Glanville’s Team Would Rather Dress for Excess

The New Orleans Saints, who beat the Atlanta Falcons on Thursday night, are a low-key team with a low-key coach, Jim Mora. When the Saints travel, they wear suits and ties.

In contrast, the Falcons have an extroverted coach in Jerry Glanville, who is often dressed in a black cowboy outfit and races cars and motorcycles. Moreover, the Falcons have no dress code for traveling.

“I don’t tell them to wear coats and ties,” Glanville said. “One team I coached traveled in blue blazers and ties. It looked like a glee club. It would have been better off singing.” *

Trivia time: Who holds the NCAA Division I-A record for most touchdowns in a career?

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Gap crisis: Chuck Daly and Pat Riley are regarded as the NBA’s best-dressed coaches. Daly takes the matter seriously. He even offers advice to peers who spend less time on their wardrobes.

“Double-breasted suits are still in,” Daly told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “But the single biggest problem I see is that you have to have an outstanding tie. A lot of coaches don’t understand that, and its problem. You can’t have a gap there.”

Something to think about, all right.

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Wrong range: The old Visalia Oaks baseball team has a new name, but it doesn’t quite fit. The Class-A California League team now will be known as the Central Valley Rockies, which is about as contradictory a term as is possible.

Because it’s now a farm club of the National League expansion Colorado Rockies, the team will go by the name Rockies, even though it’s in the San Joaquin Valley with the Sierra Nevada on its doorstep.

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Oh, doctor: From San Francisco Examiner columnist Ray Ratto: “The (NBA) lottery is the way to go to get well and the only way to get into the lottery is to get sick.”

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Patriot policy: The New England Patriots have a rule that any starter who is injured gets his job back when he’s healthy.

“Wow,” writes Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe. “Under the Patriot rules, Lou Gehrig would have gone back to the bench when Wally Pipp got over his headache.”

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Not so rosy: Jerry Tarkanian, coach of the San Antonio Spurs, has good reason for his mournful look as his team struggles to get to .500.

“I start thinking guys my age (62) should be working in the garden,” Tarkanian told the Chicago Tribune. “I think I could be living in San Diego, looking at the ocean and doing Clipper games on TV (as he did last season).”

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Passing on passive: The Golden State Warriors are almost in desperate need of a center. They had an opportunity to draft 6-foot-11 Elden Campbell, now with the Lakers, but passed on him in the 1990 draft.

“I don’t think that’s a mistake, personally,” Don Nelson, the Warriors’ general manager and coach told the San Francisco Examiner. “You would have to see him play in college. He hasn’t changed. He’s still very passive.”

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Trivia answer: Steve Owens of Oklahoma, with 56 from 1967-69.

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Quotebook: Boston Celtic President Red Auerbach on Jon Barry, the team’s unsigned first-round draft choice: “I hope his agent is paying him, because we’re not.”