For some coaches, silence would be golden
This probably is going to get me into trouble with my peers. When you consider how my line of work depends in large part on getting people to talk, I might be sabotaging myself here, too.
Nevertheless, I have some advice for college football coaches tempted to tell the world exactly what they think. Don’t do it.
You’re not helping yourselves, especially if your goal is to maintain the same control over your program and your players as you always have. And the more you try to explain that doing things your way is for the good of the sport and best for the kids, the easier it is for everyone to see you’re full of beans.
Seriously, just listen to yourselves.
“College athletics is not a business,” Alabama coach Nick Saban told reporters this week at the Southeastern Conference’s spring meetings, a weeklong affair in which school administrators and Saban’s colleagues met at a posh Florida gulf resort to discuss all the dangers associated with letting players think there’s money in this. “It’s revenue-producing.”
Now, Saban is a smart, smart fella. He’s better at his job than most of us ever could dream of being at ours, and he deals in concepts that might just be over our heads. But honestly, the more he talked this week, the more damage he did to his own argument, however brilliant it might have sounded in his own head.
Take this bit of hair-splitting Saban did regarding the college football business model, as reported by The Associated Press.
“Nobody makes a profit,” said Saban, who last season made just under $11 million to coach the Crimson Tide. “All the money gets reinvested for
other opportunities for other people.”
This argument is, like Saban's future great-grandchildren, pretty rich. Yes, tennis and rowing teams get funded by college football revenue. But the biggest financial beneficiaries of the money being “reinvested” are the coaches themselves.
Take Eli Drinkwitz. In three seasons as head coach at Missouri, he's compiled a record of 17-19. Not great, but in the rugged SEC, it's not terrible, either. To his credit, he has said he is in favor of players being compensated for their name, image and likeness (NIL).
But he dug himself into an embarrassing hole this week when, in the middle of a long answer about the influence of NIL money in college sports, he told reporters that players “are making more money in NIL than my brother-in-law, who is a pediatrician, who saves lives, and we kind of do it cavalier(ly) and we think there's not going to be any side effect.”
As many were quick to point out, another person who makes more money than pediatricians who save lives is Drinkwitz,
who makes more than $6 million per year to finish in the middle of the SEC pack.
And when he went on ESPN'S Paul Finebaum Show to clarify that his comments were about the “unintended consequences with giving 18- to 22year-olds a large sum of money,” well, he didn't quite make things better.
“If we're not careful,” Drinkwitz told Finebaum, “we are going to look back in four to five years and we are going to be just like the NFL and NBA,
where 78 percent of professional athletes, after five years removed from playing in the NFL or NBA, are bankrupt.”
The problem here, of course, is that statistic is preposterous. It stems, perhaps, from a 2006 USA Today article in which a former player made an uncorroborated claim that “78 percent of all NFL players are divorced, bankrupt or unemployed two years after leaving the game.” And even if we take that claim at face value, how much of that 78 percent figure
is covered by a divorce rate that affects all Americans, and not just former athletes. And what does divorce have to do with any of this, anyway?
As mentioned before, Drinkwitz would have been better off just staying quiet, rather than insinuating that athletes can't be trusted to handle money any more responsibly than coaches do. Had he kept mum, we wouldn't feel the need to remind everyone about his college football and basketball brethren like Art Briles, Mark Few, Scott
Drew, Lute Olsen and Billy Gillispie, who each were named in published reports as clients of a man investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for an alleged $50 million Ponzi scheme.
But maybe some coaches just can't help themselves, no matter how high their career takes them, on or off the field. Last week, former Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati coach Tommy Tuberville, who refused to let his inability to identify the three branches of the American government stop him from becoming a U.S. senator, did an interview with Donald Trump Jr.
“COVID really brought out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are in the inner city,” Tuberville said. “I don't know whether (the teachers) can read and write.”
This raised a natural question: Among those in the esteemed senator's former profession, how many feel the same way about the schools where they recruit much of their talent?
Before you answer that, coaches, do yourselves a favor: Keep your mouths shut.