Sunday, December 19, 2004
Guess who
Fox Sports college basketball analyst Marques Johnson is describing (in the print edition of the Sporting News)?This is the reality of big-time college athletics. Ask Tyrone Willingham. The idea that the primary purpose of a coach these days is to build character, instill discipline and graduate players has gone by the wayside. Yeah, it's great if those goals can be reached, as long as you meet the bottom-line requirement of winning a sufficient amount of games to keep everybody happy.
Henry Bibby. Point taken about Willingham. (His Fighting Irish were one of only four of 56 bowl-bound schools with a graduation rate 65 percent or higher and a racial gap of less than 15 percentage points). But Henry Bibby? The only character he ever built was his son Mike's. After Henry left his wife, the younger Bibby grew up strong and independent.
(Stanford, btw, hired Walt Harris away from Pittsburgh after he led the Panthers to the single lowest graduation rate, 31 percent, of all 56 bowl-bound institutions of higher education.)
