For Many College Coaches, Basketball Isn’t a Game Any Longer

They talk about the relentless pressure of recruiting and the problems now of coping with the new academic standards.

They talk about the endless demand on winning and its relationship to the new quest for television revenues.

They talk about the familiar challenge of filling field houses and the increasingly tougher task now of dealing with temptation-romanced athletes who once viewed basketball as the means to a college education but now see it as an avenue to the NBA.

While all of it has been heard during a season of high mortality among college coaches, Bob Boyd, for one, can still reduce it to basics.

Boyd is the former USC coach whose resignation as Mississippi State’s coach will take effect when the season ends.

He reflected the other day on the number of coaches who also have signaled their resignation or retirement at season’s end and said that the underlying reason in almost all cases is still winning and losing.

“The correlation is that none of them is undefeated or leading his league,” Boyd said.

“I’m suggesting that if they were, they wouldn’t be thinking of leaving. Everything else is just a byproduct.

“I mean, tell me that Dean Smith was leaving and I’d say that you then had a reason to wonder what was going on.”

Dean Smith is the coach at top-ranked North Carolina. A newly opened campus field house has been named after him. He isn’t about to leave, but others are, or have done so already.

Besides Minnesota’s Jim Dutcher they include:

--Houston’s Guy Lewis, 63, and Kansas State’s Jack Hartman, 60. Both are retiring after long careers. Neither is bitter, but both say that the job has changed, that some of the fun is no longer there.

--Ohio State’s Eldon Miller, 46, and Florida State’s Joe Williams, 52. Both have been forced out by their universities, left to resign under pressure, Miller amid his ninth straight winning season. Each is hopeful of resuming his coaching career elsewhere.

--Pittsburgh’s Roy Chipman, 46, and Cal State Fullerton’s George McQuarn, 44. Both have talked of burnout and dissatisfaction with the system. McQuarn said that frustration and irritability, spawned by his job, have polluted the little time he has with his son. Neither Chipman nor McQuarn plans to coach again.

--Boyd, 55, who said this is one case where a losing season had nothing to do with it. Boyd has elected to forfeit the final four years of a lucrative contract because of family commitments in Southern California. He is receptive to coaching offers but otherwise plans to live in Del Mar and Palm Springs, occasionally doing TV analysis, NBA scouting and promotions for an athletic shoe company.

CBS basketball analyst Billy Packer said that he viewed the rash of resignations and retirements as the normal fallout of a high-risk business and not a barometer of increased pressure.

“It may be a little bizarre in that so much has taken place during the season,” Packer said. “But I think if you were to look at the Division I statistics, you might be shocked at the turnover rate. I mean, 25 to 35 changes a year are pretty routine.

“There’s just been so much sensationalistic writing about the negatives lately that it’s tended to create an image of turmoil in the coaching business, but the turmoil has always been there. It’s never been a place for the weak of heart.”

NCAA statistics support Packer’s view. There has been an average of 38 Division I coaching changes in the last six years. There were 55--the highest total yet--between the end of the 1984-85 season and start of the 1985-86 season, which represented 19.4% of the 283 Division I basketball jobs.

The current rate is expected to be maintained, but Chipman, who will be one of the 1986 numbers, tends to laugh at the suggestion that it all comes down to winning and losing, that the rest is a byproduct.

Chipman, a college coach for 18 years and the head coach at Pittsburgh since 1980, has built a winner and sellout attraction in a city in which four professional basketball teams have failed. He has four former Parade magazine prep All-Americans on his team. They will be back next season, but Chipman won’t.

He resents the rumors that he is resigning because of an NCAA investigation because, at this point, there is no NCAA investigation. He is resigning, he said, for all the classic reasons, some of which he recently put this way:

“I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life on the road looking for kids who are qualified to play basketball. The game has become far too important.

“There’s a lot of things more important than a basketball or football game, and it’s time people started to realize that. Hopefully I can go on to something more satisfying and not have a thousand people critique what I’m doing wrong.”

Hartman knows the feeling, he said, but has managed to live with it. He has been at Kansas State for 16 years, although he had a quadruple bypass a year ago.

“Does a guy who’s 60 years old and coached for 50 of them have to have a reason?” he said at the time, drawing laughs from a media audience that knew he had coached for a mere 35 years.

Last week, Hartman said: “I’ve enjoyed it, I’m satisfied, but I’ve had enough. I still love to coach and still love to teach, but I’m less and less able to do that. I mean, it may be an exaggeration, but it seems like only 10% of my time is now devoted to on-the-floor coaching.”

The rest, he said, goes to the media, to the alumni, to fund raising, to recruiting, to dealing with the players and their new academic requirements.

“There has always been pressure,” he said. “The pressure’s there because we put it on ourselves. It’s the way we want it. It’s the reason we’re coaches. The business demands that kind of pride, the type person that can feed off the stress.

“It’s just different now than when a lot of us started. Different because of the reasons I mentioned, the fact that we no longer have the time to do as much teaching and coaching. I guess you can say it’s a little less fun and a lot more complicated.”

The changes, of course, influenced Hartman’s decision to retire, creating a vacancy that has attracted several dozen applicants. It’s the same at Houston and Pittsburgh and all the rest. The bench beckons. The spotlight calls. Where’s the surgeon general to issue a warning? Bob Boyd has one, but will anyone listen?

“If a team plays up to the expectations of its followers, then the job is fun,” he said, dealing in basics again. “If it doesn’t, then it’s ugly. Nothing really to it, is there?”