Columnist Dean Juipe: Coaching is one tough profession

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2003 | 10:11 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

It's no match for fire fighting, police work or perilously walking a beam high in the sky with a rivet gun in your hand, but among the more dangerous occupations in America is coaching a pro or college team.

The danger doesn't come from a constant physical threat, as firemen, policemen and construction daredevils routinely face, yet a coach's day-to-day uneasiness can be just as disconcerting.

He is, after all, hired to be fired. Short of obtaining some measure of legendary status, he knows the day will come when he will be asked to clean out his desk and rejoin the unemployed.

And those ranks have been expanding on almost a daily basis of late, as the ax grinds through football coaches coming out of poor seasons and basketball coaches off to inferior starts. Rick Minter (Cincinnati) and Gary Nord (UTEP) were fired Monday, Frank Solich (Nebraska) and Chris Tormey (Nevada-Reno) were exiled over the weekend, Bill Cartwright (Chicago Bulls) was cast aside last week and Jim Fassel (New York Giants) is among the many with his bags already packed.

While a win-loss record is never secondary, in some cases winning the bulk of your games simply is not enough. Solich -- 9-3 this season, 58-19 overall and on the sidelines during the 2001 national championship game -- can testify as to the inherent unfairness a coach in a precarious position sometimes faces.

His crime? His teams weren't as good as those of his predecessor, Tom Osborne.

Hence, his A.D. expresses a fear and complains about the program "gravitating into mediocrity" as he shows Solich the door.

Mediocrity -- real mediocrity, not something dreamed up by the athletic director -- got Tormey fired in Reno as well, in a move rumored for weeks and carried out after the penalty-crazed Wolf Pack were pummeled in their finale at Boise. They finished 6-6, raising Tormey's overall ledger to a still unsatisfactory 16-31 in the eyes of A.D. Chris Ault, who, despite his denials, is known to have been working the phones for a few weeks in pursuit of Tormey's successor.

What Ault should tell whoever he hires: "Don't get your hopes up. We can be better than what we were, but we also have a number of built-in liabilities that will keep you from obtaining every player you desire and winning every game on the schedule. Oh, and it's cold up here, too."

Yet someone from the coaching carousel that routinely adds, subtracts and trades members will take up the challenge and give the Reno job his undivided attention for three or four years before he, too, is unceremoniously cast aside. It's the nature of the game.

The trick, from a coach's perspective, may be to sign as lengthy a contract as your new team or school is willing to offer. That way, those in charge at least have to think twice before paying you off and letting you go, although in Solich's case it wasn't much of a factor as Nebraska sprung for the $1.8 million it owed and apparently did so with a shrug if not a smile.

Most coaches will be fired -- or "relieved of his duties" as the press releases sometimes stylishly contend -- at least once in their careers, leading to the face-value assumption that there must be a lot of lousy coaches out there.

A better possibility is that the line that separates the successful from those who are out of work is exceedingly thin, much like the cord that keeps the high-wire performer from kissing the ground.