Rush to judgment?

'Fire first, question later' mentality can be shortsighted

This is not a defense of married, middle-aged college coaches who troll frat parties, pounding brews and flirting with the coeds from Phi Kissa Cutie, or who spend their evenings feeding strippers' bank accounts and shacking up in hotel rooms with women who aren't their wives. It's impossible to dress up the recent actions of now former Alabama football coach Mike Price and perhaps soon-to-be-former Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy and make them look pretty. Inappropriate is not the word. Sordid is more like it. Disgusting works, too.

But it doesn't take a Price or Eustachy apologist to wonder about the way universities treat coaches who commit such embarrassing transgressions. Generally speaking, those coaches get canned in a heartbeat. Colleges cut their losses and move on to the next hire in time for the next day's practice. The case can certainly be made that that's exactly as it should be. After all, many institutions of higher learning don't ask a lot of their coaches these days, other than to win games and stay at least one step ahead of the NCAA enforcement posse. Requiring coaches to at least be discreet about their booze-guzzling and skirt-chasing isn't unreasonable.

But when coaches fall short of moral perfection -- sometimes far short, as in the cases of Eustachy and Price -- firing them is often the easy way out. It's harder for a school to stand by its coach, take the inevitable flak from the media and fans, and perhaps eventually come out on the other side with a coach who is a humbler, wiser and better man.

There is no telling if that would have happened had Alabama chosen not to fire Price even after it was revealed last week that he had spent hundreds of dollars at a Pensacola, Fla. strip club and that the next day, an unidentified -- and apparently incredibly hungry -- woman had ordered about $1,000 of food and drink from his hotel's room service menu and charged it to his bill. There is also no guarantee that Eustachy's conduct will improve if Iowa State retains him even after photographs surfaced last week in The Des Moines Register showing him holding a can of beer and kissing or being kissed by women at a party in Columbia, Mo. -- although Eustachy has acknowledged he is an alcoholic and says he is receiving treatment for the problem.

But you wonder if college administrations even entertain the possibility of personal improvement when deciding on the fate of scandal-causing coaches. Universities are so often blinded by embarrassment that their first and only instinct is to hit the eject button on the coach's chair. Notre Dame did it to football coach George O'Leary two years ago when it came to light that O'Leary had fudged some items on his resume. Was that one lie really proof that O'Leary didn't have the integrity to lead the Notre Dame program, or was it simply that the school didn't want to see a reference to the dishonesty every time O'Leary's name appeared in the paper?

This isn't to say that schools are always too hasty in giving coaches the boot. Price, in particular, reportedly was warned about his behavior at least once before the incident that got him fired. But it would be encouraging sometime to see a university make a decision in cases like these that wasn't motivated by public relations concerns or the fear that other schools would use the scandal as a weapon in recruiting.

There are punishments that don't require firing. Iowa State would certainly be justified in putting Eustachy on probation, for instance, and cutting his $1.1 million salary to the point where he is no longer the highest-paid public employee in the state -- a status that no basketball coach should have, anyway. Somewhere, sometime, perhaps a university won't run scared and will avoid the "fire first, ask questions later" mentality. After all, a college's mission is to make sure that everyone who passes through its corridors comes out a better person in some way -- and that includes coaches.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button topic every Monday on SI.com.

 

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