Taking The Hog[s] For A Ride

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The college football world is closely following the sordid twists and turns in the story of Arkansas head coach, Bobby Petrino and his ill-starred motorcycle ride last week. Talk radio hosts and print columnists have been weighing in with their opinions and predictions. Will Arkansas keep Petrino or show him the door?

My prediction is that the Hogs will keep Petrino. Oh, there may be some pro-forma "counseling" or more likely some financial penalty for "Conduct Inconsistent With University Standards" but I think Arkansas is going to keep Petrino.

You can just imagine the things that are being said in Fayetteville right now: "But we were 11-2 last year with a bowl game win." "For goodness sake, Knile Davis is going to be back and making a run at the Heisman!" "This is our year to get to the BCS Championship Game." "This is a personal matter." "What's the big deal, they are both adults." "This has nothing to do with the football program."

These and other trial balloons will be floated until the Arkansas administration has talked itself into doing what it already wants to do: avoid having to make a coaching change in April and flush one and maybe even two seasons down the drain.

The Hogs will fail to learn the object lesson that Alabama could teach every other school in the country:  choosing a coach's record over his character may produce short-term gain, but will result in long-term loss. From the lofty perch that Alabama football currently enjoys, it's easy to forget the depths of scandal in which the program was mired a little more than a decade ago.

It began in the summer of 1999 with the revelation that the head coach was involved in an affair with a female member of the athletic department staff and had been lying about it for months. Two seasons later the program was in its worst condition since the ignominious J. B. Whitworth was coaching; and the worst was yet to come. Punitive NCAA sanctions followed, along with so many vacancies in the coach's office that Mal Moore may have been tempted to run a Help Wanted ad.

Of course, you all know how this story ends.  Alabama's critical need for a quality coach coincided with Nick Saban's epiphany that he was made for coaching college football not the professional version of the game. Nick Saban came to the Capstone and events have proven that Alabama and Saban are perfectly suited for each other.

Three weeks ago, Coach Saban came to Nashville to be the featured speaker at a fundraising luncheon for the Jason Foundation, the leading organization in the country dedicated to preventing teen and adolescent suicide. Saban has been an ambassador for JF since his days at LSU.  I wish everyone who reads this blog could have heard what he had to say. Yes, he spoke about football, but his address was not about football. He used the topic of football, just as he used the topics of family and faith to shape his advice about dealing with the challenges that life presents.

I'll share one example:  The Tide, like every other college football team, sets goals for itself. But at Alabama, the goals are never to win a particular championship, or a stated number of games. Those are outcomes. Alabama's team goals are stated in terms of performance; being the best player you can be. If you set your goals in terms of outcomes, then you have an excuse for compromising standards. When your goal is to win games, you have a built in excuse for curring corners in recruiting and tolerating bad behavior from star players. But when your goal is to be the best player you can be, when you achieve that goal, the outcomes take care of themselves.

This brings me full circle. Today, Arkansas is faced with the same choice that Alabama faced in 1999.  My guess is that it will make the same mistake Alabama made. And Bobby Petrino will go from having wrecked while riding a hog, to taking all the Hogs for a ride that ends in an even bigger wreck.

The Commissioner