It’s been a rotten year for the Atlanta Falcons– Michael Vick turned out to have even worse judgement than people had thought, and the team immediately went into a death spiral. Then, last week, their first-year head coach, Bobby Petrino (formerly of Louisville), announced that he was leaving to become the head coach at Arkansas, and basically snuck away in the middle of the night without talking to his players or the owner.
Petrino, of course, is being savaged in the sports media, with William Rhoden of the New York Times going so far as to declare him worse than the steroid scandals in baseball and track. And that’s positively loving compared to the roasting he’s getting on ESPN radio.
Now, Petrino is a weasel, to be sure, but a lot of this is hugely overblown. It fits in with the ridiculous pro-ownership bias of sports media in general, though.
The most annoying argument made (and I’ve heard it many times) is seen in this paragraph from everybody’s favorite football yammerer Gregg Easterbrook:
Arkansas, remember the Law of Vagabond Coaches: When you hire a coach who’s only in it for himself, you get a coach who’s only in it for himself. Eleven months ago, Petrino made a “five-year” commitment to Atlanta, and as recently as late November, he was declaring in public that there was no way he would jump back to college. Then an offer came along and immediately he jumped — without, according to the gossip Web site Profootballtalk.com, so much as pausing to say goodbye to his players. In July 2006, he signed a “10-year” contract with the University of Louisville, then walked out six months later to sign the “five-year” contract with the Falcons, then walked out for his “five-year” deal with Arkansas. Over barely 18 months, Petrino signed for 20 years!
Petrino is a Bad Guy, the argument goes, because he’s signed a bunch of long-term contracts, and then walked out on them.
The thing is, this is a remarkably one-sided interpretation of the contractual committment. Sure, he signed a deal for ten years at Louisville, but if he went 1-10 in the second year of that deal, how long do you think it would take Louisville to cut him loose? For that matter, how many of his five years with the Falcons was he likely to get, given the train wreck that this season has been? And do you think that Louisville would come in for a savage attack from the GameDay crew for failing to honor their long-term committment to a coach who’s having a bad year?
You see the same thing with players all the time, too. Any player who holds out for more money is “selfish” and “wrecking the team,” but when coaches and owners cut players, it’s just hard-nosed business dealing. There’s no better example than Troy Brown a few years ago– he did absolutely everything that the Patriots needed, playing his usual position of wide receiver, returning kicks and punts, and even filling in as a defensive back when injuries decimated the Patriots’ secondary. And what happened at the end of the season? They cut him to free up salary cap room.
There’s a weird double standard in the sports media world, in which coaches and players are expected to demonstrate a degree of loyalty to their teams that the owners of the teams are not expected to reciprocate. When owners make cold-hearted business decisions, that’s just good, sensible management, but if players want a reasonable cut of the profits, they’re “greedy,” and when coaches look for the best deal for themselves, they’re “selfish.”
Petrino deserves some flack for not sticking it out to the end of the season, and for not telling his players face-to-face that he was leaving. But as far as the general phenomenon of signing long contracts and cutting out early goes, I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, good for him– owners are constantly jerking coaches and players around, and turnabout is only fair play.