Divining from the sidelines

It's musical chairs season for football coaches, played to a tune piped by talk show know-it-alls and the media.

By THOMAS ZUCCO, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 17, 2002

The gossip. The intrigue. The speculation. The expert analysis that turns out to be perfectly, wonderfully wrong.

And then there's Spring Hill Steve, who's calling a radio show from his cell phone a few days before the Bucs dumped Tony Dungy. Steve is sure Bill Parcells is coming to the Tampa Bay area to coach the Bucs because he saw Parcells playing golf with a guy who used to be married to a woman whose sister gets her hair cut by a woman who -- get this -- used to live next door to Joel Glazer's pool man!

Well? He was right, wasn't he?

It happens every winter, toward the end of the football season. It's the Great Upheaval, when college and pro teams shuffle their decks, play musical coaches and string the media along like so many teenage boys outside a Britney Spears concert.

It's the last wild party before the dorm closes for the summer. The firings. The hirings. The sources close to the team.

You just have to hope it's not the pool man.

Take for example the case of one Stephen Orr Spurrier, who abruptly quit his job at the University of Florida and now will coach the National Football League's Washington Redskins. (And he thought the Florida writers persecuted him? Wait till the Washington Post's Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser sink their teeth into him. Kornheiser has already started: "Truthfully, Steve, you've got enough angst to be in a Woody Allen movie.")

Before Spurrier got the Redskins job, it was Michael Milken Week on Tampa Bay sports talk radio. The speculation was out of hand:

He's going to the San Diego Chargers because he likes to play golf.

He's going to the Carolina Panthers because he has family in the area and he likes to play golf.

He's going to the Bucs because, aside from all the golf, he has a deal with the Glazers that was secretly struck months ago. But things got awkward and smelly when Tony Dungy started winning and made the playoffs.

The truth?

Spurrier is going to spend the longest year of his life in Washington, then retire to South Beach where he'll do what he always wanted: study potterymaking, reacquaint himself with the Pan flute . . . and play golf.

Well . . . that's what I heard.

It gets wild out there when the music stops and the coaches look for the empty chair, and during those weeks of living dangerously, no one group creates more havoc, or at least channels it better, than those of us in the media.

The problem is that during this time, coaches, athletic directors and team owners don't have much to say to us (unless it serves their needs). So pundits have to resort to . . . um, alternative methods. We'll stake out your house, call your in-laws and your 10th grade biology teacher.

We will hound you.

"They are going to follow you," said Dennis Erickson, former head coach at the University of Miami and the Seattle Seahawks. "One year, when I was on a recruiting trip, I had the press call a recruit's house to find out if I was really there.

"But the one I'll never forget is when I was at Washington State," added Erickson, now the head coach at Oregon State. "The press had me in Miami, and I was in Bakersfield, Calif., at a banquet. Sometimes, they have you in five places at once."

The media could argue they have no choice because negotiations are usually done on the sly. A coach at a small college isn't going to advertise that he's looking to move up, and an NFL team trying to hire a coach won't talk until that coach is hired. So there's a cloak and dagger element involved. You've got saboteurs, provocateurs and other shadowy figures.

It's like the Nixon White House.

Howard Schnellenberger revitalized the University of Miami's program, won a national championship, and then left for the University of . . . Louisville, a school far better known for its basketball program. Now he has an even bigger challenge: as head coach at Florida Atlantic University. They didn't have a football team two years ago.

"If you're in a situation you feel good about, and you don't want to disrupt things there, you tend to be as private as you can," Schnellenberger said. "In other situations, where you aren't worried about that, you make every effort to secure the job.

"But most of the time, the moves are made while you're warm."

Those moves are often initiated by third parties. Coaches use lawyers or boosters or other representatives to send out feelers. College and pro teams do the same, so that when an owner or an athletic director is asked if he has contacted a coach from another team, he can say no and, technically, not be lying. Politicians do this all the time. (See Clinton, Bill.)

Of course, all of this would all be so much simpler if the media would just mind their own stinking business and stick to the scores and highlights.

"Any negotiations are a lot simpler," Schnellenberger said, "if the media isn't trying to get there first.

"But it sure keeps football in the news."

Terry Bowden, the head coach at Auburn before he moved to ABC Sports, said some coaches subtly make it known they want to go somewhere else. Others do everything but carry a Will Coach For Food sign.

"But you take my dad (FSU coach Bobby Bowden) or Joe Paterno (Penn State). That isn't their personality. They never even acted like they wanted to go anywhere, so they weren't hot items. But their records indicate they were pretty danged successful."

Danged. Apparently all Bowdens carry a gene that compels them to say "danged."

"But (Spurrier) has let it be known (that he'll move)," Bowden added. "It's like Nick Saban (LSU). You see his name mentioned everywhere in the country. It's like when I was at Auburn. I always thought of myself as a college coach. And I go make a press release: 'I'm staying at Auburn the rest of my life. This is where I'm going to stay. I have no desire ever to coach elsewhere.' If you do that, the rumors won't continue."

This week, at least.

So let's test him.

Have you talked to any teams in the last year about your return to coaching?

"First of all, I've got my mind made up to stay in television. So I have not been interested in going back to coaching. Kind of like Dick Vermeil. It took him 16 years to get that itch. I definitely could see five more years before even considering coaching. No. I'm not interested."

(Pause.)

"Not yet. . . . I'm not interested in getting back into coaching at all. I just locked up a new contract with ABC Sports, and that's what I want to do."

Good thing that's cleared up.

Time is also a key element. The window of opportunity closes quickly. Coaching jobs are usually filled within days, which means a team or a coach can be rushed into making a bad decision.

"That's what happened when I went to Seattle," Erickson said. "I went there because it was home. I didn't look at the strength of ownership, and I should have. I made the decision with my heart. Two years after I got there, the team was sold."

And yet coaches readily admit that other than winning, there's nothing more intoxicating than to have teams clamoring for their services.

"First of all, it's a great time," Bowden said. "You hate to say it, but your ego sets in a little bit. And it's nice to be wanted. To a coach, those aren't terrible times. They may be hectic times; you might wish people wouldn't write everything.

"But basically there's something about most coaches, in the ego that you have, that you'd love to hear three or four teams saying they'd love you to be their head coach. I remember in '94 after beating Spurrier a couple of times in a row, the talk of 'Anywhere you want to go,' and all that stuff.

"You may say you wish it would go away, but you like those times."

Even with the media hounds and all the talk show speculation?

"Go try to call Steve Spurrier, see if you can get to him right now," Bowden answered. "The point is, we don't have to be hounded when we're coaching. We don't have to answer the phone, we don't have to do every interview. And, face it, coaches don't listen to talk radio and stuff like that. That's what everybody else sees.

"It's not the same as when you have a tough year, or several, and the media is hounding you about 'Are you going to get rehired?' 'Do you think you may lose your job?' 'Are they going to fire you?' That's the tough one there. . . . You don't have to answer, or you can say, 'I don't want to talk about it,' or 'I'm not going to discuss what might happen in the future.' It's a patented answer you give.

"What I'm saying is, it may be irritating to a small extent, but when a coach sits back or lays in bed at night, you sleep pretty good knowing three or four teams want you as their head coach. You don't lay awake at night unless it's like, 'I wonder if they're going to fire me?' "

Dang.

It's a fact of life that writers, sportscasters, and especially talk radio hosts will always speculate about who's going where, and why. It the backyard fence nature of sports. Can't play it, so you talk about it. (And it's not 'we won'. The athletes won. You watched.)

It's when they don't talk about you that you need to worry.

"It's nice to be loved," Erickson said. "And in coaching, you have to take advantage of that while you can."

-- St. Petersburg Times staff writer Bruce Lowitt contributed to this report.

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