Shocker: College football is a business (and a big one!)
All of the local sports media have been caught up in celebrating Rice's new football coach as a great man of character (as opposed to that evil Todd Graham -- who, incidentally, only got a woeful football program to a bowl game AND managed to get people to spend money on a program that a large part of the Rice community would just as soon see terminated). Here's an example of it from the Chronicle wordsmith who covers Rice:
So before he detailed his excitement over the opportunity, shared his offensive and defensive philosophies or revealed his plans for building a staff, Bailiff outlined a difference between his ideology and that of his predecessor, Todd Graham.
"This job is not about me," Bailiff said. "This job will always be about the student-athletes. I have a job because there are players that I'm responsible for. They're not here to serve me; I'm here to serve them."
[snip]
Part of the fallout from Graham's departure for Tulsa on Jan. 11 were the players he abandoned, many of whom felt betrayed by his decision to leave two days after signing a contract extension. Despite acknowledging that holding on to Rice's recruits was his biggest challenge, Bailiff put a priority on mending fences with his new players.
"I have to regain their trust, and that will be important to me," said Bailiff, who was 21-15 in three years at Texas State.
So, now that just about every single journalist who covered this story had made a big deal of contrasting good-character Bailiff with bad-character Graham, here's a little question:
Didn't good-character Bailiff bail (pun intended) on players he recruited to Texas State -- his alma mater! -- after not quite three years on the job? Indeed he did.
And, here's what he said when introduced by Texas State on February 5, 2004:
“I’ve never been more excited in my life,” Bailiff said Thursday. “I never thought the time was better for this hiring then now. We’re gonna be there for these young men around the clock. We’re going to give them love, and along with that comes tough love. I’m going to work every day like I’m going to spend the rest of my life here.
I'm not posting that to try to embarrass Bailiff (or our intrepid journalists who covered Rice's hire, for that matter). Rather, the point is that Todd Graham left town (and left Rice football in much, much better shape) for what he saw as a better job and better pay. David Bailiff left his alma mater for the same reason. Both of them made it sound as if they could grow old at their former schools. Sensible people who follow college football should have known that such talk coming from ambitious young coaches at dumpy programs is not to be taken too seriously. It's just part of the business of college football (which is a very big business).
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/20/07 10:28 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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