Great coaches are successful at getting their teams to focus on mastering and ingraining every detail of the game's fundamentals, and the game plan, until they are second nature (see my archived post, "Rick Majerus & Vince Lombardi"). Needless to say, this requires hard, repetitious, and concentrated effort in practice. A coach cannot drive his players to persevere through such tedium and exertion without being a disciplinarian. The coach cannot be an effective disciplinarian if he gets too close to the players.

Name a single truly great coach who was a "players' coach." I can't think of any. This is McBride's great failing. He may be a decent recruiter, and able to motivate and inspire his players, but in the final analysis, he doesn't have the resolve or gumption to push the players to the very limit of their endurance. He'd rather be their buddy.

Ironically, the reason many on this board lionize McBride and say they'd rather lose Majerus than McBride is that Majerus has a reputation for terrozing the players, and McBride for being their peer. However, therein lies the distinction between Majerus' greatness and McBride's mediocrity.

My father, who is an acquaintance of Al McGuire, Rick Majerus' mentor, had occasion to travel with McGuire and his Marquette Warriers on an exhibition tour through South America the summer before they won the national championship. My father relates that on one occasion he noted that McGuire never sat with the team when they dined. McGuire replied sharply, "I NEVER eat with the team. You can't be their coach and their buddy. They live in a different world from which a successful coach must remain apart."

In my view, the best of the Utah football coaches since I started following the team in the late '60's was Chuck Stobart. Stobart was a disciplinarian, and it showed on the field. He generally played every team close (although he was blown out by BYU in his last year). During BYU's golden years, he finally succeeded in playing BYU extremely tough a couple of times. I remember in 1981 (I think), a very good BYU team had lost to highly ranked Georgia in Athens practically on the last play of the game, and then beat Utah in much the same manner--the difference being a fumble by Utah's QB Ken Vierra from the BYU 1 into the end zone, and recovered by BYU (as an acquaintance of mine has noted, Stobart's teams always seemed to be one play away from a great win). After the game, the BYU players said Utah hit harder, was a tougher team, than Georgia.

Becuase Stobart didn't play a fashionable wide open game like BYU, didn't get along with AD Arnie Ferrin, and didn't really mesh with the community, he was fired before he really had a chance to develop his program. (Ferrin was obsessed with replicating not only BYU's success, but its image and style. Note that Stobart's successor was Fassell, even then reputed to be an offensive genious.) The following year Fassel took Stobart's team and went 8-3--their best record in over a decade. But Fassel never matched this record (much like Redd Miller did with John Ralston's Denver Broncos team in the late '70's). I think Ferrin made a big mistake firing Stobart, and things may have turned out much differently had he stuck with him.

I think you have nailed the issue dead center, as usual. For me, the question comes down to whether or not it is possible to be a great coach and still have the personality of Ron McBride. Obviously Al McGwire does not think so. Neither does Majerus. And who am I to argue? But just because this method doesn't work for some coaches doesn't mean that it is not possible.

Now I am no psychologist, but I believe I know something about discipline because I spent 15 years of my life in marching band. Some of you may scoff about this, but a successful marching requires extreme discipline and precise execution. When I was a junior in high school, one of my good friends (who was a year older than me) was given the responsibility of head drum major. Now my friend subscribed to the same kind of philosophy that McGwire talks about. As drum major, my friend was ruthless in his pursuit of excellence. He screamed at people in practice, gave push-ups to those who got out of line (literally), and made the whole experience of band practice very tedious. However, when we took the field, we performed very well. We even took 3rd place in the states largest marching competition.

The next year I took over as head drum major. But I did not want to make any enemies. My band director told me that I would have to take a hard line if I wanted to be a good drum major, but I thought I could do even better if I made the band member "want" to succeed. I wanted them to have their own convictions and push themselves, rather than taking a totalitarian approach. So I went to each of the squad leaders (informally) and asked them to help build up the self-esteem of each member in their squad. If someone was struggling, I asked them to invest a little extra time with that kid to help him (or her) come up to speed. In practice, I tried to be very encouraging -- pointing out the fact that mistakes are OK as long as we learn from them. And when we finally took the field in competition, we performed even better than the year before taking a 1st-place trophy.

This experience taught me that, while discipline is important, so is believing in yourself. The old adage is very true: "what the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve." But the one area where harsh discipline wins out over the "buddy system" is in making people aware of their shortcomings. A positive approach is great, but if you fail to realize your shortcomings you are doomed to failure. Like coach Mac says, the minute you think you are pretty good, you are in danger of becoming pretty bad. And that is why I really like what you had to say about "details." You said...

"Great coaches are successful at getting their teams to focus on mastering and ingraining every detail of the game's fundamentals, and the game plan, until they are second nature...."

I think that is an excellent point. However, I don't think a coach has to be an ogre to implement this kind of thing. You can focus on minute details and still be positive and nurturing. The real difference comes in how you deal with shortcomings. One method derides them, the other method tries to replace them with successes, but neither method excuses them. If that happens, failure is certain.

-- Deposit 2 cents -- Heck maybe even 10.

-- GO UTES !!!!!!!!!!!!

Most succesful Head Coaches who use the dictator technique need good Assistants to function as the "buddies." Somebody has to do the personal building if the Head Coach is going to be the "hammer." I don't think you can have the Head Coach be the buddy and the Assistants be the hammer.

Vegas Ute

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