George O’Leary won’t be treated the way Steve Spurrier was for abruptly retiring in the middle of a football season.
He shouldn’t be, either… but not for the reason(s) you might think.
O’Leary’s retirement shouldn’t be met with the First Take-style debate, “Did he quit on his team or not?” His retirement should be met with cheers and sighs of considerable relief, for reasons that have nothing to do with how well UCF football performs on the field.
Viewing O’Leary should be done through the prism of assessing a coach. More specifically, though, his identity as a coach should not be filtered through his work as a gameday tactician or offseason recruiter, but as a man centrally responsible for the health of the players under his watch. This is a coach’s first task, well before the matter of winning games comes into play. Care for 18- to 22-year-old athletes — that’s always number one, to the point that it ought not need to be discussed.
To be fair to O’Leary, coaches work in large organizational settings and massive infrastructures. In all of life’s complexities, it is reasonable to acknowledge the possibility that other support personnel at UCF did not do their jobs as well as they could or should have, leading to the unfortunate death of football player Ereck Plancher in 2008. O’Leary’s role in orchestrating or managing a situation in which Plancher received substandard care — and his parents received insufficient information pertaining to their son’s medical condition — could be overstated even today. It might have been overstated in the past.
Yet, isn’t this why coaches are paid outrageously large sums of money? Isn’t this why the availability of water and trainers should never have become such a point of legal contention in a trial which made no one look good?
If you read the Orlando Sentinel’s full coverage of the Ereck Plancher story, especially the legal battles which flowed from the original incident, it is nearly impossible to walk away with the idea that George O’Leary did his job the way it was supposed to be done… this, in the area of coaching which MUST BE fundamental to the job description: Care. For. Your. Players.
Again, O’Leary might not have been solely at fault, and he might not have understood everything he needed to understand. I can accept those claims. Yet, the competing claim is that no one could have or should have been more responsible in handling the welfare of his players more than O’Leary… and he failed to cover every base.
Maybe that doesn’t make O’Leary a bad person… but it sure makes him a negligent one — not necessarily on a criminal level, but certainly in the realm of common sense.
Forget the resume flap at Notre Dame or other unpleasant episodes which latched onto him; O’Leary’s foremost legacy is Ereck Plancher. There’s no joy in that statement; it is what it is, and can’t be wished away even if one would dearly love to do so.
It’s unfortunate, because in the realm of getting teams to win games — something which doesn’t just occur by magic, especially at a program such as UCF — George O’Leary was a pretty damn good football coach.
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First of all, Baylor had not been to a major bowl game in 33 years, a third of a century, when it took the field for the 2014 Fiesta Bowl against UCF. The Bears last took the stage in early January in the 1981 Cotton Bowl against Alabama. Baylor might not have been playing for a BCS championship, but the Bears had everything to play for in that Fiesta Bowl.
George O’Leary and his staff ran rings around Art Briles and his brain trust.
Given how exceptionally gifted Briles is as a chessboard manager, O’Leary’s masterclass on that night in Glendale underscored how much he knew about football as a game-planner, schemer, and a detail-oriented man who properly motivated his players when the moment really counted. (Yes, the irony is not lost here: One who could so fully account for football details ran workouts which didn’t seem to account for all the necessary details needed to provide for the care of athletes.)
UCF beating Baylor — decisively, not by a razor-thin margin — represents the greatest feat in O’Leary’s coaching career. The man who turned Georgia Tech into a high-quality team in the late 1990s, earning enough of a reputation to be hired at Notre Dame before the resume flap torpedoed that opportunity, rebuilt his career at UCF. Lamentably, his excellent work on the field was (and forever will be) overshadowed by a haunting tragedy in an offseason workout. Yet, if viewed strictly in football terms, O’Leary left the sport with top-tier credentials.
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In the end, I’m led to cite this column by my TSS colleague, Joseph Nardone. You might have read it, but if you didn’t, Joe makes the fundamental and always-timely point that coaches are mortals just like the rest of us. Being a Final Four coach doesn’t mean you’re a better person or deserve more of the benefit of the doubt in an off-court matter (something unrelated to your skill as an X-and-O tactician or as a user of well-timed substitutions and lineup changes).
In a larger political sense, successful coaches become very powerful people. At Penn State with Joe Paterno and at other schools as well, this power has led to abuses of various kinds, reminding us that too much power placed into the hands of one person is rarely if ever a good thing for a larger theater of activity or a greater community of human beings.
George O’Leary could really coach. On the occasion of his retirement, that much should be said. Yet, the person associated with the coach has — at many points along the way — given the American public ample reason to think very little of him.
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Sportswriters are often at their worst when they demand the firings of coaches with an unbecoming hair-trigger immediacy, a reflexive reaction not supported by careful situational analysis or an appreciation of the fact that behind the coach, there is a person, often with a wife and kids.
In the case of George O’Leary, reality was — and is, and probably will continue to be — inverted. O’Leary clearly represents the idea of “coach as power-holder.” He was and is, for many, the man who does anything it takes to win, crossing the line in appalling ways and being defensive about anything which didn’t reflect well on him.
O’Leary was the coach who didn’t deserve to hold his job as long as he did. Now that he has exited stage right, not only will there not be some grand farewell or a rousing tribute to greet him; the end of his coaching career is cause for relief, mixed with the somber awareness that while the humanity of coaches is often ignored by writers, O’Leary seemed to ignore the humanity of other people around him in the coaching business.
This doesn’t make George O’Leary a villain, but it does serve to strip bare the notion that a championship-winning coach is somehow a better person than the rest of us.
If O’Leary’s career shatters society’s misplaced worship of coaches, perhaps it will have served a beneficial purpose after all, creating a plot twist few (if any) might have anticipated when Ereck Plancher died seven years ago.
