I have about four pages of thoughts about issues tied to Gary Barnett’s ouster as the University of Colorado football coach, but I’ll start with these.
* These names shouldn’t be the entire short list, but Auburn offensive coordinator Al Borges, UCLA assistant head coach Jon Embree and Mullen High School coach and KOA radio broadcaster Dave Logan should get serious consideration.
The latter two, of course, played at CU. Embree has extensive college coaching experience. Logan doesn’t. Yet those dismissing Logan as a “high school coach” and likening him to former Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust are off-base, and not only because the term “high school coach” shouldn’t be a pejorative.
Before he coached at Cincinnati’s Moeller High, Faust didn’t play for Notre Dame. Before he got into Denver-area high school coaching, Logan was a CU star.
Faust didn’t play in the NFL. Logan was a standout receiver for the Cleveland Browns.
Faust didn’t have a broad-based background that added to his credibility. Logan does.
Other than that, Faust and Logan are a lot alike.
For the record, I’m not impartial, because Logan and I were baseball batterymates at Wheat Ridge High School. But if hiring Logan would be a “provincial” move, it’s more offensive that local interest too often is a negative in Colorado.
That’s because many of the multitudes moving here annually never develop a commitment to, and knowledge of, the region and its traditions.
Borges wouldn’t be a “provincial” hire, yet he’s eminently qualified. He is an offensive intellect who also has coached at Portland State, Boise State, Oregon, California, UCLA and Indiana. At Oregon, he coached under Mike Bellotti, who at times has pondered a change of personal scenery but almost certainly isn’t leaving Eugene anytime soon – at least not for Boulder. At Auburn, Borges adapted the West Coast offense to the personnel, giving it more of a hard-nosed running-game component and calling it the Gulf Coast offense. He’s dryly funny and disarming without being phony, and Boulder wouldn’t be a culture shock to a man who has coached at Berkeley.
When I reached him in Alabama, Borges understandably didn’t want to say much. He is happy at Auburn and is one of the highest-paid assistants in the country at $390,000 a year. But Borges confirmed he is interested in the CU job.
* Targeting the CU job for a coach who fits a specific racial profile – whether white, black or green – would be against at least the spirit of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in hiring on the basis of race.
Specifying that the hire should be African-American also is insulting and condescending, even if inadvertently.
If an African-American is deemed to be the best-qualified candidate in an open-minded yet admittedly highly subjective evaluation, fair enough.
Northern Colorado athletic director Jay Hinrichs, who also is searching for a coach, should hire Arkansas-Pine Bluff head coach Mo Forte, a former Broncos assistant. Forte is interested, is a terrific coach and has experience at working in economically challenged Division I-AA programs – which is what UNC is now. Saying Forte merits special consideration or bonus points because he is African-American would demean him. The same is true for any African-American candidates for the CU job.
* Unfortunately, CU ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, he of adjustable ethnicity, abhorrent views and suspect scholarship, has a higher profile than professor John L. Hall – who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics.
That’s indicative of CU’s image ills, and the timing of Barnett’s ouster exacerbates the problem. The widespread view is that CU fans wouldn’t have cared if everything written and said about the program being a behavioral cesspool were true – as long as Barnett won enough football games.
I share that view, as long as it’s applied only to a very loud minority of CU partisans, and also considered a prime example of why even instinctively honorable coaches everywhere might be able to rationalize cutting ethical corners to enhance their chances of winning.
Sadly, Barnett apparently didn’t bank many goodwill points for addressing the program’s shortcomings and for trying to make reforms work. In some ways, the shortcomings involved issues typical not just in Division I-A football, but in fraternity houses and the campus mind-set from coast to coast.
Granted, even if there isn’t a smoking-gun revelation when the audit of his football camps is released, some – whether because of naivete, ax-grinding disingenuousness or both – undoubtedly will portray relatively minor issues as major transgressions.
But unless new information convinces me otherwise, I’m giving Barnett credit, especially during the last year, for running a relatively praiseworthy major-college program on the behavioral and academic front.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
