ShareThisFootball is violent. Strong men, some of the meanest and fastest, clash on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall. Their bones break. Their bodies hurt. And in the end, half of them are smiling.
So it's not surprising in some quarters that the violence spills into those historically secret football sanctuaries, the locker rooms and practice fields, and plays out among coaches and players. If you've worn shoulder pads since the late 19th century, you know.
But in 2010, greater America is frowning.
In six weeks, three successful collegiate head coaches -- Texas Tech's Mike Leach, Kansas' Mark Mangino and South Florida's Jim Leavitt -- have been fired or forced to resign over accusations of abusing players.
Leavitt was found to have grabbed walk-on Joel Miller by the throat and slapped him in the face. Leach was canned for allegedly sending a concussed player into an equipment room for hours. Mangino resigned after similar allegations of abuse.
Why these three? Why now?
Cultural progress.
"We have evolved," said Greg Dale, director of sports psychology and leadership programs for Duke Athletics. "I think it's indicative of the shift in our culture, of what is acceptable and not acceptable behavior."
The player-coach relationship, by its nature, is dangerously structured.
The player is voluntarily submissive. He signed up for this.
The coach holds power. And because there's a precedent for tough coaching, the actions of the coach are condoned, even if they cross the shifting line of what's appropriate. In 1954, for instance, Paul "Bear" Bryant didn't allow water breaks during all-day practices in 100-degree heat. This was common. We know now it's stupid, maybe abusive.
Theoretically, those characteristics have been present in many forms of human destructiveness, from genocide to the lynching of blacks in the modern South to child abuse.
Now that struggle between human aggression and personal liberty is playing out inside a sports culture that's descendant from warfare and protective of its code.
What's happening now is that players are empowered by their parents, perhaps more than ever before, to question authority and control.
They're also more connected than ever, through technology. Many live their lives on Facebook and Twitter. And that connectedness has brought the public into those private football cocoons.
"The whole idea of what happens in the locker room stays in the locker room?" Dale said. "Those days are dwindling."
"We understand that people can bring microphones into meetings," Texas coach Mack Brown told the Kansas City Star. "They can video everything that happens every minute of every day. We ask our coaches: Don't ever say anything you wouldn't say in public or don't do anything you wouldn't do in public."
As the allegations against Leach and Mangino swirled, a former Texas A&M receiver used Facebook to tell the world about a former coach mistreating players.
"Looking back," wrote Terrance Murphy, "it hurts my heart to know how many of my teammates will never come back to A&M because of those antics and how many kid's life was altered because of it."
So is the dismissal of three coaches healthy self-correction?
Some aren't so sure. Camps are forming in defense of the accused coaches.
"It is sad the game is starting to be broke apart by kids with no heart!" one fan posted on jimleavittmustgo.com.
"Players today are wimps!" wrote Alan Goldberg, an author and sport psychology consultant in Massachusetts. "They're mamby pambys. They're soft as grapes and want their coaches to listen to their feelings and pay attention to them when they get a boo-boo."
But it's easy to form false notions about mental toughness or what makes a good athlete. Today's players are bigger, stronger and faster than players 50 years ago. Does anyone believe Bryant's '54 Aggies, no matter how tough, could hang with a good college team today?
Dale predicts a power struggle will ensue, and more coaches will be fired in the coming months, and more locker room secrets will squirt into the light. And when we look back at the six weeks that launched this conversation, we'll identify it as the shift that kept the violence on the field.
(Contact Ben Montgomery at bmontgomery(at)sptimes.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
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