In College Football, Winning’s Not Everything, It's the Only Thing

University of Miami head football coach Randy Shannon was fired after another sub-par year for the Hurricanes, a once proud program which has never quite recaptured the mojo from the days of Jimmy Johnson and Butch Davis (sort of). What I thought was telling is the common theme that resonated in almost every news article about the firing, namely that Shannon brought a once scandal-ridden program back to respectability, he instilled discipline and academic accountability leading to a team which played by the rules, didn’t get in trouble, with much improved graduation rates. Despite this, he was canned.

I’m not naïve, and I realize that you can’t ignore mediocrity on the field. The University of Miami still believes that given its history, attractive campus and location in the heart of fantastic football recruiting grounds, they can still command national (or at least ACC) championship contending teams, despite not having the resources of a public university. 7-5 won’t get you’re the big bowl payouts and it doesn’t get you the publicity that you need to boost recruiting and raise the profile of the school.

It bothers me less that Shannon got fired that other coaches seem to have their horrible records off the field overlooked. I get that winning’s critical, but aren’t school administrations and athletic departments going to give more than a token weight towards the conduct and graduation rates of student-athletes? Too often it seems like winning covers a multitude of sins, and who can blame coaches for responding in kind to behave in a way which served their best interests? For all the talk from university presidents that "all of these factors matter", their actions seem to indicate otherwise. Lose and you get fired without question. Have pitiful graduation rates and half your team arrested for sexual assault leads to the follow-up question of "But you did win the conference championship in the past three years, right?" Aren't college coaches sadly but understandably going to conform to this incentive model?

Or put another way, unless Randy Shannon has tremendous character (and it seems that he does), why wouldn’t he be tempted to essentially say, “Okay, not going to make that same mistake again. Next time I get a head coaching gig, I’m going to deprioritize character, disciple and academics. We’re going to bring in the best football players notwithstanding character issues and focus on football instead. Forget about making them go to classes (or better yet, we’ll just hire a tutor to do their work for them), because we don’t want them to be distracted from what’s really important. Get arrested? We’ll sit you for the opening drive – but we have a championship to win.”

Yes, I know that it’s supposedly a false choice, and that a handful of coaches have been able to win and have held the players accountable to succeed in the classroom and off the field. But they just don't make 'em like John Wooden anymore.