IN PRAISE OF MELLOW FOOTBALL COACHES

A tip of the cap to Matty Boy at http://lotsasplainin.blogspot.com/ for nice words about Bill Walsh.

Having suffered through two absolutely tragic New York Giant seasons under uber-disciplinarian Tom Coughlin's wretched coaching, it's time to praise some of the mellow guys. Jeez, Coughlin's supposed to be such a disciplinarian, so why the fuck does his offensive line mess up the snap-count so often? Why does he sit his best players to "teach them a lesson"? Why hasn't he done a better job protecting the health of Shockey? It's too depressing to even get into. Coughlin's a dildo who built an entire career on one random play: yeah, Flutie, BC, 1984. He couldn't be an assistant to the special teams coach under Bill Walsh.

Matty boy covered most of the main points about Walsh's intelligence, humanity and organizational gifts, but for one. He left a system in tact such that another normal adult, George Seifert, could step in and run that system equally well. The 49ers always figured out something, didn't they? Recalling a game during the 1992 season with both Montana and Young hurt. So, whaddaya know? The Niners are good as gold with Shaun Musgrave at QB. Walsh and Seifert after him ALWAYS had a plan. They always focused on what their players did well as opposed to what the did poorly. They had brilliant talent at times: Rice, Lott, Montana, Young, to be sure, but how did they figure out Rathman? Jeez, how did they figure out Rice to begin with? And Ronnie Lott surely wasn't the only player in the defensive secondary of the great Niner teams. How about Hicks? We could go on, but we don't want to steal Matty's thunder on Walsh.

Now, with the full disclosure that Forego is a Wes grad and a native New Yorker, we'll mention Bill Belichick and Eric Magini only briefly. These guys are cool, great coaches, and brilliant iconoclasts. The book's only 2/3 written on Belichick and we're on page 1 of the Magini story.

Let's have a look at some of the other non-control-freak-Hall-Of-Fame coaches.

May we all remember just how great a coach Barry Switzer was, please? The Wikipedia entry link follows and has the details -- and we understand that according to Bill O'Reilly Wikipedia has a "liberal bias" -- but one story always stood out for Forego with regard to Switzer. This story made Forego extra happy that Switzer got a chance (admittedly blown to some extent) for super-glory as Dallas Cowboys' head coach. It concerns a now-forgotten running back at Oklahoma named Marcus Dupree. The story's really too long for a blog, so look it up. The short version is that there were a number of scandals that involved Dupree and the media did its usual racist number, but Barry Switzer stuck by that kid every step of the way, when the easy course as Head Coach of Oklahoma would have been to do the opposite.

We love Hank Brown at UT and Mike Leach at Tech, and the former not just for "the game" against USC. The stories of these two college coaches are available everywhere and if you like your college coaches to be winners, cool, and iconoclastic, you got them here.

Good luck from Forego, a poor skin-head without a dollar