Hey, Coach, SIT DOWN

Two things can be said today about the people who coach big-time basketball and football in America, college and pro alike:

* They have too much power. All coaches have more power than they need--and more than they should be allowed to keep.

* They belong in the stands. On game day, every coach should be removed from the field, or from the basketball floor, and seated in the crowd--far from the players.

In nearly every instance, the role of America’s football and basketball coaches is incompatible with modern trends in leadership.

Most other U.S. businesses have welcomed their employees into the decision making, thereby improving production.

By contrast, U.S. football and basketball teams are, almost everywhere, ever more autocratic. Football coaches, for example, increasingly intrude on the moment-by-moment action. And in basketball, coaches scream instructions even as a player is going for the basket.

Large changes are due. Overdue.

At the university level, that seems self-evident. To bring sports into line with other campus and classroom customs, college coaches should depart at game time while their players demonstrate what they learned in practice.

The coaches wouldn’t like that.

“A team is not a democracy,” Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight has said.

But why isn’t it?

In a nation that has strenuously opposed kings and dictators for more than 200 years, thousands of Americans have shown that democratic measures are clearly more rewarding than an autocrat’s.

It is the American way, when you think about it, for athletes to elect their leaders, and for coaches to instruct, not rule.

And as instructors, they should focus on two neglected areas: teaching players to be effective play-callers and productive captains.

In other sports today--both individual and team sports--most coaches are much less intrusive. For instance, coaching is against the rules in tennis. Most golfers are on their own. At the track, so are jockeys, and, at 200 m.p.h., race drivers.

Although baseball managers micro-manage scandalously, the game tempo in hockey denies that privilege to NHL coaches. Track and field coaches are hard to see, and harder to find. And at a crew race, the coach, drink in hand, stands on the boathouse roof.

Only in World Cup soccer are there mixed signals. Mexico lost one game this year when its laid-back coach failed to replace two missing forwards in overtime, as the rules allow. But other coaches intruded infamously, ruining big games with orders to their players to play only defense.

Still, World Cup meddlers are hardly world-class meddlers. That distinction belongs to American football and basketball coaches.

With more democracy, the pros as well as the colleges would have a more human game, a more varied, more entertaining, more popular game.

PLAYERS CAN LEARN

On the campus scene today, from one school to the next, the real surprise is that so few college presidents seem to realize that football ought to be a learning experience for their students.

As should basketball.

It’s a given at any university that activities such as debate teams and, say, school plays are for learning. Although play directors are also university employees, no school president expects to see the director up on the stage managing Juliet’s big love scene with Romeo.

But the next day, he does expect to see the football coach running the school team as if it were his own personal property: ordering the players about, calling all the plays and defenses, and blaming failures on execution, which means, “I had a good idea and the players screwed it up.”

College authorities apparently assume that football and basketball are without educational purpose even though, surely, student-athletes have a lot to learn about living--about the values that matter to civilized adults--lessons they can get playing a game.

For there are no born leaders.

Nor was any athlete ever born knowing when to lead, when to follow, when to speak up, when to pipe down, how to think under stress, how to interact with teammates.

Most 1990s players aren’t learning any of that. Standing in the huddle between plays, instead of thinking and talking together, they wait like dumb animals to be led around.

The symbol of what’s really wrong with big-time sports today is the NFL’s radio in the helmet--the tool that finally reduces the quarterback to an automaton, even in the two-minute drill, which used to be his.

Although, happily, the helmet radio hasn’t yet reached the universities, they still don’t see that coaches should be judged the way math profs are judged: on how well they prepare their students.

In basketball, quiz time is game time. And at a learning institution, while his students are taking a test in basketball, should the coach be stomping around, waving his arms, yelling at his team, insulting the officials?

What do players learn from that?

Such coaching excesses result from an overemphasis on winning that could be curbed by converting the autocrat in charge into an educator. Presumably, basketball crowds aren’t there to see a coach rave and bluster. They’ve come to see a game, and so at game time the coaches should be out of there. They’ve worked hard. They’ve earned a good seat in the stands.

PLAYERS CAN LEAD

If a college sport is construed as an educational experience, it follows that student-athletes should be involved in game-day leadership.

They once were.

Football was developed in the last century by players, not coaches. And for many years, players remained in charge. Indeed, coaching by non-students was forbidden.

The penalty for hiring a coach, according to an early rule committee member, Parke Davis, was game forfeiture.

If today’s game-day decisions were made as they once were--by student-athletes instead of coaches--superior leadership training would be afforded two or three basketball captains and half a dozen football captains, different sets every season, possibly every month or two.

There’s a lot for them to do: make substitutions and adjustments, keep each player’s head in the game, keep everyone’s emotions right on, calm down the guys who need that, rally the team in adversity, verbalize effectively in crisis situations.

Majoring and maturing in all that is an educational experience that in some respects beats classwork.

And not long ago, American college students were into it.

Even today, “The captains are the coaches at Oxford and other (European universities),” said Pat Haden, the Rhodes Scholar from USC, who, before his days as a downtown Los Angeles lawyer and Turner-NFL TV analyst, studied over there.

“It’s a system that works well, too,” said Haden, who was on Oxford’s blue (varsity) teams in several sports. “You elect the captain-coaches. As a player, you respect the coach because you voted for him.”

In America, could captains take over?

Said Seattle SuperSonic Coach George Karl, “The game of basketball wouldn’t suffer a lot if the coaches were (absent) on game day. If the coach does the job right during the week, there isn’t much he really has to do in games.”

Karl was speaking of college coaching, but in his view, much the same holds in the NBA.

“The big thing in a (pro) game is simply recognizing early on who’s hot and who’s not,” Karl said.

It isn’t every captain who can do that. But, then, it isn’t every coach, either.

PLAYERS CAN CALL PLAYS

Play-calling, offensive and defensive, is the other function of sports leadership, and there’s good reason to believe that most games would be more entertaining if players instead of coaches made the calls--as they did in the days of Sammy Baugh, Sid Luckman, John Unitas, Joe Namath, Terry Bradshaw and, among others, Ken Stabler and Jim Plunkett.

When coaches are out of the signal-calling process, what’s lost in formal organization is more than made up by player spontaneity and creativity.

Here’s the difference:

* Coaches, most of them graying conservatives, call plays from a computer list. You see them reading their printouts every Sunday.

Each week they compute the best percentage play for every situation--on every down--and then at game time, rather than think about what might be going on out on the field, they simply check the printout and make the highest-percentage call.

Thus plays sent in by a coach, many of them picked last Tuesday, are mostly mechanical, conservative, predictable, and not responsive to sudden change--which exactly describes the Raider calls that have angered Jeff Hostetler this season.

In recent years, the only NFL coaching staffs excelling as signal-callers were those organized by Bill Walsh and Jimmy Johnson, both now out of the league.

* Players, most of them young and adventurous, make calls that tend to be more enterprising than a coach’s as well as more aggressive and more responsive to what happened a moment ago.

Play-calling quarterbacks focus on the here and now, proceeding on the evidence of their own eyes and the input of their teammates.

Is an opponent winded, or suddenly limping?

Is a defensive tackle charging too hard--asking to be trapped?

Is there an unforeseen opportunity to do something special?

Players aren’t buried in the ritualized history of a computer printout. They are caught up in the action on the field.

They are immersed in today’s challenge, not last Tuesday’s.

What’s more, their quarterback is doubtless a believer in Unitas’ golden rule: “Take what the defense gives you.”

Quarterbacks are more inclined than any coach to pass the ball aggressively on first down, when defensive teams, both pro and college, nearly always play the run.

Coaches--whose concern is not to lose--think about interceptions. Quarterbacks--whose concern is not to get killed--think about getting hit.

The quarterback is acutely aware that there’s less chance of a body-shattering sack on first-down plays--when defensive coaches worry more about runs than passes.

He is also aware--if his coach isn’t--that most of the head-snapping sacks that make the highlight films are dealt on third and long.

Jim Kelly knows.

The Buffalo quarterback is the single active example of a play-calling player.

It’s an honor he first got four years ago when, disgusted with Buffalo’s ground-based game plans, he wrested signal-calling away from his coaching staff.

Kelly did this simply by keeping the Bills in their no-huddle two-minute offense for most of every game, throwing early and often, and disorienting defenses with an up-tempo attack.

The tempo was so fast that his coaches couldn’t send in the plays--and that was obviously Kelly’s hidden agenda.

Most pro coaches wouldn’t have stood for any such thing. When in 1977 Namath tried to do it for the Rams, he was benched, and never played again.

But Buffalo’s Marv Levy, the NFL’s resident Phi Beta Kappa scholar, has been called the league’s smartest coach. It is a measure of Levy that despite his personal conservatism as a football man, he let Kelly have his revolution.

The result was four years of Buffalo overachievement, an unprecedented four straight Super Bowl appearances by a team that isn’t deeply talented--as it proves year after year. Overwhelmed by much better talent, the Bills have lost at the Super Bowl all four times.

Elsewhere, NFL coaches are still tightening their grip on the controls, still calling conservative, unimaginative plays.

As are college coaches.

Game day still belongs to them. And that will continue if the nation’s college presidents, NFL presidents, and NBA presidents will it.

But some day, with any luck, in a more perfect world, game day can be more democratic--a players’ day. In that era, during the days before and after games, coaches would be involved about as they are now. They would organize and supervise practices, teach techniques and leadership skills, and develop game plans.

In addition, in a more democratic era, coaches would have to be out recruiting a different kind of player--a thinking player. Size, speed and motor skills are only enough in a robot world--today’s football and basketball world.

The new premium would be on thinking under pressure, and, soon, there would be livelier minds on the field and on the basketball floor. The coaches, meanwhile, on game day, would be somewhere else. That’s one time when sports teams can do without coaches.