Coaches have to deal with being placed on the "hot seat"
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By BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
As he walked through a parking lot outside Memorial Stadium a week ago, strangers kept shouting at Charlie McBride.
“Hey, Coach!”
“Charlie! How’s it going?”
“Wish you were back!”
This amused McBride. Strangers have been shouting at him in parking lots for a long time. They used to shout different things.
Sometimes they’d ask why he wasn’t like Monte Kiffin.
These days they ask why Kevin Cosgrove isn’t like Charlie McBride.
Why isn’t Bill Callahan like Tom Osborne?
Why aren’t the new guys as good as the old guys?
Granted, they used to ask the same questions about the old guys when they were the new guys.
Scrutiny has been raining down on Husker football the past couple of weeks after lackluster showings against Southern California and Ball State.
If the criticism is not being shouted in parking lots, it’s being written about in newspapers, spoken about on radio, typed in ALL CAPS by HUSKERBOY95 on a message board near you!!!
The Huskers are 3-1, but it’s a shaky 3-1, the kind that critics note could easily be 1-3.
And given the price of a ticket and today’s high coaching salaries, critics feel no shame in raising their voices.
“There are people who think, ‘Hey, you’re getting paid this much money. You better win and you better do it right,’” said McBride, the former Husker defensive coordinator.
And when it’s done wrong? Man, those days hurt worse than a coach will ever let on in front of the cameras.
As former Iowa State coach and one-time Nebraska assistant Jim Walden will tell you, almost every coach knows he’ll find himself on a hot seat eventually.
If you can’t take public criticism, go sell microwaves or something.
Most football coaches get fired. Most football coaches expect to get fired at least once.
In 1988, one year after arriving at Iowa State and seeing the situation before him, Walden told the school president, “You’re going to fire me one day.”
Sure enough.
Walden is now a color analyst for Washington State, the place he coached at before leaving for Iowa State.
“Most coaches kind of accept the burden,” Walden said. “You almost work in this world of which you’re bound to fail, because your whole motivation is to spend your whole life trying to be better than really good.”
Eventually, you have a year where you’re just good, or not even that.
“I knew when I wasn’t getting it done,” Walden said. “In a sense, it was, ‘Hey, they’re going to fire me. And they probably should.’”
Nowadays, fans type out their disgust on Internet message boards or blogs, masked in anonymity.
The anger used to come in the form of the written letter.
Walden would answer every letter he received, so long as they were signed.
“If he thought enough to give me hell and sign his name to it, I thought I could at least give him a response,” Walden said.
McBride, living in the Phoenix area now, still has copies of the weirdest letters. He’s thought about writing a book about them.
A man once wrote, telling him he should quit. Nebraska could do quite fine without his kind, thanks.
A few years and national championships later, the man wrote back. “A glowing letter,” McBride recalled.
“The more you’re at Nebraska, the more you understand the fans, the more you understand the scrutiny you’re under because of who you are. It’s the only show in town. That’s their thing.”
After one tough loss to Colorado, a man called McBride’s house late at night.
His son, David, who was then in high school, answered the phone. The caller had an offer to make. He said he’d pay more than a million dollars to buy out McBride’s contract.
“What’d you say to him?” McBride asked his son when told of the phone call in the morning.
“I told him I didn’t think it’d take that much,” his son answered.
When the criticism came the heaviest, McBride didn’t have to go far to lift his spirits.
“The encouragement from other coaches and players, that’s your savior,” he said. “You know, Tom was always encouraging me.
“I remember my wife telling me once, ‘Hey, you chose this profession. You better be able to handle it.’”
Most coaches today will tell you they just ignore the critics, but it’s not always that easy.
“You feel bad. You don’t feel wanted,” McBride said. “People don’t like you. You wonder, ‘What am I doing here?’”
McBride has known Cosgrove and Callahan a long time.
He said it “kind of breaks his heart” now as he hears the criticism of Cosgrove, whose defense last week gave up 40 points to Ball State. To McBride, it doesn’t seem that long ago that they were saying the same thing about him.
“After USC, he (Cosgrove) wasn’t the happy-go-lucky guy,” he said. “I had a little talk with him, ‘Hey, I’ve been through this show before. Just hang in there and do the best you can and keep the kids playing hard, and that’s all you can ask.’”
Coaches are a close fraternity. They often stick by one another in these situations.
Walden said an assistant coach should never receive any more heat than a head coach.
“A coach shouldn’t have to fire a defensive coordinator because the fans are mad because a guy gave up 40 points to Ball State,” Walden said. “Look inside yourself. Are you on top of your game every stinking day? And do you not think for one minute a bunch of teenagers can take a day off?”
While McBride thinks the high salaries of current coaches might further criticism, Grant Teaff, former Baylor coach and current executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, isn’t so sure.
Teaff said there’s plenty of criticism even at the Division III level, where coaches aren’t making the big bucks.
“Human beings are human beings,” Teaff said. “”They’re going to be critical of a Pee Wee team. … It’s a sport that for the common man, whether people played it or not, they think they know how it should be played.”
A few days ago, Cosgrove was asked if the recent weeks had been the toughest of his coaching career.
His voice turned quiet.
“I try to avoid it as much as I can,” Cosgrove said of the criticism. “You know, I have a job to do. If I let it affect me, it’s going to carry over to the players, and you can’t do that.”
Teaff recommends coaches don’t pay attention to the critics. Walden said he thinks that’s almost impossible.
“I read the paper every day for 31 years as a head coach,” he said. “I wanted to know what people were writing or saying about me.”
You’d usually hear about criticism some way or another, McBride said. At a certain point he just had to ask himself: Are my kids playing hard?
If the answer was yes, there was no problem looking in the mirror.
“There’s a passion in Nebraska,” McBride said. “And coaches that coach there need to tighten their belts and just understand they’re in one of the greatest programs in the world.”
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7439 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
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