Have a little tact, a little empathy, a little respect. All these qualities (and many more) seem to be lacking in any great measure in the current crop of college athletic directors.
You may ask, "What has inspired this diatribe? Why the hostility, the bitterness?" The answer lies no further south than North Carolina.
Ostensibly, third-year basketball coach Matt Doherty resigned, though it is widely recognized that he was forced out with three years remaining on a six-year contract that paid him $855,000 a year.
Were this an issue of unethical conduct, such as Jim Harrick Sr.'s at Georgia, few would complain over his departure. Were this purely an issue of failure to achieve objectives, in this case winning, few would shed a tear when Doherty walked out the door. Were I to tell you that Doherty had been forced out by the complaints of freshmen, you'd probably laugh. Yet this last unlikely scenario is the one that actually occurred.
University of North Carolina AD Dick Baddour interviewed some of the high-profile freshmen on the team, and in combination with a few other factors, decided that Doherty no longer belonged on the bench for the Tar Heels.
The freshmen alleged that Doherty was too intense, too motivated, too driven to win. Doherty has little defense to this, saying, "I'm a pretty fiery, passionate, hard-driving guy. That's the way I played. I had to because I was slow and I couldn't jump. I was an overachiever."
As there was no allegation of improper behavior, other than the intensity described above, it must have been an issue of performance, right?
Other than being named the National Coach of the Year his first year at Chapel Hill, all he did was take a team led by three freshmen this year to a record of 19-16 after being 8-20 the previous year. This turnaround is evidence of his coaching prowess and acumen, not grounds for dismissal.
His loyalty to the school is unmatched; he was a player on the 1982 National Championship team, was an assistant under Dean Smith and now had one of the most coveted jobs in collegiate sports.
And he was being dismissed on the whining of some teenagers that he yelled at them too much? In the words of teammate and classmate Michael Jordan, "Kids get yelled at. I was yelled at, and there were times when I probably felt like I wanted to go home," he said. "But I'm a firm believer that 18-year-old kids shouldn't be able to determine a coach's future."
Sadder still, there is a precedent for such action. Were this a solitary incident it would be easy to dismiss as one AD responding to the wrong pressures and making a bad decision, but college athletics is rife with examples similar to this.
A poignant example can be found by looking no further back than this past winter break. As I sat and watched the GMAC Bowl in hopes of seeing two of the premier college quarterbacks, Byron Leftwich and Dave Ragone, a disheartening thing happened.
As a decent first half came to a close, I began to drift away and ignore the sideline reporters chasing down each coach as they ran into the safety of the tunnel at halftime until I realized what John L. Smith, the coach of Louisville, was being asked.
At halftime of the biggest game of the season for these teams, they were asking the head coach of the University of Louisville if he had accepted a position at Michigan State. Initially excited by the deviation from the usual, "How has the game gone so far in your view?" with the equally predictable response "Things aren't going exactly as planned, but my boys are playing hard, we just need to execute a little better," my excitement quickly turned to disgust.
Had the AD at MSU honestly allowed his search committee to do such a thing? To ruin the last game for many of these athletes by responding to the same pressures that Baddour had succumbed to was despicable.
To be sure, athletic directors are not the only ones that must be held accountable for their actions, yet in these examples, and many more, they are the ones with the final say, and increasingly they are making the wrong choice for the wrong reasons. In both of these situations, the decision makers could have changed their plans slightly to achieve a similar solution without the controversy.
Had the AD at MSU simply waited till after the game, not many would have cared that a low-profile coach at a mid-major school was getting a chance to play with the big boys. If Baddour had stated that Doherty was being dismissed for failure to attain the lofty goals expected at UNC, few would have complained. Neither thought to make these simple adjustments.
The position of AD is similar to so many in its loneliness at the top, and yet it is so sad to see the repeated abuse and idiocy perpetrated by these bosses in the name of collegiate athletics. Sadder still is that good meaning men and women have to work under such people, subject to arbitrary practice and whimsical decision making.
