From Murphy’s Law To Prometheus Today

Call it Murphy’s Law or call it The Law of Unintended Consequences.  Call it a real-life example of creating Frankenstein’s Monster who is now out and about in the countryside.  College sports are now minor league professional sports.  I have no intention of waxing nostalgic here about the glory of amateur athletics and the noble nature of college sports in days gone by.  Nevertheless, let us recognize the status quo for what it is.

For years, many folks argued that college athletes were being exploited – – and they were indeed if your definition of exploitation also covered Olympic athletes and Little League athletes.  Participants in sports at those levels all toiled and practiced and performed for no “payment” while others reaped bountiful financial rewards.  In the lawsuits that ultimately determined that athletes at any level should be allowed to profit from their name, image and likeness once those attributes had acquired value due to athletic achievements, it was difficult to hope that the “other guys” would win the case and prevent Joe Flabeetz from selling the rights to his name as a product endorser.  However, I for one did not see that we would arrive in the current situation let alone get here in only a couple of years.

• Name, image and likeness deals have become recruiting tools not rewards based on athletic achievement.
• One report I read said that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is working on a structural system that will allow high school athletes to join in the name, image and likeness business.
• Because it is “fundamentally unfair” to make an athlete sit out a year if he/she transfers when a coach can pull up stakes and change schools at a moment’s notice, that led to the creation of the transfer portal.  That is nothing more than a politically acceptable term for “collegiate free agency” – – and it can be used by athletes and/or against athletes.

When Deion Sanders addressed the current members of the Colorado football team – the team he will take over next Fall – he told them to get to the transfer portal to make room for players that Sanders would bring in.  He said that life for players hanging around would be made as agonizing as possible to see if any of them were going to prove worthy of retaining their scholarships.  [Aside:  The PAC-12 guarantees scholarships for 4 years, so Sanders cannot just renege on that prior agreement – – but he can make life miserable for anyone that he does not want in the program.]

Moving on …  Mike Leach, head football coach at Mississippi State, was hospitalized over the weekend.  The press release stated that Leach was taken to the hospital for “a personal health issue” that happened at his home.  Excuse me:

• Memo to Communications Folks at Mississippi St.:
  • Health issues can be serious or not serious
  • Health issues can be curable or chronic
  • Health issues can be lots of things but none of them are “impersonal”.

Next, I want to address another issue involving a football coach.  Over the weekend, the Washington Post did a long-form story on Jim Caldwell.  The headline was:

The QB Whisperer …

With No QBs To Whisper To

The narrative of the story is revealed in these sentences in the fifth paragraph:

“The fact that Caldwell spends Sundays at home in Lewisville, N.C., watching football on television suggests there is a weird amnesia among people who hire NFL head coaches.  They go chasing after the latest “quarterback whisperer” and elevate young White men above their capacities apparently insensible to the fact that it was a Black coach who altered the career of arguably the most intelligent quarterback in the history of the league, Payton Manning, and who raised the games of two eventual Super Bowl winners, Joe Flacco and Matthew Stafford.”

Caldwell has been out of the NFL coaching business since 2017 since he was fired by the geniuses who run the Detroit Lions despite Caldwell’s winning record as a head coach in Detroit and two playoff appearances for the Lions in his four-year tenure there.  It is pretty clear from the quotation above how the authors explain Caldwell’s period of unemployment – – and they may be 100% correct.  But maybe Jim Caldwell is sort of like Prometheus in Greek mythology…

Prometheus was a Titan god of fire who defied the edict of the Olympic gods and gave fire to mankind.  Zeus did not like being disobeyed and “sentenced” Prometheus to eternal suffering; Prometheus was chained to a rock and an eagle would land on him and peck out his liver every day only to have the liver grow back overnight so that Prometheus would suffer the same fate every day for eternity.

Jim Caldwell has not suffered and will not suffer anything nearly as gruesome as that.  But Jim Caldwell may have gotten crosswise with the football gods because:

1. He took the job as the head coach of the Detroit Lions – – AND – –
2. Since the merger of the NFL and AFL, no coach fired by the Lions has ever been a head coach again in the NFL for even a single game.

Since 1965, the Lions have had 20 head coaches – – counting interim head coaches.  Only three had winning records with the Lions – – Caldwell was one of the three.  And none of them ever got another head coaching job in the NFL.

Finally, since I began today with a reference to Murphy’s Law which everyone knows well, let me close with a corollary to that famous Law:

“If several things that could have gone wrong have not gone wrong, it would have been ultimately beneficial for them to have gone wrong”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………