EDITORIAL: Dustup over Texas Tech coach suggests our priorities are awry
Grizzled football fans probably saw this one coming.
Consider the setup: An incredibly talented but feisty, even eccentric college football coach disciplines a sophomore receiver for flagging dedication to the team, while the player’s dad, a former college football star and TV sports personality, meddles and only further complicates the picture.
In the end, the coach gets pink-slipped on the eve of the team’s bowl game appearance and talk of lawsuits abounds.
Which is why if Mike Leach, winningest football coach in Texas Tech history, watches his team in the Valero Alamo Bowl in San Antonio today, he’ll do so from the stands or by watching the big game on TV.
We’re hardly in a position to know what went on behind the scenes between Leach and player Adam James, son of former SMU football star Craig James. The coach, angry at James’ attitude, allegedly ignored a concussion the player suffered and made him stand in cool, dark places on two occasions.
As former Baylor Bears football coach Grant Teaff suggests, coaches haven’t changed much in efforts to discipline and toughen players but our culture has.
To us, this incident seems much ado about little, the result of two fairly colossal egos — Leach and Craig James — colliding. First off, it’s not like Adam James was waterboarded. This so-called abuse doesn’t even rise to the level of Bear Bryant’s infamous Texas A&M training camps where players did notoriously strenuous workouts without water breaks in intense summer heat.
For Texas Tech to fire a coach of this magnitude suggests there’s more to this dust-up that we don’t yet know. If not, then we’d say somebody over-reacted.
That said, this is just further evidence of a media-driven culture that puts way too much emphasis on self-indulgent celebrity coaches rather than talented players or even the game. We’ve seen it here and elsewhere, and it detracts from the overall purpose of college athletics — the fine-tuning of young athletes into balanced men and women and the sportsmanship behind all competition.
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