I was fortunate to have the opportunity to see the Alabama-Michigan game last Saturday night in person at Cowboys Stadium. Here’s the view from our luxury box, and yes, the stadium is as impressive as you’ve heard. Jerry Jones has done at least one thing right in the last 15 years.
As an Ohio State fan, I wasn’t very thrilled about the match-up, though of course these are two of the most storied programs in college football. Nick Saban has Alabama at the top of the mountain, while Brady Hoke is trying to rescue Michigan from the RichRod debacle.
Michigan fans were thrilled with last year’s 11-2 record, but many of them and the “experts” around the country were a little too giddy about Michigan’s prospects for this season. Michigan didn’t beat a top 15 team last year, so that record wasn’t as impressive as it looked.
That said, the team’s performance on Saturday was pathetic, and frankly I blame the coaching staff. Sure, Alabama is clearly the better team, but Brady Hoke has Denard Robinson, and he’s the kind of player that can change a college football game in seconds with his explosiveness.
Last year I wrote about Michigan’s dilemma with Denard Robinson. Brady Hoke wanted to run a pro-style offense, but he had one of the best running quarterbacks in the country. Well, Hoke tried to have it both ways for a while, but on Saturday he and his staff called plays as if they had Tom Brady under center instead of Robinson. The result was ugly with incompletions and brutal interceptions. Hoke specifically avoided Robinson’s best play – sending the receivers deep and then tucking the ball and running.
We’ll see if Hoke and offensive coordinator Al Borges realize they blew it with the game plan. Hoke likes to run his mouth, and he’s gotten plenty of support following RichRod, posting 11 wins and then beating Ohio State. But now Urban Meyer is in Columbus, and he seems to know how to use his dual-threat quarterback Braxton Miller. Hoke’s support in Michigan will start to whither if he can’t find a way to unleash Robinson and starts losing to his Big Ten rivals.
Now that the media has fed on the Penn State scandal for the past year after building up Joe Paterno as a saint on the sidelines for the past 40 years, some are naturally moving on to other subjects to deify.
With Alabama coming off of two National Championships in the past three years, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Nick Saban is the next coach to get glowing coverage from many in the media. Rachel Bachman and Ben Cohen have just written a profile of Saban in the Wall Street Journal where they take great pains to explain Saban’s greatness. Here’s an example of some of the gushing “analysis.”
The stunning volume of victories and championships and NFL draft picks has Alabama redefining college-football success as we know it. How, exactly, does the Tide do it?
Really? Redefining success? This sort of dominance over several years hasn’t been seen before in college football? Didn’t Alabama lose a game last season?
The writers go on to explain Saban meticulous attention to detail in the recruiting process, and I guess there’s some insightful reporting into Saban’s methods. But is there anything really new here? Saban is at one of the top football factories in the country and he’s grabbing the best recruits. It’s no different than what other successful coaches have done, and probably less impressive than what Urban Meyer achieved several years earlier at a school that doesn’t have Alabama’s tradition.
More notable, however, is that they also don’t dig into some of the less noble tactics used by Saban and others in the SEC like oversigning which is mentioned in passing near the end of the article after they’ve nestled Saban comfortably on his pedestal.
Here’s another nugget from the article.
“He’s incredibly honest in the recruiting process,” said former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy, the starter on the 2009 national-title team who now plays for the New York Jets. “He tells kids, ‘Hey, you’re going to come in and redshirt. Look, you’re going to do this. You’re going to do that.’ He tells them exactly what he thinks. I think a lot of people respect that because so much of the recruiting process is an unknown.”
Wow. Saban sounds great. I guess it’s nice to hear this from Saban’s starting quarterback, but wouldn’t we learn a little more about what really goes on in college recruiting and at Alabama in particular by talking to some of the kids who lost their scholarship after one year because they weren’t quite as “special” as Saban thought when he recruited them? Of course we would, but that wouldn’t fit the happy storyline being promoted here. This isn’t about reporting; it’s PR fluff.
If the writers or the Wall Street Journal wanted to do some reporting, they might have considered looking into the random nature of NCAA enforcement and sanctions, and how many schools are learning to dodge the NCAA by just refusing to self-report problems. That’s why a tattoos for memorabilia scandal brings down a coach at Ohio State, while an alleged suits for memorabilia scheme reported in detail by SPORTSbyBROOKS gets ignored by the national media, Alabama and the NCAA. If a story doesn’t make it to ESPN or SI, it just didn’t happen. Right? Perhaps if publications like the Wall Street Journal would do some real investigating relating to this topic, they might have a real story about Alabama, or on the other hand they could say with confidence that Alabama student-athletes were avoiding the pitfalls encountered by players at Ohio State and North Carolina.
Some might argue that this was a simple football story, and there’s no need to bring in the ugly side of college football every time we discuss a top program. I get that, and it’s a fair point. Sometimes we all just want to enjoy the games. But when we get a profile exalting the recruiting “genius” of millionaire coaches like Saban, it’s journalistic malpractice to settle for token mentions of issues like oversigning and ignore well-documented allegations of misconduct.
Rick Reilly recently wrote a column where he admitted to “engaging in hagiography” as one of the many journalists who turned Joe Paterno into a saint. Of course Reilly had no idea of how that image would ultimately be destroyed, but he regretted focusing only on the positive spin surrounding Paterno’s success. A professor had called him and warned him that Paterno wasn’t a saint as everyone assumed, so there was a real story there had Reilly decided to actually do his job. Just like there’s a real story around all of today’s best coaches as well. Some are better than others, and many of them try to run clean programs. But it’s hard to take profiles like this one about Saban at face value if the issues bubbling under the surface are ignored.
The Joe Paterno statue came down today, and tomorrow Penn State will learn about the reported “unprecedented” penalties coming down from the NCAA. The buzz on Twitter suggests it won’t include the death penalty, and that Penn State will not appeal the ruling, suggesting that perhaps a deal has been struck behind closed doors.
All of this is moving quickly, but meanwhile SPORTSbyBROOKS is highlighting a story from 2006 suggesting that pressure came down on students to refrain from pressing charges against Penn State football players involved in an alleged brawl.
The culture at Penn State was way over the top, and Paterno had a serious personal failure with his involvement with the Sandusky crimes. Paterno himself would have been subject to indictment had he lived and had the prosecutor been able to corroborate the Freeh report. In many ways this is a special case and the NCAA will be doing something very out of the ordinary with these penalties. Nothing can reverse Sandusky’s crimes or Penn State’s cover-up, but serious punishment of the program is in order.
But the systematic problems revealed at Penn State are not unique, as millionaire football coaches all over the country rule their programs with an iron fist. Hopefully the NCAA considers that as the sanctions here should serve as a model on how to clean up a football program, beyond just punishing Penn State for the horrible cover-up of Sandusky’s crimes. For example, no football coach should be able to influence student discipline for crimes outside of football. All academics should be completely separate from the football program.
Watch this stunning video of new Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano edited by SPORTSbyBROOKS, and you’ll see that the Joe Paterno worship hasn’t waned yet in the eyes of many at Penn State. With people like Lubrano on the Board of Trustees, how will Penn State handle some of the new revelations about how Paterno may have been involved in a cover-up of Sandusky’s crimes?
This was dug up and highlighted by SPORTSbyBROOKS and it’s instructive on how Paterno had an iron grip of the football program. Nobody would seriously doubt that, but this article fills in many of the details. Paterno told them to go to hell, and then he or someone in his camp likely leaked this story as he spiked the football in their faces. After this story there was no doubt who was the king of Happy Valley, and he would leave on his own terms.
This paragraph also jumped out at me:
He chose unforgiving punishments for players who drank too much or skipped class, like when he cut star wide receiver Joe Jurevicius from the travel roster just before the Citrus Bowl Jan. 1, 1998. Yes, he was willing to worsen his team to strengthen his way. He donated his millions to the school library and his minutes to film study. He pledged simplicity — a blue blazer wardrobe, a modest house. He decided he would never fire an assistant coach, finding it senseless to let one go when he could help make him better. “You showed you were committed to it,” former assistant Kenny Jackson said, “and he’d die with you.”
It’s all painfully ironic now, but the real message here was that Paterno was tough on players and others around the football program when they broke his rules. He was the king.
Read the entire article. It’s actually creepy thinking about it now. The bottom line is Paterno didn’t want to let go, and that singular drive may be what kept him from doing the right thing when the Sandusky allegations were explained to him.
