He was just the Oklahoma State football coach -- a man of 40, you may recall -- when Mike Gundy delivered his now infamous postgame rant in defense of his quarterback.
Remember who that quarterback was? Most don't. Lots of people remember Gundy, not just for the rant but for the newfound fame that's come with the continued success of the Oklahoma State program.
Look at the headlines now, almost five months before any ball is kicked off in any real college football game, and coaches are in them. Not just Bobby Petrino for whatever he was doing and Urban Meyer for whatever he may or may not have done in his final years at Florida, but in multiple contract extensions for a guy who's already seen Alabama build a statue of him outside its stadium, Nick Saban.
For better or worse, coaches have become the true superstars of college football.
The business of coaching is bigger than ever. Coaches' names are bigger, their paychecks are bigger, their actions more closely scrutinized and their pressure to win is only growing. Conferences are changing and expanding, bringing more TV money and more attention. One of the goals, obviously, is to avoid the kind of attention Petrino and Jim Tressel ended up getting on their way to the unemployment line. But the main goal is to win, and all this extra focus on coaches is doing is driving up blood pressure and the pressure to win and win big.
Are coaches, in many cases, getting too much credit when such big winning does happen and too much blame when it doesn't? Yes. Is that going to change anytime soon? Not as long as college football conferences have multi-million dollar television contracts and rabid fan bases have the Internet to heap glowing praise and bitter scorn on those coaches, often letting both out in the same month.
In response to the Sporting News article on the end of Meyer's tenure at Florida, Meyer talked this week about "living in a fishbowl" as the CEO of a blue-blood football program being something he's used to. He's the boss, the one who ultimately decides who comes in the doors and works like crazy to control what gets out. That doesn't always happen, obviously, but the race for ultimate control amongst coaches and the nation's top football programs has become as the competitive as the race to climb the rankings.
Whatever "gentleman's agreement" Meyer did or didn't break in his first recruiting season at Ohio State matters little now. The game has changed. He's the boss, the face, and the guy chasing all of the top players, and all other Big Ten coaches can do in response is ramp up their own level, their own profile.
Beating Ohio State would help, too, but actual results are decided by players on the field on Saturdays. Coaches are busy soaking in the spotlight year-round.
Saban is America's highest paid football coach at $5.3 million annually, or a little over $550,000 more than he was making before he won his second national championship at Alabama las year. Mack Brown of Texas is next at $5.2 million, and he had a losing season in 2010 and won the Holiday Bowl last year. Next on the pay scale come a couple of native Ohioans, Bob Stoops at Oklahoma ($4.1 million) and Meyer at Ohio State at $4 million.
Regular folks don't make $4 million a year, or even in the same galaxy. Regular folks can see, though, how those who do must live in fear of the day such checks stop coming. A few years ago, Pete Carroll was throwing out the first pitch as the Mariners game, the happy new coach of the Seattle Seahawks, before the NCAA really ramped up its investigation at USC.
Next time you hear a coach talk about his "vision" for a program, know that Carroll is far from the only one who ever visualized an escape route. If only Petrino had done a little better with his motorcycle route...
Neither Bobby Bowden nor Joe Paterno got the type of exit from coaching they probably envisioned, but for very different reasons. They were from a different time. Paterno liked to tell a story about how he didn't have a contract at all when he started as Penn State's coach, and even as he was pursued by the Boston Patriots and Penn State officials asked him to sign a contract to ensure they could keep him, he resisted.
Meyer was denying he had a contract with Ohio State up until the very hour he slipped on a scarlet and gray tie for his introductory press conference, wasn't he?
Jeff Long, the Arkansas athletic director, faced a tough situation earlier this week. The writing was pretty much on the wall for Petrino when details of his lies and manipulations started to leak out, but he was 21-5 in two years at Arkansas. He won! Arkansas went to the Sugar Bowl two years ago, won the Cotton Bowl last year and could be a top-five team this fall. There was a rally held on campus in support of keeping Petrino.
Long made the right call, but it wasn't an easy one. And it seems every fan from Fayetteville to Morgantown already has an opinion on who should be the next coach at Arkansas. Online sportsbooks are offering odds on who it will be. In case you're wondering, Gus Malzhan -- who's yet to actually coach a game as head coach at Arkansas State -- is the early 7/2 favorite.
Fans today don't just worship and worry about their coach. They clamor for the next one.
Luke Fickell hadn't even picked a starting quarterback last summer when people started whispering and wishing that Meyer would replace him. Brian Kelly didn't even consider sticking around for his unbeaten Cincinnati team's Sugar Bowl game against Meyer's Florida team three years ago; by then, Michigan fans had already basically been envisioning what their team would look like if Jim Harbaugh came back to his alma mater.
They're extremely happy with Brady Hoke now, but that will last only if he can beat Meyer. Stay tuned.
There's probably no turning back from this high-dollar, high-pressure culture. If Alabama and Texas suddenly decide they don't want to pay their coaches $5 million, some other school would. Those with money to spend and jobs to fill have never had trouble finding Saban's phone number in the past.
It's a new college football world. Whether this coach-centric culture is good for the game, we can't say. But we should get used to it. Seven months from now, there's going to be a whole new cycle of coaching changes and fan bases pointing to the next savior.
Yes, it won't be long before some AD will be thinking about giving Petrino and/or Tressel a call.
