power is that their players have few options other than to obey them. An NFL rule prohibits teams from drafting players until they are three years out of high school; athletes in other sports may leave school after only one year or simply bypass college.
While Kevin Garnett could hold his own in the NBA a few months after high school graduation, a similarly skilled high school football star probably needs to develop his body and master the technical aspects of his position before he’s ready for the NFL.
“A coach’s leverage in basketball is a lot less, because athletes can take off on them after one or two years,” says Alan Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago. “That’s not going to happen in football. The coach has a captive audience.”
Although they love to exercise control, many college football coaches squirm at the term.
“I prefer `sphere of influence’ to control,” Northwestern coach Gary Barnett says.
Why?
“It’s the ’90s,” he says.
Asked why they seem more control-oriented than their basketball counterparts, football coaches quickly point to two basketball bullies, Georgetown’s John Thompson and Indiana’s Bob Knight. Indeed, no list of control-freak coaches would be complete without the man in the well-stretched red sweater. But it was Knight who said that when investigators got to the bottom of Watergate, they would find a football coach.
Watergate served as a testament to the paranoia within the administration of Richard Nixon, who was, perhaps not coincidentally, a passionate football fan. Paranoia is rampant among college football coaches, who suspect someone always is trying to steal their plays or steer their recruits to a rival campus.
Michigan beat writers have a nickname for the Wolverines’ coach: “Paranoid Lloyd” Carr. It’s a response to Carr’s efforts to limit press access to one of the nation’s most widely followed college teams.
And to think that Carr is a vocal Democrat, often ribbed by colleagues in a profession conservatives rule.
Football, by its nature, breeds a need for control. Improvisation is discouraged. Offensive players must set up in a designated formation before they may launch their intricately planned attack.
In football, control is critical even after the whistle. Ever watch a college coach after his team scores a touchdown? While all around him are jumping up and down, the coach is grabbing his players and pulling them back to the bench. The reason? Teams can be penalized for “excessive celebration.” Never mind that 75,000 people are going bananas in the stands.
“Basketball coaches have to orchestrate a way for basketball players to perform a work of art,” Barnett says. “Football isn’t that way. It’s strategy and tactics.
“Football is so similar to the military, and because they’re so similar, a football program has to be run the same way. You have to move large numbers of people and there has to be a high degree of order and control that have to happen.”
Barnett isn’t the first coach to equate football with the military. Hayes frequently drew the parallel. Florida State’s Bobby Bowden is an ardent student of military history.
“Having been in the Marine Corps and having worked my way up from the guy carrying the base plate of the mortar to becoming a captain with a company, I learned about organization and discipline,” says Iowa’s Hayden Fry, who is No. 5 in career victories among active Division I-A coaches. “You have to delegate duties and responsibility. But the head coach is still responsible for the overall outcome. So you’d better keep your finger on everything and see that it’s done the right way.”
The right way is the coach’s way. And it doesn’t matter whether his team is unbeaten or 0-and-something.
Joe Paterno, who is closing in on his 300th career victory at second-ranked Penn State, is renowned for control that extends far beyond the sidelines of Beaver Stadium. Paterno has a hand in Penn State athletic decisions great and small, from banning freshmen from the football media guide to choosing the athletic director, his nominal superior.
Price is known among peers as a “players’ coach” because he formed a committee of players to consult him on minor decisions. But Price makes it clear that he controls everything else, including where his players sit on airline charters and how much time they’re allowed to spend with parents visiting on game weekends.
“The control freaks you’re talking about are the same way,” Price says. “But I call it structure.”
Meanwhile at winless Rutgers, coach Terry Shea delegates responsibility for the defensive game plan to assistants but runs every other aspect of the Scarlet Knights program.
“I’m probably meticulously involved when it comes to putting my print on just about any decision that represents our football program from an image standpoint and from a logistics standpoint, from travel to the training table,” Shea says. “I’m probably as hands-on as you might see in a football coach.”
That’s saying something, because “hands-off” is rarely uttered in the same sentence as “college football coach.” And perhaps it’s no wonder. Coaches are held responsible for graduating their athletes and keeping them out of trouble. They have to fill stadiums and generate enough money to pay for the rest of their schools’ teams.
The risks are high for major-college football coaches. But so are the financial rewards for those who win.
“I’ve always had the belief that if you get one shot at it, you might as well do it your way,” Illinois coach Ron Turner says. “You never want to look back and say, `Boy, I wish I had been more involved with the defense, or more involved with what we ate or the study table or anything like that.’ “
But there are plenty of things coaches don’t control. Injuries. The media. Recruiting. Referees. The weather, although Harris might try.
“You certainly don’t have control over what the players think and what they read and what they hear and how much time they spend on those things,” Carr says.
Schembechler often said how much he hated it when a football game came down to a field-goal try. No wonder: It’s a play that involves a long snap, a catch and a kick. Players control the ball only for an instant before it is launched toward the goal posts by perhaps the least athletic player on the roster. The coach has no more control than the guy selling bratwurst under the stands.
“On Saturdays a lot of things are out of your control–sphere of influence,” Barnett says. “Saturday becomes the human element.”
Until the NCAA allows scholarships for robots, college football coaches can’t eliminate the human element. But they often try mightily.
On the way to winning the national title in 1988, former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz benched Ricky Watters because the star tailback was fumbling and blowing assignments on the field. It turned out that Watters’ advanced architecture seminar was infringing on football practice.
When a distraught Watters decided late in the season to switch to an easier major so he could spend more time on football, Holtz acted as if he opposed the move.
“I would never allow him to transfer out of architecture,” Holtz said, as if the decision were his.
Holtz also told the reporter who broke the story that he never would grant him another one-on-one interview.
Sometimes, the human element forces coaches to exert control in bizarre ways.
When Bill Dooley was coach at Virginia Tech, he once lost a heated recruiting battle with Clemson. Dooley graciously wished the player good luck, then asked him why he had chosen the Tigers. As the story goes, the player replied, “Coach, what it came down to was this: They had a soft ice cream machine, and I love soft ice cream.”
The next week, Virginia Tech’s players found a new soft ice cream machine in their cafeteria.
