My .02 plus some other spare change.
I disrespectfully disagree with this being a trend or pattern with Gus or that this happens because we’re taking chances on certain guys. Take your eyes off Auburn and look around this league and around the college football landscape. This is the norm, not the exception. How many pot smokin’, stolen gun totin’, DUI gettin’, bitch slappin’ incidents can you name at Alabama within the last year alone? Richt booted 4-5 a year and Smart has already sent some packing. I saw McElweenie talking about his suspended top receiver yesterday. Err’body getting’ raped up at Tennessee…and Vandy. LSU players beatin’ the hell out of folks. We’ve got a new RB from Baylor and one of their former QB’s looking at us after that program imploded. This a minute sampling of crap that I can think of off the top of my balding dome. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s the current environment of college football.
As the D1 corch I talked to several weeks back said, “We aren’t dealing with the same type of kid anymore. Despite what you want to believe, football is nowhere near the top of their priority lists.†The bottom line is, are you winning or not? That’s all that matters. We all like to think our coaches are fine, upstanding people with the intentions of not only winning, but also building young men of character and class. Maybe most of them are good people but that $3-5 Million Dollar contract and all those Ford commercial endorsements don’t have shit to do with building a team of community service minded, church going, helping little old ladies across the street individuals. You win by overlooking and covering up as best you can, the transgressions of your best players and making damn sure that ass is on the field come Saturday. Occasionally, some stuff is too egregious to deal with and you have to cut ties. Otherwise, “We’re handling this internallyâ€.
Two coaches are prime examples, Nick Saban and Mark Richt. Like I said above, how many player shit storms has Saban dealt with at Bama? Doesn’t matter if he covers stuff up. Doesn’t matter if he “makes it go awayâ€. Doesn’t matter if he serves ice cream. Doesn’t matter if he’s a cock sucking asshole to the media. He wins! He’s a saint. Richt is a good man. He kisses babies. He probably tolerated far less and sent players packing much quicker. Had he dealt with the problems like Saban has, he’d probably have two or more MNC’s to his credit. But at the same time, despite probably more discipline issues than anyone else, he averaged right at 10 wins a season with 9 of his 15 at UGA being 10 win or more campaigns. You can’t fire a guy for that. He wins!!! Yeah, eventually they did, but 15 season?
Malzahn’s “problems†are on the field, not off. His personnel let him down last year and he relinquished too much control to boy wonder. All indications are he’s taking it back and doing what he knows best. If it works, great. If not, they’ll find somebody else. But I promise you one thing. No matter who they get, they’ll still be dealing with the same kids. The same issues everybody else deals with.