All Hail The Coaches

ALL HAIL THE COACHES

The world’s greatest sportswriter, Dan Jenkins, once had a friend from England ask him “Which month is it when you Americans become obsessed with tall Black men running around in short pants?”

“That would be March.” he replied.

And that would be me. Consider me obsessed. Every year around now I spend as much time on the NCAA Tournament as possible without losing my job or having DSS take my kids away for neglect.

I love the tournament. I love running the office pool. I love the bracket buster upsets. I love using terms like “bracket buster.” I love the fact that every year Southern Illinois makes it in and everyone scrambles to find out what a “Saluki” is. I never get sick of all the overworked “Big Dance” clichés like “Cinderella team” and “will the glass slipper fit?” and “you’ve got to dance with the ones that brung you” and all that tired, hackneyed crap.

Like most readers of Barstool, I watch as much coverage as I can, read as many articles as I can get my hands on, and then search the web for others. And through all of that research, I reached one inescapable conclusion: college basketball coaches are the highest form of evolved life on the planet Earth.

CBS, USA Today, Dick Vitale, ESPN, Billy Packer…they’ve all convinced me that the coaches in the NCAA tournament are the last, best hope for mankind. The day will soon come when the earth will be saved. There will be peace on Earth. The lion will lie down with the lamb. Swords will be beaten into plowshares. A Star Trek-like future will dawn, free of poverty, disease, and racism. I will be a scratch golfer and Monica Bellucci will lust after me. And on that day, will we all join hands and thank the basketball coaches for delivering us.

I’ve been following the tournament since before Larry vs. Magic, and I can honestly say that in all that time, I’ve never, ever once heard a coach criticized. In fact, I’ve never heard of one that wasn’t “doing a great job”, “turning the program around” or “deserving of all the credit in the world.” Is there another job in America where you can be completely immune from criticism?

Consider Bill Self, the coach of Kansas, a school of 29,000 whose only reason to exist is to win the National Championship in basketball. But after the Jayhawks lost to Bucknell, a glorified junior college with 3,330 students and five scholarship athletes, all you heard from the TV pundits was “what a great season Kansas had” and how “you’ve got to feel bad for Coach Self.”

It makes you wonder what Terry Francona is thinking. Tito just won the World Series in his first year in Boston. But if on Opening Day, Johnny Damon reaches base in the first inning and Francona doesn’t have Edgar Renteria bunt him over, a thousand Boston-area mental patients and registered sex offenders will speed-dial WEEI demanding he be fired.

The biggest apple-polisher on TV is Vitale. I admit, I love Dickie V. His whole nuttier-than-squirrel-dung act never gets old. But you could play a drinking game where someone has to do a shot every time he says “Bottom line: [fill in the blank] can flat out coach.” And his bizarre obsession with Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski has gotten to the point where Coach K needs to start carrying pepper spray. In fact, Vitale looks at the ACC coaching ranks like he’s a sophomore girl and they’re the Milton Academy hockey team. Last week in his tournament preview column in “USA Today” Dickie V. simultaneously praised North Carolina’s Roy Williams and his predecessor Matt Doherty. What Vitale failed to mention is that Williams is to Doherty what “Jaws“ is to “Spring Break Shark Attack.” Or that the highlight of Doherty’s career was when he was caught on camera saying “Every year Duke has the ugliest cheerleaders in the ACC.”

When Billy Packer’s not busy defending Bobby Knight for strangling some 17 year-old freshman, he’s defending some other coach for doing some other thing that would have the average person holding his jacket over his face in District Court. Packer’s latest project is Temple’s Jon Chaney. Chaney has admitted to sending in a “goon” to break another player’s arm, publicly threatened to kill opposing coaches, and generally acted like a ridiculous, bug-eyed, looney tunes, pants-peeing maniac for as long as I can remember. But when ‘EEI asked Packer what his former players think of Chaney, he said they all have tremendous respect and love for the man.

Think about that. Did you ever had a coach that no one complained about? Chaney’s been coaching Temple since 1982, and not one player had a single beef? Over playing time, rules, discipline…anything? Well, since Chaney never makes them go to classes (he graduates 9% of his players) it’s no wonder they don’t have anything bad to say.

Last week ESPN’s “Did You Know” asked which coach held the record for most consecutive times being upset by a lower seed. The answer was Norm Stewart of Missouri with four straight upsets. But Linda Cohn couldn’t resist calling him “the great Norm Stewart.” What would she have done if he’d lost five straight, given him the Congressional Medal?

Of course, being immune from criticism isn’t the only perk of being a Div. 1 basketball coach. Just look at Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim. Woody Allen could look at Boeheim and say “Now that guy is a geek.” But he’s a legend at ’Cuse and has a wife who looks like Tawn Kitaen in her Whitesnake video days, all thanks to his basketball success. Meanwhile, the guy who found the cancer gene sits alone in his apartment on Saturday nights.

And in case you’re wondering, the answer is “sa•lu•ki (n.)- Any of an ancient breed of tall slender dog developed in Egypt“. If you were as smart as a basketball coach, you’d know that already.