So we can add another line to the growing list of reasons why coach-in-waiting plans aren't a great idea.
When your coach-in-waiting gets rowdy and belligerent at a casino in the wee hours of the morning and creates an embarrassing situation, it makes an already strange setup even weirder.
First of all, it should be noted that Dana Holgorsen was one fascinating dude even before this incident. By the looks of some of his pictures (including the one above) he looks much less a football coach than a guy you'd see parked on a barstool at the Windjammer on Isle of Palms five nights a week.
Surf's up, bra!
I'm picturing the guy drawing up a play on a cocktail napkin as he slugs down his ninth Pabst Blue Ribbon of the night.
"Duuuuude ... Check out this option I came up with off the orbit motion ... how totally trippy is this?"
With dramatically enhanced prestige and money, and more pressure to win and, and more pressure to keep from saying and doing the wrong things, the coaching profession has become filled with cookie-cutter types with no personality -- or, if they have personality, they rarely show it publicly.
So when a guy like Holgorsen comes along who likes to have a good time -- and it sounds like he liked to have a good time long before this incident -- you tend to welcome it. College football needs oddball characters like Holgorsen and Mike Leach, mostly because oddball characters and oddball behavior is so much a part of the game's history.
This isn't to say it's advisable for a head coach in a high-profile job to do stuff like this:
The Nitro Police Department responded to a 911 call from the casino at 3:13 a.m. because an apparently intoxicated customer was "refusing to cooperate with the casino's management," according to Metro 911 dispatch logs.
Casino supervisors had the customer detained after he declined to leave.
Patrolman Raymond Blake was dispatched to the scene and encountered a man who was identified as Holgorsen. Blake said Holgorsen offered no resistance.
"We got up there and spoke to the male and said, 'Hey, they want you to leave,' " Blake said. "He complied, walked out, sat out on a bench, waited for the taxi, and when the taxi arrived, he got in and left."
They just don't make coaches like they used to. Or maybe the coaches just do a good job of letting their hair down in private.
Once upon a time, a coach at Clemson named Danny Ford didn't have a problem going out and getting a beer.
One of my favorite stories, related two years ago in this article by Bob Gillespie, tells of Joe Morrison's imbibing nature.
Morrison used to puff cigarettes on the sideline during games. Imagine that happening today.
Or imagine this:
Morrison made an early impression on players. Del Wilkes, an All-American offensive lineman in 1984 (and also a steroids user), had quit the team after Carlen’s firing but had set up a meeting with the new coach.
“I’m there at noon,” Wilkes said. “It gets to be 12:15, no Joe. Then he comes in, introduces himself and says, ‘Sorry I’m late. I tied one on last night and I’m still a little hung over.’
“I knew then he was a different kind of coach than I had played for.”
Anecdotes like these are fascinating and even endearing because they make these coaches seem like normal people with some of the same impulses and frailties that characterize the rest of us humans.
Surely the movement toward entertaining-as-cardboard personalities such as Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Bill Belichick and the like has been good in some ways.
But it makes things a lot less interesting.
LW
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