COMMENTARY Coaches dilemma: What’s too much

WASHINGTON — Football, by design, ranks among the most intensely physical of sports, and as such, its coaches typically are required to be unyielding in their management approach - tough love to build tough players. Nonetheless, coaches must remain conscious of the fine line that separates discipline from abuse. The complicating factor, former players and coaches said, is that the line is established not by the authoritarian coaches doing the leading, but by the many personalities being led.

The events of the past month reaffirmed that reality to Mark Mangino, who on Dec. 3 resigned under duress as coach at Kansas, which he guided two seasons ago to a 12-1 record and a Bowl Championship Series berth. This season, the Jayhawks went 5-7, and even as examples of his mistreatment of players multiplied, Mangino insisted repeatedly that his coaching practices would not change. Consequently, his job status did.

“I will say this: What success we’ve had here in recent years, you have to have an amount of intensity, structure and discipline to the program,” Mangino said in a newsconference four days before he resigned. “It’s not easy, and you just have to have it.”

That much has never been in debate. Fred Akers coached at Texas from 1977-1986, directing the Longhorns to bowl games in all but one of those seasons. Akers acknowledged the importance of being strict with and instilling order in a team, but he said it is equally vital for a coach to demonstrate a considerable measure of self-restraint, as well.

Akers and several other former coaches contacted for this story agreed that coaching and parenting are not all that different in that regard.

“I think it’s almost comical, if it weren’t so serious, that too many parents and too many coaches kind of treat players and children like dirt during the week and then on the weekend when the game comes up, they tell them, ‘OK, now go out and be great,’ ” Akers said.

Gerry DiNardo, who coached at LSU and Vanderbilt in the 1990s, said coaches say so many different things to so many different players that it can be easy to lose track of how uniquely one message can be interpreted. Former Nebraska quarterback Eric Crouch, who won theHeisman Trophy in 2001, said that if a survey on what constitutes verbal or physical abuse was conducted on any given team, “you’re going to get 105 different responses.”

Crouch’s first season at Nebraska was the final one for Tom Osborne, who led the Cornhuskers to 13 conference championships and three national titles during his 25 years at the helm. Crouch described Osborne as firm and disciplined, though never one to swear at a player.

“But by the time I got to Nebraska, Tom Osborne was already the legendary Tom Osborne,” Crouch said. “I’m sure that it was a little bit different when he first started in the early ’70s as the coach.”

The length of time a coach has been at a program can make a critical difference, DiNardo said, in the approach he takes with his players.

“When you take over a team and you haven’t been in the homes of those players and you don’t know the parents and you haven’t built the relationships through the recruiting process, when you don’t have all those things, there’s times you go in there and you’re pretty aggressive in what you say and what you do,” DiNardo said. “It doesn’t mean that you can be abusive, butyou are more aggressive in your tone, you’re more aggressive with the rules, the punishments and so on.”

Crises arise every day as a college football coach, DiNardo said, though he clarified that a “crisis” does not always constitute “a major bru-hah.”

“It could be a kid’s just dropped a fifth pass of the practice,” DiNardo said. “Some kids, if you elevate that you’re going to make them better. Some kids, if you don’t elevate it, you’re going to make them better. ... There are general rules, but the best guys treat everybody differently. They treat everybody fairly, but they treat everybody differently. And if you say that and you believe it, which I do, that means language is very much a part of the equation.”

Division I college football coaches are among the highest-paid public employees in many states, and such compensation often is accompanied by an overwhelming sense of clout. Mangino signed a contract extension in 2008 that was to payhim $2.3 million per year through 2012. Such authority, sources said, makes it even easier for a coach to lose sight of that fine line between discipline and abuse.