Phillip Fulmer

Seventeen years ago, I sat in a news conference in Memphis, Tennessee where officials of the University of Tennessee announced that head football coach Johnny Majors had resigned and was being replaced by offensive coordinator Phillip Fulmer. Last Monday November 3, 2008,
University of Tennessee officials held a press conference in Knoxville, Tennessee to announce that this would be head football coach Phillip Fulmer’s final year.

In seventeen years at Tennessee, Fulmer won almost 75% of his games and won a national championship in the 1999. In order to fire Fulmer the University will have to pay him more than six million dollars. In addition, the University will have to pay all of Fulmer’s assistant coaches’ salary for a year or two if they are not retained by the new University of Tennessee head coach. So firing Fulmer is a multi-million dollar act on the part of the University.

McCain’s Navy

Almost twenty-five years ago, I attended a luncheon at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, Arizona where a first term United States Senator named John McCain spoke to a group of the city’s African American leaders. McCain assured the group that he was everybody’s senator and vowed to work closely with the small African American population in the state of Arizona.

As a show of his commitment, the senator came with a group of people he called “McCain’s Navy”. These were mostly white professionals who volunteered their services to help improve the lives of a variety of individuals and groups in Arizona. McCain also had syndicated columnist George Will with him. Later, Will, an avowed conservative, wrote a very positive column, which suggested that McCain was a new breed of legislator. More recently, in his columns, Will has been a constant and severe critic of McCain.

On Wednesday November 4, 2008, McCain lost his bid to become the President of the United Sates to Barack Obama, an African American.

‘From Winning to Losing

Both Fulmer and McCain have distinguished careers. Fulmer is one of the most successful coaches in the history of college football. Fulmer is an affable fellow who is revered by his former players. He is a former Tennessee offensive lineman who is very large man. Having participated in golf tournaments where Fulmer was a celebrity participant, I can attest to Fulmer being “a hail fellow well met”.

Despite his past success, the University of Tennessee was willing to part with millions of dollars in order to fire Fulmer. Fulmer had a losing record this season and seemed to be unable to compete with some of the newer and more successful coaches in the Southeastern Conference (S.E.C.). Alabama coach Nick Saban has turned Southern football on its ear .In the week when Fulmer was fired, Saban’s Alabama team was voted the number one team in all of college football.

Fulmer also suffers in comparison to other S.E.C. coaches such as Georgia’s Mark Richt and Florida’s Urban Meyer. The newer S.E.C. coaches are more youthful, more media savvy and have installed offenses that are more dynamic and have become fan favorites. Fulmer’s perennial nemesis South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier was quick to “stick the needle” in after embarrassing the Tennessee Volunteers on the field a few days before Fulmer’s firing.

The New Guy Wins

Like Fulmer, Senator McCain has a distinguished and successful career. A genuine war hero who was imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese, McCain has been a legislative leader. He can point to a number of significant achievements in service in the U.S. Senate. His major strength as retired a Navy officer was national security. When the focus of the election shifted to the economy, McCain was out of his element and seemed never able to gain his footing. Consequently, his campaign became tactical rather than strategic. McCain was short in what George Bush 41 called the “vision thing”.

McCain’s opponent, Senator Obama, is forty-seven years old while McCain is seventy-two. Obama bounds up stairs and glides across stages while McCain has a halting gait in part due to old war injuries. With the overwhelming number of Americans believing that America is on the wrong track, McCain suffered when compared to Obama’s inspirational oratory an seeming unflappability.

For both Fulmer and McCain their past successes are laudable, but the future has been ceded to a new generation of leaders.

ASU’s James Harden

Every winter when the college football season is winding down there is a cry to crown a national champion on the field like college basketball. Well now it is NCAA college basketball tournament time, and the cry in some quarters is how unfair the NCAA selection process is. Ask the fans of the Arizona State Sun Devils whether the NCAA selection process is fair and be prepared to duck.

The Arizona State men’s team beat their “hated” arch rival, the Wildcats of the University of Arizona twice during the regular season. The Devils had a better record than the Wildcats in the PAC-10 conference in which they both compete. So who got selected on Sunday to play in the NCAA Tournament? The University of Arizona of course.

An NCAA official explained the snub of Arizona State by saying that the determining factor was the high RPI of the Sun Devils which came about because of their poor non-conference schedule. The only catch with this explanation is the NCAA selection committee usually says they don’t pay much attention to the teams’ RPI. As they say ,”consistency is the signature of small minds”.

The NCAA basketball tournament is not a very effective method for determining the best team in college basketball. The current tournament is a very efficient method for generating income for the CBS network, the NCAA, and the various colleges involved.The first round NCAA tournament games blanket the nation and teams from virtually every nook and cranny of the country are playing that first weekend. After the first weekend if the “chalk” holds the real tournament begins. Because the selection committee left out Arizona State, Virginia Tech, Syracuse, Virginia Commonwealth, and Ohio State among others, the test is seriously flawed.

Finally, success in the NCAA tournament is due in large measure to the committee’s decision as to where to place teams within the brackets. The Tennessee Vols were thought to be a number one seed going into the SEC conference tournament. Because Tennessee lost in their conference tournament they are now a second seed and now must play the North Carolina Tar Heels if they expect to get to the Final Four.But the team that won the SEC tournament, the Georgia Bulldogs is a fourteen seed even though they won the SEC tournament by winning four games in three days.

So like the BCS the NCAA selection committee is a lot like the Electoral College, they make decisions that may or may not be performance related . But unlike the football bowl system which crowns 35 winners, the college basketball season will end with one winner and dozens of teams who will “cry foul”.

Coach Bob Knight proposes to have 128 teams play at the end of the college basketball season. This he says is a better way.

Is it?