Charlie Strong Is Just What College Football Needs, but He Won't Last at Texas
Every college football program believes in its myths.
At Notre Dame, where it's about blending championships and godliness, five players expect to have a hearing next week in the team's most recent cheating scandal. At Michigan, where it's about winning in the tough, old-fashioned way, the tough, old-fashioned coach they brought in to replace the modern one is about to be fired.
This is all to explain what is already starting to happen to Texas coach Charlie Strong, who is in just the first month of his first season on the job. It's already starting, and within a few weeks Strong will be in deep trouble. You can smell it coming.
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The thing is, Strong is a great fit for the college football world, a compassionate disciplinarian, which makes him a great fit for society, too. At Texas, he is, and always was going to be, a bad fit.
As the NFL drowns in off-field scandals, we claim to want discipline in football. And on Tuesday, Strong kicked a ninth player off the team since spring.
Two players charged with sexual assault were kicked off immediately, and Strong didn't have to see a tape of the incident. Most of the others, according to Horns Digest's Chip Brown, were kicked off for failed drug tests.
So Strong is doing things the right way. His problem, though, is that Texas isn't interested in the right way. It wants the Texas Way. At least, that's what Texas' big-dollar power brokers want. They never wanted Strong in the first place, as he wasn't big enough or showy enough, and they still can't even believe the school had the nerve to hire him without their approval.
"(At the time) I was talking to a coach who I think is one of the top five coaches in the nation," billionaire Texas oilman Red McCombs told CBSSports.com's Dennis Dodd this month, specifying only that he wasn't talking about Nick Saban. "I think I had him at the 5-yard line. The next day, they announced they'd hired Coach Strong. Obviously, something happened...
"It fell out like I was disappointed in Coach Strong. I was disappointed in the decision being made."
Revisionist history. When Texas hired Strong in January, McCombs said on ESPN radio the new head coach was better suited as a position coach, or maybe a coordinator.
The mix of 1) players being kicked out; 2) recruiting shortcomings of former coach Mack Brown; and 3) quarterback David Ash quitting football because he had suffered too many concussions has left the Longhorns at 1-2, including a 41-7 home loss to BYU.
It's going to get worse. This team is going to go 5-7, maybe a game better or a game worse. And the powerbrokers are already expecting improvement.
They expect winning now, while Strong is trying to rebuild a program from the ground up. He preaches what he calls his five core values, and has put them on signs in the football building. There were signs like that last year at Louisville, too.
Honesty. Treat Women with Respect. No Drugs. No Stealing. No Guns.
The player kicked off on Tuesday was offensive tackle Kennedy Estelle, and Horns Digest wrote that Estelle and Desmond Harrison came to Strong a few weeks ago and said they had substance abuse problems. The school, according to Horns Digest, wanted to kick Estelle and Harrison out. But Strong talked officials into allowing them to keep their scholarships, go to rehab, go to class and not practice or play football. If they followed the rules for six weeks, they could be reinstated on the team.
Estelle, according to the publication, did not follow the rules. So he's out.
Strong is sending his message. It's a message about doing things right, developing as young men, going to class and then winning from that core.
Sure, he's not perfect. He's not a myth. But he appears to be just what we need.
And yet, even if there is no outcry about him yet, it's coming. Soon. Believe me. ESPN already had an Outside the Lines segment Wednesday on the criticism surrounding him. Analyst Danny Kanell, the former Florida State and NFL quarterback, said he's "concerned that Charlie Strong is losing that locker room," that his "my way or the highway approach" is not working.
Kanell is wrong. Strong isn't losing the locker room; he's building one. He is laying down laws and showing compassion and strength at the same time. And he has a record of success.
Strong is working to change the locker room culture, but that's not the culture that's going to defeat him.
Mack Brown did not leave the program in the best of shape. He rebuilt it, got Texas back into the national elite, won a national title and lost another one in the championship game. He told me last year that after that loss, he dropped into a funk. He admitted to making mistakes in recruiting and coaching. Strong has to pay for that now.
Any reasonable person can see that. But Brown built that program partly through his coaching, but partly by being the world's greatest PR man, masterfully bringing together all the powerbroker forces through his personality.
Strong doesn't have that personality. He might not have a personality at all. When he was hired in January, he sat on his hands and mumbled during the press conference. The Texas Way wanted a splashy announcement.
Strong isn't splashy. Unlike Mack Brown, he doesn't seem like one of them. And I hope race isn't involved in that, but as Tim Keown of ESPN The Magazine pointed out, he is the first black head coach Texas has ever hired for a men's sport.
Whatever it is, he doesn't fit. His resume said Louisville on it. He's not Saban or Gruden or Mora. The power boys undermined Brown in the first place, publicly pressuring him to leave while dropping Saban's name.
The power boys thought that all the money in the world could make everything right in 30 seconds. Apparently, Saban didn't think so.
But they wanted the myth.
Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report. He also writes for The New York Times and was formerly a scribe for FoxSports.com and the Chicago Sun-Times.
