Stakes High in Colleges, and Coaches Feel Pressure

Once, before 45-second clocks, three-point baskets and Dick Vitale, college basketball coaches were full-time faculty members who were paid to teach and asked to win games.

But in today’s dollar-crazed, television-driven world of college athletics, coaches are the ringmasters of a jump-shot, slam-dunk circus--and the ringmasters are under siege and talking about organizing a union.

“The monster is eating the masters,” Xavier Coach Pete Gillen said. “Everyone wants to get to the Final Four, and everyone wants to get rich quick.”

The pressure to win never has been greater, and the stakes never have been higher.

A first-round bid to this year’s National Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament was worth $250,000 to each school, and the teams in the Final Four in Seattle each are guaranteed $1.23 million.

It’s no wonder then that coaches are being sacrificed in the rush for wins and dollars.

“There is no loyalty,” Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said. “You win, or you get fired.”

Still, the elite coaches can cry all the way to the bank. For them, the perks are financially rewarding.

“The rich get richer,” said Paul Westhead, the Loyola-Marymount coach. “They get the house, the $150,000 TV contract, the $150,000 shoe contract and the $150,000 coaching contract. But the vast majority of coaches are getting $40,000 to coach and maybe a $4,000 shoe deal. And that’s comparing apples to apples. The poor middle guys are just voices out there who get forgotten.”

This spring, the terrain is littered with coaching casualties. Some coaches claim this is the worst turnover they have seen.

“You expect some attrition,” Westhead said. “If you lose a bunch of games, something will happen. But when you see the fate of a Don Donoher, that is categorically unacceptable.”

Donoher, who won more than 400 games in 25 years at Dayton, was fired after three straight losing years.

Tennessee’s Don DeVoe coaxed the Volunteers into the NCAA Tournament, but he resigned one step ahead of being fired.

After his first losing season in 11 years, Bob Donewald was fired at Illinois State.

In all, more than two dozen of the 294 Division I coaches are expected to be out of work.

“This is a sick thing,” Indiana Coach Bob Knight said. “I think these people are sick with this whole basketball thing. The way that coaches have been handled has been absolutely ridiculous.”

Some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. Bill Frieder, Michigan’s coach for seven years, was forced to resign before the NCAA Tournament after accepting a contract to coach next season at Arizona State. Frieder’s loss was Steve Fisher’s gain. The interim coach has guided Michigan to the Final Four.

Many coaches sympathize with Frieder’s predicament. They say winning, not loyalty, is the sport’s most valued commodity.

“I’ve seen a tremendous change and increase of pressure,” said Tom Penders, who has coached at Fordham, Rhode Island and Texas in the last four years.

“At Fordham, we won in the NIT five straight years. I thought it was a heck of an accomplishment with a school with a $22,000 budget, roach-infested dorms and holes in the roof at the gym. Our president could not understand why we couldn’t get in the NCAAs. I told him, ‘If we could get the same kind of commitment as Georgetown, I’ll get you in the NCAAs.’ ”

The pressure to win has taken its toll in other ways. Maryland’s Bob Wade, suffering from dehydration, collapsed and was hospitalized after his team defeated North Carolina State in the first round of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.

“You get caught up in the areas of coaching and recruiting and you forget about yourself,” Wade said. “I had to take two steps back and evaluate things. The program is important, but so is your health. This is a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day job. Basically, you’re suffering from stress and worry. You’re trying to please so many people--the team, the alumni, the administration.”

Coaching also has been altered radically in the last decade by television, which transformed college basketball from a cult sport to a growth industry.

The 1968 UCLA-Houston showdown at the Astrodome signaled the beginning of a new era, a three-way marriage of big money, huge arenas and television.

It wasn’t until 11 years later, though, that the Final Four became a national phenomenon. The 1979 championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State marked the first on-court meeting of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and drew the highest TV ratings in tournament history.

“What is evolving is the game is getting stronger,” Westhead said. “Division I college basketball has become a big business; it is a money-making venture for all parties. The alumni reap benefits. The schools reap benefits. The coaches are players in this business. For better or worse, we don’t take the Ivy League approach.”

Coaches are now the sideline showmen of the game.

“They’re becoming actors,” said John Wooden, who guided UCLA to 10 NCAA titles in 12 seasons before retiring in 1975. “Coaches and players are becoming more individualistic.”

“The fact is the color guys on TV are ex-coaches, and they focus on the coach,” Boeheim said. “And there are so many more games on TV. Before, no one focused on you. We were on national TV 22 times, and you become bigger than the game because you’re there forever while the players come and go every four years. I’m doing the same job I did 10 years ago, for a lot more money.”

Television provides the colleges with millions of dollars--CBS paid $166 million over three years to televise the NCAA Tournament and four other college championship events--but creates a revenue monster that requires constant feeding with victories. Defeat means a financial setback.

“Many of those broadcasters who stand on hills and mountain tops, who perpetuate myths of how great a coach a guy is, they don’t really know,” said Temple Coach John Chaney. “Is he a great coach because he has great talent? In my situation, I know we’re just not that good without talent. Your life rests in the hands of a youngster who is 18 years old, looking at your program and deciding that five or six telecasters said how great your school is. He makes his choice based on the wrong information.

“Everyone wants to be seen on TV. Everyone wants to go to a school that is highly visible. Everyone wants to go to a school that will have a chance to reach the Final Four. Those are the things that tempt youngsters.”

And what tempts college administrators? Meeting budgets, maintaining a refined image and winning. The NCAA literally has hundreds of rules regarding recruiting and scheduling but few covering the issue of hiring and firing coaches.

“I don’t believe that money is the primary consideration at all institutions,” said Dr. Martin A. Massengale, the Nebraska chancellor who heads the NCAA’s Presidents’ Commission. “If the coach is doing the things we ask him to do--build a good program on a solid foundation, abide by all the rules and train young people--that’s important.”

What the coaches want is security.

But security comes with a price. Coaches can be hired and fired, but they are free to make a fortune--$200,000 and up for the elite, which is more than five times the salary of tenured professors.

Some coaches have talked openly of forming a union. More than 2,000 college and high school coaches will gather at the National Association of Basketball Coaches convention in Seattle, but don’t expect them to leave wearing union labels.

“I was in a union, and my father was in a union,” Princeton’s Pete Carril said. “We’re coaches. We’re not steelworkers.”