Frank Martin wasted no time in issuing not one, but two apologizes. The Kansas State basketball coach had let his emotions get the best of him last month as he screamed at Chris Merriewether during a timeout and hit the senior guard on the arm with the back of his hand.Immediately after the game, Martin sought out Merriewether in the locker room and apologized, then opened his press conference by tackling the issue head on. “That’s a mistake on my part. I’m an old-school guy, but I understand the times are real sensitive now.”
Martin’s rush to clear the air is continued proof that what happened Dec. 3 in Lawrence, Kan., has sent shockwaves through the world of college coaching. The day that Mark Mangino resigned as Kansas football coach, in the wake of allegations that he verbally and physically players, has made the treatment of players a hot-button topic and put coaches’ tactics under the microscope like never before. The Mangino Effect has been felt from Palo Alto to Piscataway and from Columbia, S.C. to Corvallis and everywhere in between.
“There’s just an awareness, that’s the biggest thing,” said Georgia Tech athletic director Dan Radakovich, who says he and coach Paul Johnson have discussed the issue. “There’s just an awareness out there and not to think that you can't be touched or you’re bulletproof.”
Nowhere did that lesson hit harder than at Texas Tech and South Florida and no one was hit harder than Mike Leach and Jim Leavitt. Whether you deem the basis of their firings as questionable, appalling, primitive or simply overblown tough love, their firings likely wouldn’t have happened had Kansas not made a stand and forced Mangino out (yes, technically he stepped down). It was Mangino’s fall that set the precedent that wins and losses and coaches who have revived, or even built programs from scratch, aren’t as important as the safety of the players whose care they’re charged with. It’s also made the Pattonesque coach seem like a dinosaur, a relic fireable “with cause.”
Making a stand against player mistreatment could have happened years ago, like in 2003 when Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer slapped wide receiver Ernest Wilford on the helmet during a game or when Louisiana Tech’s Derek Dooley did the same to left guard Ben Harris in ’07. It could have come at UCF, where George O’Leary and his staff oversaw an offseason conditioning practice that led to the death of freshman Ereck Plancher in ‘08. O’Leary is scheduled to give a deposition Feb. 23 in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the Plancher family.
But it was Kansas that made the statement, maybe because of the public reactions to the allegations, maybe because of a perceived rift between Mangino and AD Lew Perkins, who did not hire the coach. Whatever the reason, Kansas took the plunge and maybe most importantly, emerged largely free of any lasting public backlash. In doing so, it showed Texas Tech and USF they could swiftly wipe their hands clean of popular coaches who have blurred the line between motivation and depravation. It would no longer be about ego vs. ego. It was no longer about Mike Leach vs. athletic director Gerald Myers, who had been embroiled in a bitter feud during Leach’s contract negotiations last winter that grew so fierce, Leach went over Myers head and personally negotiated with chancellor Kent Hance. It was no longer about how power-drunk Leavitt had apparently become, the madman who was known to bloody his face after head-butting players wearing helmets and had a reputation for being arrogant and overbearing. The changes were now at their core about a contract between parents and the coaches they had entrusted their children do, a contract that had been left irreparably broken. How could more parents be expected to send their sons off to play for these men?
Kansas gave Texas Tech and USF, more than anything, confidence and precedent. But the lasting effect of the tactics that cost Mangino his job is that on a larger scale there is a clear push within our society to show it has progressed beyond the toughening of players by men who would use any means necessary, and it’s forced the current crop of coaches, many of whom were brought up by those same General Coaches, to pay attention.
“[Coaches] are thinking about it now,” Radakovich said. “They may not have thought about it for months or even years until these cases had come forward. But now it's become something they need to have a heightened sensitivity to these types of issues.”
Awareness is a start, but the bigger question is whether the firestorm of attention being placed on the coach-player relationship and the boundaries of discipline is just a current infatuation of fans and media or the beginnings of a seismic shift in American sports?
“I think it’s the way it is from here on out,” said Illinois AD Ron Guenther, who played for the Illini in the 1960s. “The athlete is being treated differently at every level and I think there’s an expectation. I think there’s a way to push and demand with still being respectful of relationships.”
The public will never likely know if the Mangino Effect has truly changed the landscape. Painting all coaches as bullies would be wildly irresponsible and unfair but considering there are 120 FBS programs, it’s unlikely the game has been completely cleaned of coaches who have taken things too far in the name of motivation. Just how will those remaining coaches who stay rooted in the old ways adapt? It’s with those coaches where the true test of the avalanche that followed Mangino’s resignation lies; will they show restraint before potentially putting themselves, their programs and their players at risk? If so, what began Dec. 3 in Lawrence could be looked back on as a true turning point.
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