Krivak Ponders Future at Maryland

Jean Krivak admits she sighed with relief when the Maryland football season ended. She had watched while Maryland’s players “dropped like flies” with injuries. She had watched while the coaching staff made player change after player change. She had watched while the tension built.

She had seen the toll all of this had taken on Joe Krivak, the Maryland football coach and her husband.

“He looked so tired at the end,” she said. “It has been wearing. The schedule. The injuries. By the end of the season, he was so drained ... Someone told me this one time and I believe it: You coach harder when you’re losing than when you’re winning.

“But in a situation like this they were trying to be magicians.”

She had sat in the stands this season, as she has every season. In the three years Krivak has been head coach, Jean has missed only one game, and it took a hurricane to keep her away from that one last September. In 28 years of marriage, all of them as a coach’s wife, she has seen her fair share of football games, heard her fair share of fans.

“I do sit in the stands, so I know what’s going on; I hear the comments,” she said. “I’ve been in this business long enough to know that when you’re winning, people think you’re wonderful and if you lose, they don’t think you’re so hot. However, with the schedule and the injuries, I don’t know if it’s fair to judge won-lost. But you know how it is, you never want anyone to say anything bad about your children or your husband.”

The Terps finished the season 3-7-1, bringing Krivak’s three-year head coaching record to 12-20-1. No one regrets that more than Krivak.

“There are days when it’s tough, no two ways about it,” Krivak said. “By in large, I’m not satisfied ... But you’ve got to keep it in proper perspective, because if you don’t, it’ll drive you crazy.

“I think when it really boils down to the final analysis, people really don’t care (about the reasons for losing). Everyone loves a winner and everybody wants to be a winner. And if you’re not, then, somehow, you aren’t any good. Well, I don’t buy that.”

He and Jean talk about his job. Jean recalls one evening when they were talking about the questions surrounding Joe’s future when she recalled a series of ads run by Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.

“They wanted their customers to decide whether to keep the restaurant’s symbol, the Big Boy, and the promotion was, ‘Will he go or will he stay?’ I told Joe, ‘We should do something like that,’ ” said Jean, recalling the laughter that followed.

Joe Krivak has one year left on a four-year contract, but there does appear to be a question of whether he will go or stay. He is scheduled to talk with Athletic Director Lew Perkins about his future soon. At a lot of schools, it would be a foregone conclusion that he would return for his last year.

But at Maryland, where the administration already is paying three head basketball coaches -- Lefty Driesell, Bob Wade and the current Coach, Gary Williams -- things don’t always go the way they’re expected.

And so the questions continue. Will Krivak complete his contract? Does he want to complete his contract?

“I didn’t say I was definitely coming back,” he said just before Thanksgiving. “I’m just relaxing and thinking about some things. I’ve got a year on my contract, and let’s just let it go at that. I’ve got a year. That’s where it sits. We’ll just see what happens.”

Krivak believes the program is headed in the right direction. He points to increased numbers of upper classmen. This season there were 13 seniors who came through the Maryland program. Three others were walk-ons and three more were junior college transfers. Next season, Krivak expects the number of seniors to expand to 20.

He said last year’s recruiting class was one of the best at Maryland in the 1980s. And a number of those true freshmen -- such as Bill Inge, Ron Reagan, David Marrone and Brandon Bertha - saw action during the past year. Krivak sees a bright future for them.

But everything is not the way he would like it -- either in performance or the perceptions people have of his program.

“My job and our level of performance is predicated on the performance of 18-, 19-, and 20-year-old kids,” he said. “We put it on display 11 or 12 times a year for everyone to analyze, take apart and critique and then they make their evaluation of you based on those performances. And, for the most part, it is done by people who don’t know a whole lot about what you’re doing.

“And it’s probably the only profession where you put it on display, except perhaps the producers of a play, where you are subjected to the scrutiny of your audience.”

When Jean Krivak is asked if she thinks her husband is happy in his job, she is thoughtful.

“That’s really tough,” she said. “I think, as an assistant you always aspire to be a head coach. I don’t think you’d be a good assistant if you didn’t.

“The thing I feel is that until you walk in his shoes, you never really know what it’s about. Probably, you’d take the job, but it might be called disillusionment, a little disillusioned in what it actually is as opposed to what you thought it was. You miss a little of the player contact. He always had good rapport with players and it’s always harder to have a good rapport with 125 as opposed to 10 or 12.”

Joe Krivak was asked the same question.

“Some days you like it,” he said. “Some days . . . So many things are tied in with winning that make it enjoyable. But when you’re not winning, it makes it extremely difficult, because everything you’re generally evaluated on is wins and losses.

“You always think it can be done and it will be done,” he said. “You’re close in so many instances. A player here or a player there, a break here or a break there. You know, we lost four very close games this season. If we had won those games, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about these things.”

Away from football, Krivak is supported by his wife and friends “who were my friends before I had this job and who are still my friends when things are going tough, and we’ve had three really tough years,” he said.

“I think that’s all that counts,” he said. “You have to know who you are and what you are and I think if anyone has any doubt about that, all they have to do is look at Joe Krivak and his family and how they’ve lived and how they conduct themselves. That in itself is my testimony.”