Mike Leach contends that Adam James was "lazy" and used his father's influence -- Craig James, a former NFL star, is a college football announcer for ESPN -- to demand "preferential treatment." That Leach would sit for 30 minutes of questioning from the same network whose employee has vehemently denounced Leach speaks well of the former Texas Tech coach. For the sake of argument, suppose Leach's view of his player is correct. What was punishing him by confinement supposed to accomplish?
Many football coaches are obsessed with punishing any player who doesn't bow before them. This points to something about the sport that is rarely discussed, the dark side of the psychology of coaches. Some men go into football coaching, especially at the high school and youth levels, because they want to be little tyrants -- especially, tyrants screaming orders at adolescent boys. Adolescent boys can't fight back physically or verbally -- they obey adults even when the adults' orders are suspect, and experience fear and shame in the presence of angry adults. What kind of person, exactly, wants to lord it over young boys, screaming obscenities at them, ordering punishment, denigrating them -- the most hateful language I've ever heard has been from youth and high school football coaches screaming at players -- then demanding that they sprint until they vomit or collapse in pain?
I think you know what kind of person, and too many of that kind have become football coaches.
Abusive coaches are rare in the NFL, for two reasons. First, abuse coaching doesn't work -- denigrating and punishing players doesn't win games. Second, NFL players are men and won't sit idly by taking abusive behavior. They will run up hills if told to; they know the coach must make them run up hills. But can you imagine an NFL player standing in a shed for three hours because the coach said so? Abusive coaches become common in the college ranks, because there, scholarship power and booster influence lets them get away with abusive behavior. And such coaches are way too common in the high school ranks.
This made me think of Bob Knight. He and others justified his tactics by saying that he made his players better men, and he prepared them for life outside of basketball. I don't understand how being sworn at and belittled on a daily basis in and of itself prepares you for much of anything of value. You certainly wouldn't want to enter the wider non-sports world, where tyrannical tantrum-throwers are generally not received well, with the misconception that Knight's penchant for anger is acceptable. At best, that element of Knight's style was a needless and potentially dangerous dark side of an otherwise brilliant teacher and mentor. At worst, it was a fundamental character flaw. Either way, there was nothing good about it.
Knight often compared himself to Patton (and I imagine lots of other coaches have similarly aggrandizing self-images), which is kind of silly but also revealing, because a) Patton was engaged in defeating the Nazis, a slightly more vital task than winning football or basketball games, and b) Patton's famous abuse of the two soldiers in Sicily, which stemmed in part from an ignorance of the medical effects of sustained time under fire, was probably the worst moment in his career and needlessly placed at risk his further contribution to the allied war effort.
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