You've Got To Have The Moves

The colored lights were glowing and half the ornaments were already on the tree in the Oregon State football office on Dec. 11 when Dan Marlow, the secondary coach, popped his head around the corner and asked, "Aren't we going to have a Christmas tree this year?"

Kari Ludington, a football secretary, gave him a puzzled look. She pointed at the artificial spruce, which was roughly the height and girth of a middle linebacker—and about as hard to overlook. "Oh," Marlow said, drawing back and blinking. "It's right there, isn't it?"

Marlow had missed the tree because it was not in the sight line from his office in the narrow assistant coaches' corridor to the closed door of room 117, the head coach's office—the office with no name plaque. Behind that door Mike Riley, the man who was considering an offer to become Oregon State's new coach, was holding one-on-one interviews with assistants from the staff of ex-coach Jerry Pettibone, who resigned on Nov. 25. Up and down the corridor, nervous men popped in and out of tiny offices like actors in a bedroom farce. They murmured, "What have you heard?...What does it mean?...What did he say?"

In one of the offices running backs and special teams coach Bill Singler was too wound up to sit behind his desk. Outside his window raindrops plunked in puddles and dark clouds blanketed the campus, but Singler was lost in more subtle portents, such as the surprise postponement of an afternoon press conference in Corvallis, at which Riley, the offensive coordinator at USC, had been expected to be named Oregon State's coach. "That's baffling," Singler said. "If they don't hire Mike, they're set back until after Christmas." Singler tapped the floor with his feet, bit his lip and stared at the minute hand of his clock, which was creeping toward his 2:30 appointment with Riley. "I'm going to go to the rest room before I go in there," he said. "Is his door still shut?" He stuck his head into the corridor and pulled it right back.

Outside room 117, at her desk, Francine Counihan seemed to be near tears. Having worked as a secretary since 1984 at the right hand of three head coaches—Joe Avezzano, Dave Kragthorpe and Pettibone—she had become a sort of house mother to the assistants. Now her brood was splitting up again. "It's heartbreaking," she said of watching the assistants squirm over their uncertain futures. "I don't know how they stand this profession."

Similar scenes have taken place at other campuses in recent weeks—at Alabama, Baylor, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Notre Dame, Pitt, Purdue, Tulane and Wyoming, among others. At last count, 22 of the 111 NCAA Division I-A football programs had either hired or were about to hire new head coaches. And since new coaches generally retain few, if any, assistants from the old regimes, the job scramble has been more frantic than usual. "You've got just over a hundred schools, with nine full-time assistants each," said Singler, a former All-Pac 8 receiver at Stanford. "That's about a thousand jobs. And there must be three times as many coaches looking for work—qualified, experienced coaches. So, no, it's not exactly the season to be jolly."

Unless, of course, your idea of Christmas is to be told you have 24 hours to clean out your desk and turn in your phone card—which is what happened on Nov. 25 to the Maryland football staff. "You talk about glum," says Kevin Rogers, a Syracuse assistant who has lost his job three times in his 19-year career when his boss was replaced. "You're thinking, This might be the Christmas I can't afford to buy my kids gifts."

The bright side, if you can call it that, is that most assistants are prepared for the pink slip in the office stocking. After all, many work on one-year contracts. "It's a very transient job," said Singler. "If you're an assistant, you hold a position, on average, for three to 3½ years. The head guy lasts four to six."

Singler has held 10 coaching jobs in 20 years (chart, page 93) and has been sent packing more times than he wants to remember. His last two jobs, in fact, carried more warning flags than a logging truck. At Rutgers last year he joined the doomsday staff of Doug Graber, whose teams had gone 25-29-1 in the previous five seasons. Then Singler signed on at Oregon State, where Pettibone was coming off a 1-10 season. "You can't be too choosy," he said. "There are only so many jobs, and it's important to me that I work with people I respect."

Unfortunately, Pettibone packed it in toward the end of a 2-9 campaign—the Beavers' 26th consecutive losing season, a Division I-A record—and his assistants immediately started networking. "Every college assistant has a job board," Singler said on Dec. 10, pulling out a legal pad whose top page was densely covered with writing. "Some are on walls, in grease pencil. Mine's on paper."