It’s been a long time since this blog has featured that genre of sports journalism in which the university football coach is cast as a pietà, an icon of purity and innocence suddenly and shockingly beset by evil.
UD thinks this piece, written by a Bowling Green football fan, qualifies as Coacha Inconsolata writing.
You tend to get CI when a football team is so vile – a complete loser on the field, with a heavy emphasis on criminality – that the choice for booster/journalists becomes very stark: Either contempt or sympathy. Either you allow yourself to acknowledge – and even express – the disgust that the sickening reality of the local team makes you feel, or you cast about for some way to redeem an unredeemable spectacle. You rifle (riffle?) the mythic-familiar and conjure a fallen world whose gratuitous malignity brutalizes Our Mother of the Gridiron, the coach.
Title:
Heat Rising on Bowling Green’s [Coach] Jinks as Arrests Pile Up
Not that Jinks recruited the heat; the heat just satanically piled up from Hades.
The team, the writer notes, is at “the bottom of the standings,” but “No. 1 in the country in offseason arrests.”
Off-season, mind you; there are almost always far more crimes committed during the season.
The writer pithily sums things up:
Six wins in two years.
Five arrests in six months.
Can we say the obvious? Can we say that this is the result you get with a really really shitty coach and program?
No, no. The writer goes on to praise the coach for dismissing the naughty players (what a saint: most coaches would keep dangerous people on campus), and for spouting the most amazing stream of sports cliches in his own defense that UD has ever seen — more even than that scene in Bull Durham. The writer actually quotes the coach’s entire statement in the piece.
The coach, he concludes, is “a good guy,” tasked with the “inherent challenges of monitoring more than 100 college kids.” Problem is, his “inexperienced staff” (another cross he has to bear) “is recruiting too many marginal characters out of self-preservation.” They’re doing it out of self-preservation, after all! Nobody else wants these dudes, but Bowling Green has to take them because … no one else will …
July 30th, 2018 at 10:49AM
More follies from the Mid-American, where November football takes place on school nights in empty stadia, all for the ESPN2 and ESPNU and all the other obscure online ESPNs and their broadcast money.
Urban Meyer used to coach at Bowling Green, which means the fans are going to hold out for the next Rising Star, criminal records and empty stands notwithstanding.
August 1st, 2018 at 10:00AM
A while back, a group of our trustees and boosters were getting darn tired of .600 seasons and no tournament for the basketball team. We needed a coach who would not be so…well, picky about shit like being able to read and write and not burglarizing their fellow students’ rooms in their spare time. It did not end well.
August 1st, 2018 at 10:44AM
tp: Yes – damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.