Even If His Team Romps, He Can’t Win

Did Jimmy Johnson do what any coach would have done, or did he act like a jerk?

Running up the score on Notre Dame like that. Rubbing the Fighting Irish’s faces in it, 58-7, in goody-goody Gerry Faust’s final game as coach.

The nerve of the guy.

That episode is still being hashed around here at the Sugar Bowl, where Johnson’s Miami Hurricanes have a chance to become national champions if they can whip Tennessee tonight while top-ranked Penn State is losing to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.

Miami players and fans insist that the coach should not be blamed for the score against Notre Dame.

“What was he supposed to do--tell our players to fall down on the ball for a quarter?” defensive end John McVeigh asked. “We had guys who were dying to show the coach what they could do, so they could play more next year.”

Even Tennessee players sympathized.

“Whether they ran up the score or not is just a matter of conjecture,” Volunteer defensive back Charles Davis said. “Ara (Parseghian) is up there in the TV booth telling people Miami should go easy, and I’m thinking maybe he’s right. But then I noticed guys pulling out some of the scores Ara won by when he coached Notre Dame. He wasn’t all angel himself, was he?”

As for the guilty party, Johnson was livid about being accused of pouring it on. “If it had been me on the other side rather than Faust, there wouldn’t have been a word said about it,” he said later. Who you beat is what matters. Nobody had apologized to him in 1980, Johnson said, when Oklahoma roughed up his Oklahoma State team, 63-14.

Some of the voters in the national polls already have gone on record as saying they will have a difficult time forgetting the so-called lack of class shown by Johnson and the Hurricanes in that Notre Dame game. Others say Miami was just doing what it had to do to make its case for No. 1.

The funniest thing of all is, people are telling Johnson and his players that they have to not only win the Sugar Bowl, but win big. “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” Johnson said. “We get nailed for ‘pouring it on’ Notre Dame, but now they tell us we have to destroy Tennessee if we want to be the national champions. What nonsense.”

See, there are people who believe the Orange Bowl should determine the national champion by itself. Winner take all. But that makes Johnson furious. “How can anybody vote Oklahoma No. 1 over us when we beat them this season on their home field?” he asks. “I don’t get it. You tell me.”

It is not a bad point, although Johnson must remember that Miami is not undefeated. It did lose to Florida. So, in one respect, a voter could say that Oklahoma’s only defeat was dished out by a tougher team--Miami--than Miami’s was.

The whole situation is part of the competitiveness of college football, and that is a subject Johnson knows something about. He is as competitive as they come.

No one knows that as well as Johnny Majors, the coach of Tennessee. Majors and Johnson have been friends and rivals for two decades. Majors was an assistant coach at Arkansas when Johnson played there. He arranged Johnson’s first coaching job, at a Picayune, Miss., high school. He hired Johnson for his coaching staff at Iowa State.

There are great stories about Majors and Johnson and how they are similar in their need to win. A story in the Miami Herald told how cut-throat the competition became between the coaches at outside interests such as racquetball and bowling. Even games of charades at parties, Johnson’s wife said, turned into evenings of loud arguments.

When Johnson tore an Achilles’ tendon during a four-man game of racquetball, the other players were yelling for a doctor, Johnson said, but all Majors was concerned about was “finding a fourth to finish the game.” Another time, when the coaches decided to try ice skating for the first time, the others met as scheduled a week later to learn, but Johnson already had spent the week taking lessons. “Just shows you can’t trust the little s.o.b.,” Majors said.

It is a friendly war. Majors and Johnson have nothing but admiration for one another. “That stuff about running up the score on Notre Dame is a lot of hogwash,” Majors said. “You never tell your team to quit trying. Never.”

Johnson is rolling with the punches, because he is used to it. This is not the first sticky situation he has been in.

There was, for example, the mess when he was named to succeed Howard Schnellenberger, who had just coached Miami to the 1983 national championship. Schnellenberger left to coach a Miami USFL team that never materialized. Johnson was stuck, against his wishes, with most of Schnellenberger’s assistants, several of whom had wanted to be named head coach.

There was nervous tension in the air all season. “A lot of finger-pointing,” Johnson called it. When Boston College stunned Miami, 47-45, on Doug Flutie’s last-second miracle pass, Miami defensive coordinator Bill Trout resigned in the locker room after the game. Eventually he joined Schnellenberger’s staff at the University of Louisville.

Johnson later picked up a letter opener, placed it between his arm and side so that it appeared he had been stabbed in the back, and said: “This is the picture of me they should have used in the media guide.”

The loss to BC and another bad one, 42-40, to Maryland, a game in which Miami blew a 31-0 lead, could have ruined Johnson’s first season at Miami. It did not. The Hurricanes, still without a defensive coordinator, went to the Fiesta Bowl, where they were beaten by UCLA, 39-37. At 7 a.m. the next morning, Johnson named his new coaching staff.

A year has passed. Miami has a shot at the national championship, and Johnson has a new five-year contract that begins tonight. “I’ve never been happier in my life,” he said. “I kept telling myself if I could get through that first year, I might be at Miami for an awful lot of years to come. Turns out I was right. Everything’s perfect.”

And the Notre Dame game?

“Aw, I’m sick of the Notre Dame game,” Johnson said.