Posted on: Friday, August 1, 2003
No coach should be larger than the school
Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
A few years ago, when Utah was still in the Western Athletic Conference, its basketball coach, Rick Majerus, held a revealing press conference in the parking lot outside the conference tournament.
The theme of the impromptu session at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas was how he was bigger than a tournament that needed him more than he needed it.
"If I wanted to, I could get a couple of our boosters to buy my way outta this thing," Majerus boasted.
Majerus has never let anybody forget that he was the biggest man on campus at Utah and this week, when the NCAA leveled a penalty of three years' probation, the Utes and everybody else saw what can happen when a coach becomes omnipotent.
Not for the first time — or unfortunately probably the last, either — has a school ceded too much authority and power to one coach and paid a price.
The violations at Utah, in and of themselves, were mostly nickel and dime stuff: Free meals for players, excessive per diem allowances, practice hours beyond permitted limits, improper observation of players, etc.
Fortunately for the Utes, the penalties were mostly of the hand-slap variety. Together, however, they paint a picture of a coach who pretty much did what he wanted when he wanted, and a Utah compliance office and administration that was afraid to call him on it.
Only when Utah fired the ski coach for what he claimed were violations that paled in comparison to what others were getting away with, was the school administration forced to address the issues.
The report concluded Utah gave "too much deference and latitude" to the men's basketball program. That is a polite way of saying Majerus ran roughshod over the whole department and its lapdog athletic administration.
Not that it would surprise anybody who has either spent much time around Majerus or the athletic program he has dominated for more than a decade. Majerus can coach as well as anybody drawing Xs and Os in the game today. The man is a sharp evaluator of talent and a brilliant strategist. As a quote machine and storyteller, he has few peers.
But he shouldn't be left to run untethered. No coach should. Nor is he the only example of late of what can happen when a school bestows too much power on one coach. Witness the wide latitude Jerry Tarkanian's basketball operation was given at Fresno State. Recall the untouchability that football coach Rick Neuheisel had exercised at Washington. The list is long and disturbing.
Win big and do it often enough and a lot of schools and their administrators have a tendency to allow the tail to wag the dog.
Utah is the latest reminder of what can occur when that happens.
