SEC coaches have fought back against the passionate fan mob this season, drumming up sympathy in the media and among the citizenry.
Granted, we’re not talking ISIS here. It’s an annoyance at worst, and it usually stems from understandable and alternate intentions. But I’m tired of hearing what could be construed as whining from millionaires paid to coach a sport.
Dan Mullen is not a fan of hire/fire websites. He made that clear last week.
Nick Saban, too, bombarded his own fan base, fussing in their ear hole as if they’d fumbled a punt and just trudged past him on the sideline. (Alabama fans didn’t like a lackluster performance in a one-point win at Arkansas, a team that hasn’t won an SEC game since 2012.)
Sure, there are hundreds and probably thousands of petulant fans, in Tuscaloosa and in every SEC city. But those fans pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars each to follow the Tide all over the country. And not very many of them make $6.9 million per year.
So some “fan” created a website with your name in it calling for your job. (Usually straight out of the mid-’90s with weird formatted text and five simple pages, with a lot of pasted text.) Boo hoo. If that’s the only tradeoff to have access to a private jet, like Saban and Will Muschamp, I’d endure far worse. Wouldn’t you?
Most all of the SEC coaches receive paid membership to a local country club plus two cars with paid insurance. Oh, and stacks upon stacks of cash. The perks are in addition to, in Saban’s case, more than $500,000 per month in gross income.
A recent Newsday report surmised through research that the average FBS coach makes $1.75 million per year, an increase of almost 75 percent in seven years.
They aren’t overpaid, either. Bury yourself in Forbes for an hour and you’ll reach the conclusion that these men are making fair market value based on what their programs provide for the university. By no means am I trying to promote jealousy. These men work as hard or harder than their constituents.
I also don’t subscribe to the notion that somehow educators, nurses or those who serve a more ethical and vital societal function are given a grave injustice by the discrepancy in salary. We do live in a free-market economy.
Mullen is correct that being an SEC coach subjects you to rampant job speculations and rumormongering by the public mob. But do you think the single mom of two living on a $45,000 teacher’s salary who takes her daughters to two games at Davis Wade Stadium and buys each of them a Bulldogs cheerleader outfit feels much sympathy?
Short of standing in front of a firing squad, the average fan gladly would hear any number of dad-gums from thousands of people if it meant making a year’s salary in less than a week.
Oh, and that salary? Those shiny eight-figure football facilities? The multi-million dollar stadium renovations? They wouldn’t exist without ludicrous TV revenue, soaring ticket prices and the like, all stemming from exponential interest in college football.
There’s no simplistic way to measure the correlation of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like with the recent explosion of coaching salaries. But it would be akin to an ostrich with its head buried in a Gulf Shores, Ala., beach to dismiss the multiplier affect that technology and globalization have created.
The same cultural shift leading to such irrational, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately collective emotion, expressed in hire/fire sites and various other mechanisms, is responsible for making millionaires out of assistant coaches like Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart.
If your special teams fumble four times in a game and the fans grumble rather than appreciate the win, let them. If fans call for your job one week and beg you to sign a lucrative extension the next, embrace it. You get paid to be a professional, not to spout off like any common SEC fanatic.
Again, it’s hard to sympathize with the life of a college football coach. Get fired after running your company into the ground and you can still make $4.6 million in one year? Where do we sign up, and what did Charlie Weis ever do to deserve such a bounty?
Sure, he doesn’t deserve some of the rhetoric. The weight of that responsibility must be stressful. But heaven forbid Muschamp gets fired, heads to College Station, Texas, as A&M’s next defensive coordinator and watches his salary shrink to a cool $800,000.
I have no problem with brutal criticism directed at supposed “fans” like Harvey Updike, who defaced a historic cultural landmark in Toomer’s Corner by poisoning oak trees. But a little boo and hiss now and again, rather than sheer gratitude for a below-average and uninspiring performance? If that’s going to lead to a lot of whining, then why did you accept the job?
I get wanting to protect the players. At least in theory. The ethics of booing (or worse) 20-year-old kids based on their proficiency at a game are worth discussing. But when the angst is directed at the logo, and not attacks of specific individuals outside of the head coach, tough luck.
So, while Mullen makes some salient points, he’s misguided. One has to wonder if he’d be in a position for a raise to $3 million or $4 million per year without the atmosphere that produces the hire/fire sites he railed against.
Granted, even during halftime interviews when other coaches would nitpick their team’s performance, Mullen just beams this season. Saban’s persona tilts toward the “get off my lawn” stereotype of a grumpy older man, albeit perhaps the most successful, productive and appreciated one since Bear Bryant at Alabama.
Saban claims he used his rant to motivate his team, and the 59-0 win on Saturday against Texas A&M provided pretty good evidence of that. Yes, expectations at Alabama always are unreasonable, and they will be as long as Saban is the coach. But Saban needs to realize how petty he sounds. As the sports axiom says, worry about your own job, coach. If your team continues to play better, the fans will play nicer.
A coach can be a sourpuss as he wants — not many fans take umbrage with Bill Belichick. It shouldn’t matter. Just as long as they don’t start telling fans how to act and what to say.
An itinerant journalist, Christopher has moved between states 11 times in seven years. Formally an injury-prone Division I 800-meter specialist, he now wanders the Rockies in search of high peaks.
