Bowden's death further reminder that idea of coach as father figure is fading
As college football says goodbye to Bobby Bowden, the sport also is saying goodbye to an archetype. In an age when coaches toss around the term “roster management” more than “depth chart,” when players can come and go at the drop of a helmet, the coach as father figure may have to go into the museum case with ineligible freshmen and the Wishbone offense.
Bowden’s death Sunday at the age of 91 brought to the front of my mind a question that has been sitting in the back all summer. Rick Neuheisel put it there one morning on his SiriusXM radio show. Neuheisel, the former Rose Bowl MVP, the former Colorado, Washington and UCLA coach, is of my generation. We grew up looking up to coaches, seeing them as icons.
“The world of father figure as coach is dissipating right before our eyes,” Neuheisel said on ESPNU Radio. “Now you’re just a general manager moving players along and the players are just trying to get a bite of the apple so that they can go someplace and make some money doing the sport.”
This is not a get-off-my-lawn column. It’s hard to argue against giving student-athletes the same rights that coaches have had to pick up and leave. It’s even harder to argue against the off-field earnings of student-athletes going from nil to NIL. And to be honest, the coach as father figure may have as much to do with mythmaking than reality.
Maybe all of us watched “Knute Rockne, All American” too many times.
Football coaches often are hard men, coaching a hard sport in an ultra-competitive environment. Many coaches got into the business to work with young people, to pay forward the debt they owed their own coaches. But a relative few hold onto that idealistic mission as they face the pressure to win.
Perhaps that’s why we revere the coaches who maintain that paternal nature. They match the myths we have in our heads. Ohio State players called the Woody Hayes “the Old Man,” a euphemism for father. Lewis Grizzard, the late Atlanta Constitution columnist, once wrote about Auburn coach Shug Jordan, “Interviewing him, somebody once said, is like talking to your daddy. It was.”
(Hat tip to former Auburn athletic director David Housel, who provided that Grizzard quote in his engaging new book, “From the Backbooth at Chappy’s.”)
Bowden filled that role, too. He showered his players with love and responsibility. For most of his career, he opened his locker room to media, figuring that if his players had NFL aspirations, they needed to learn how to speak to reporters.
‘It’s about helping them grow up’
David Shaw of Stanford is steadfast that “quite a few” father-figure coaches remain on the sideline.
“I’ve tried to be one,” said Shaw, who grew up with a coach as father figure — Willie Shaw had a long career as a college and NFL assistant. “I want to be one that (is) really trying to do this thing in the right way. And we understand that we have people giving us their most prized possession and saying, ‘Take care of this young man.’
“It’s not just about getting them to the NFL and making a whole bunch of money. It’s about helping them grow up. The world is fast approaching with every day that they are with us. I take it as our responsibility to truly get them ready for that. If we can win some games along the way, that’s great. Hopefully the young person can graduate along the way, that’s great. We all know the life lessons of sports are awesome.”
Some of those lessons go unlearned when a player can up and leave at the first sign of adversity. Or when a coach can give up on him and nudge him out the door to make space for the greener grass.
“It is different recruiting transfers,” Texas Tech coach Matt Wells said. “It’s different. I mean, it’s a whole lot more — a little bit more business-oriented and in some ways transactional.”
The COVID-19 season of 2020 didn’t help. Coaches had little hang-out time with their players. No players hanging out on their office couches, no lingering over empty plates in the team dining room.
“The building of relationships is the biggest thing that us coaches need to do with our student-athletes, and we lost a lot of that,” Kansas State coach Chris Kleiman said.
Last spring, he added, “We required our kids to swing by the offices and say hello so we could get that contact and (face time) and touching of a handshake or whatever it may be as the semester went on, as we started to clear up some of our COVID things, just to build bonds.”
Maybe we should look to Mack Brown of North Carolina and Nick Saban of Alabama, the two oldest coaches in the FBS. Brown turns 70 this month; Saban, in October.
“Our coaches said, ‘How do you coach anymore with the transfer portal? I yell at one, he may leave,’ ” Brown said. “Recruit kids that want to be here, in school, and want to graduate. And they’re more likely to stay at least until they graduate. And if you recruit the right ones, they won’t be leaving. That’s it.”
Saban has some father figure in him. That’s why he hosted his incoming freshmen last week for an evening of fun at his house on Lake Tuscaloosa. But in public, Saban buries that persona beneath a feisty outer crust made crustier by the MBA language he uses in talking about his vast Crimson Tide staff (talk about your depth charts). When Saban refers to his program as “the organization,” he sounds like the bad guy in a John Grisham novel.
Shaw searched for a polite way to say that he thinks the ready-fire-aim manner in which the transfer portal sprung to life is a disaster. Scores of football players who entered the portal after last season haven’t gotten an invitation to come out. It turns out that providing the student-athletes an opportunity to leave didn’t come with a guarantee to land in another program.
“We’re going to have to muddle through,” Shaw said. “We’ll probably have a different way of doing this three or four years from now.”
I don’t know. I think the father figure as coach is largely gone. The largest one of my career died Sunday.
(Top photo of Bobby Bowden: Sporting News archives via Getty Images)