NO TED LASSOS ALLOWED: WHEN A DREAM JOB IS A DEATH WISH
With more money and pressure creating massive expectations, a football coach must be a masochist to enjoy a profession when a billionaire owner or booster could fire you at any given moment
What, an NFL coach thought life would be easier with a $113 billion bonanza from media companies, with the construction of intergalactic-inspired palaces in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, with a legal gambling craze that will generate $12 billion this season from game wagers?
What, a college coach thought his stress would subside because fat checks are written to a quarterback for his image, name and likeness, because ESPN conspires with the SEC to create a superconference that prompts the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 to counter with their own alliance, all wrapped around the added billions of a pending 12-team playoff?
What, did these men think re-opening COVID-defiant stadiums to tens of thousands of maskless fans, all in the mission of recouping lost 2020 fortunes, mean that the comfort of normalcy is upon them?
In truth, the sport’s seismic changes only have magnified pressures, raised stakes and turned coaches into even bigger punching bags when losses are mounting. What once was a dream job is now a death wish. Why not just lay down on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt, which allows a better chance of personal survival? When billionaires are playing this kind of ego-and-finance game — franchise owners, university boosters, broadcasting executives — the coach is doomed to be sacrificed when expectations fall short and there is hell to pay.
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings sang about cowboys. Actually, in 2021, no mama should let her baby grow up to be a football coach. “Ted Lasso’’ is only a TV show, remember. It’s a fictional hoot about a failed American football coach who takes over a hapless British soccer team with a love-and-kisses approach, including gifts of shortbread biscuits to an owner who wants to spite her ex-husband by tanking games. Here in the States, the massive influx of new media and gambling money has no connection to love, kisses and cookies. It’s almost as if experiencing a pandemic has made the sports moguls even hungrier and more ruthless.
It’s no longer a shock when a coach is fired early in a season. The demands of high-roller interests and howls of social-media trolls create storms that must be monitored by front-office executives and athletic directors, who once dismissed the raw clamor as irrelevant noise. The Jacksonville Jaguars won’t be firing Urban Meyer, only one game into his NFL career, disastrous as that defeat was and disturbing as reports are that he’s “unhinged’’ behind the scenes and acting like a detail-obsessed college coach unfit for adult football. Yet already, they’re wondering in Columbus if he might return to replace his self-appointed successor at Ohio State, Ryan Day, whose sin was losing at home to Oregon. That switcheroo won’t happen, but it’s not crazy to wonder if the outcry in Chicago is so ugly, rooted in decades of frustration, that the Bears will fire Matt Nagy sooner than later after their worst opening-game loss in 18 years — on a night when the streamlined, explosive Rams were everything the Bears are not and the $6 billion SoFi Stadium was showcased as everything Soldier Field is not.
All of these stories are intertwined. Way back in 2019, when things were simpler, Mike Bohn could have fired Clay Helton as he stumbled at the helm of USC’s pro-like program. Instead, an athletic boss new to the job showed patience, impressed by Helton’s classy, fatherly philosophy in dealing with young people. An unpopular decision went against the grain of the USC ethos, an entitled Hollywood-influenced arrogance that has resulted in scandals across campus, including the admissions scam that snared Aunt Becky/Lori Laughlin. It backfired on Bohn last weekend, when the Trojans began a hopeful season with a catastrophic home loss to Stanford, prompting an avalanche of “Helton Must Go’’ indignation — including two loud columns in a 24-hour news cycle in the Los Angeles Times. This came only days after a TV interviewer had asked Helton if he saw a part of himself in the Lasso character. The question wasn’t intended as a slight, but in the wake of a 42-28 loss, the symbolic scene framed Helton as a man too nice for a cutthroat, merciless industry.
“One of my favorite shows,’’ he replied.
The reporter followed up, “Instead of Xs and Os, because he doesn’t know the game, he is more about psychology. Is that your approach?”
Said Helton, unknowingly fitting his career with a body bag: “I get to deal with 18- to 21-year-olds. It’s not only the Xs and Os on the field, but you’re also teaching them life. The combination is what I’ve always liked. I saw my dad coach in the NFL, and my niche was here. I really like being not only their coach, but their friend, their mentor, some of them their adopted father and bringing them along. Maybe that’s the reason I like the show. I appreciate that question.”
Helton will have plenty of time to catch up on Season 2, now that he is a former coach with a $12 million buyout. Having absorbed enraged feedback from influential USC supporters, many in the entertainment industry, Bohn knew it was time to dump Ted Lasso. “As I committed to upon my arrival at USC, during the past two off-seasons we provided every resource necessary for our football program to compete for championships," he said in a statement. "The added resources carried significantly increased expectations for our team's performance, and it is evident that, despite the enhancements, those expectations would not be met without a change in leadership. … I want to be exceptionally clear: our university and leadership are committed to winning national championships and restoring USC to football glory. This decision represents our next step toward that goal in what has been a thoughtful and strategic process to build a comprehensive football organization equivalent to the premier programs in the modern landscape.”
Imagine if Bohn had made the change two years ago, as he should have. That way, he could have driven across town and lured Meyer from his analyst position at Fox Sports, when he might have been amenable to remaining in the comfortable realm of college coaching in a job worthy of his three-championship pedigree. By keeping Helton, Bohn lost out on Meyer, who eventually met on a yacht with Jaguars owner Shad Khan and heeded the NFL call when other prominent college coaches, from Nick Saban to Steve Spurrier to Chip Kelly, have crashed in the pros. Already, Meyer has been added to a dubious list by his legions of critics, who doubt he’ll develop Trevor Lawrence as an elite QB — and wonder why he signed Tim Tebow in an aborted summer publicity stunt, why he hired (and fired) a sports performance director accused of bullying and discrimination at the University of Iowa and why he’s already ranting like a lunatic and not dealing well with losing after rarely losing in college. Does Meyer now realize the Jaguars can’t be fixed by signing a batch of five-star recruits?
“I don’t really know that word (shell-shocked), other than we’ve all gotten our asses kicked before. It’s inexcusable, the things that need to be fixed,” he grumbled after a 37-21 loss to the lowly Houston Texans, coached by a neophyte in David Culley and without their troubled star quarterback, Deshaun Watson. “Three preseason games you would think we'd have that fixed, so that's something we're going to ... I would guesstimate you would not see that again. That's inexcusable."
Said Lawrence, who threw three interceptions and looked lost in a debut in what some have projected as a Hall of Fame career: “Yeah, it obviously sucks. Losing’s always hard. We can’t let this snowball. I know I'm going to respond well. I'm made of the right stuff, so I don't have any doubt about that. I hate losing. Hate losing. So, we're going to get better, but that's all you can do is learn from it, get better, move on.’’
I suppose Meyer could embarrass himself like Bobby Petrino, who escaped the Atlanta Falcons — who were paying him $24 million to stay five years — after he lost 10 of his first 13 games in his rookie season in 2007. Rather than tell the players himself that he was off to Arkansas, Petrino left laminated notes on their lockers. Would USC take a phone call from Meyer? It doesn’t matter if Bohn or school president Carol Folt cringe at the thought when Rick Caruso, chairman of the USC Board of Trustees, already has made his feelings known publicly in an e-mail to Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke?
“I appreciate everything that Clay Helton has done for our students over the last several years,” Caruso wrote. “However, it has become abundantly clear that it is time to make a change and I am supportive of the actions taken today by President Folt and AD Bohn. We have a proud football tradition of excellence, and I am confident in our ability to attract a world-class coach who will return the USC football program to the most competitive and highest levels of collegiate football.”
So, it’s clear the power base won’t be settling for flavor-of-the-year names in the college grapevine, such as Iowa State’s Matt Campbell or Luke Fickell, who worked with Bohn at Cincinnati. The Trojan Horses want another Pete Carroll, if not Pete Carroll himself. But if Meyer and Bob Stoops say no to overtures, here’s the problem for, say, the Bears and other NFL teams who sour on head coaches this season. They’ll be competing with USC for Campbell or Oregon’s Mario Cristobal, who has brought physical football and a Saban background to the top of the Pac-12. More sensible for USC or the Bears is Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, who might enjoy avoiding the future SEC meat grinder and trying to turn Justin Fields into the next Kyler Murray. Then again, he’d be doing so in Chicago, a coaching graveyard.
If the coaching profession has become a form of masochism, it might explain why Jon Gruden called for a ballsy pass play — which Derek Carr completed to an impossibly wide-open Zay Jones — when he could have kicked an overtime field goal and saved himself the turnover risk. Feeling the intense heat of winning the Raiders’ first spectator-attended game in Allegiant Stadium, after a blur of emotions during an insane game that alternately seemed won and lost, Gruden chose to trust his expanding gut instead of a kicker’s foot.
“I felt like I died and woke up. And died again. I was like a cat — I had multiple lives tonight,’’ he said. “I don’t like playing like that. It was tough, but we did a lot of good things to win that football game."
What inspires such a comment? Oh, probably the weight of a 10-year, $100-million contract that demands he finally make the playoffs.
Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects. Compensation for this column is donated to the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust.