THE WHOLE TRUTH

No matter how many times Butch Davis insisted he would remain as coach at the University of Miami, fans should not have been surprised when, earlier this week, he jumped to the Cleveland Browns.

Two dozen major college football programs changed coaches in recent weeks and, along the way, there was no shortage of broken promises.

Coaches walked away from long-term contracts because they got better offers. Or they finagled contract extensions with their current schools, people within the sport suggest, by spreading rumors that they were candidates for openings elsewhere.

Athletic directors, meanwhile, gave votes of confidence to their coaches only to fire them soon after. In some cases, dismissed coaches had a winning record and a team headed to a bowl game.

And through it all, the media fueled the flames by reporting on rumors and speculation.

“I’ve never seen a year like this,” Utah Coach Ron McBride said. “Everything was crazy.”

Observers of the business of college football say they saw it coming.

“I think this has become a very unfortunate, no-holds-barred jungle,” said Michael Josephson of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey. “This is a special arena where the normal rules of honesty don’t seem to apply.”

This also is a big-money arena. In virtually every state, the highest-paid public employee is a university coach in either football or basketball, observers said. The biggest names in the business command upward of $1 million a season.

That money does not always buy loyalty.

Davis began denying he might leave Miami in late November, when he was reported to be a candidate at Alabama and with the Houston Texans.

Through January, the coach who had rebuilt the Hurricanes insisted he was close to signing a long-term extension. Then Cleveland offered him a reported $3 million a year, three times his salary at Miami.

At Florida, Athletic Director Jeremy Foley says the high stakes have changed the dynamic of loyalty in college football.

“No question, no question,” said Foley, who pays his football coach, Steve Spurrier, approximately $2 million annually. “But a contract is a contract. You hope that relationships are such that people don’t feel [they have to leave].”

Head coaches are not the only ones to come and go with alarming quickness, as McBride discovered last month when he hired Rob Spence to be his offensive coordinator.

“All of a sudden, a week later, he’s talking to somebody else,” McBride said. “Then he’s not coming.”

Citing a desire to keep his children nearer to their grandparents, Spence resigned and quickly accepted the same job at the University of Toledo. “The old handshake thing doesn’t work anymore,” McBride said.

Instead of engendering outrage, the change has brought only a shaking of heads, a quiet acceptance.

“I think the day has come, as coaches watch situations like these, they will never, never say they’re going to stay,” Texas Coach Mack Brown said.

Brown was the center of controversy after the 1997 season when he promised to stay at North Carolina, then left.

“I quit making statements,” he now says. “If you do [say you’re staying], people are going to use it against you.”

Some coaches argue that their employers are the ones who show a lack of commitment. They tell tales of athletic directors giving them a pat on the back in public, but asking around in private, searching for a new person for the job.

“If you look around [at the coaches fired this season], a number of those guys had winning records,” Brown said. “A number of those guys had been really loyal to their programs.”

Georgia fired Jim Donnan only a few weeks after Athletic Director Vince Dooley gave him a vote of confidence. Donnan had a 40-19 record over five seasons but the school reversed field on him, saying he did not have enough success against his team’s big rivals.

Ohio State voiced a similar concern in its surprise decision to buy out the remaining three years of John Cooper’s contract. While faring poorly against Michigan and in bowl games, Cooper had a 111-43-4 record over 13 seasons with the Buckeyes.

Bruce Snyder lost his job at Arizona State even though his team was on its way to the Aloha Bowl in Hawaii.

“Both sides are doing it,” ethicist Josephson said of the deception between administrators and coaches. “I don’t know who to blame, who threw the first stone. If general business acted with the casualness to commitment that sports do, everything would break down.”

Or, as Brown recalled: “Lou Holtz said it best: If you get a lifetime contract and you lose, they kill you.”

In the scramble for job security, some coaches have taken to questionable tactics. It is no secret that the surest way to more money and an extension is to become a candidate for another job.

It has become an all-too-common practice for some coaches to interview at other schools--schools they have no real interest in--if only to gain leverage on their current employers.

“That’s kind of unethical but it happens,” said McBride, who has remained at Utah for 11 seasons. “The more they get their names out there . . .”

Last month, USC pursued two coaches, Oregon State’s Dennis Erickson and Oregon’s Mike Bellotti, who eventually received bigger, longer contracts to stay put. Some in the media--not to mention fans--wondered if USC had been used.

Erickson and Bellotti denied as much.

While not commenting specifically about his coaching search, USC Athletic Director Mike Garrett said he is aware of the leveraging tactic. It is the result, he believes, of more and more coaches hiring agents.

“The agents may be playing that game. They get a percentage of the action and they want to have the maximum dollars,” he said. “Of course, the agent can only do that if his coach allows him to do it.”

Garrett spreads some of the blame to the media, which he said helps spread rumors.

“In our case, I can’t tell you how often they were wrong, totally off-base,” he said. “I was dealing with a cat and they had a rhinoceros. You just shake your head and keep going.”

Garrett said he preferred to offer no comment rather than to lie about a process he wanted to keep private. That sometimes meant taking a beating from the press, which was hungry for information.

“I think that’s a dignified position,” Josephson said.

But Josephson, whose institute promotes a sports code of ethics, fears too many administrators and coaches behave unethically in the process of hiring and firing. While many in college football conduct themselves honorably, he sees a growing “crime-free zone in terms of behavior that, in other commercial settings, would be unacceptable.”

The danger, he said, is that sports have significant social impact and the rules that govern sports business may soon become the norm in other parts of society.

“The idea of a man walking away from a contract or a university up and saying, in the middle of a season, ‘We don’t like what you’re doing,’ that idea has entered our level of expectation,” he said. “There is no moral outrage anymore.”

Administrators and coaches are beginning to see the downside too. They talk of too much attention being taken away from the game, too much pressure to win.

Some of that pressure, Brown worries, is felt by players who know their coach is on the hot seat. And too often, high school recruits commit to play for a coach who quickly leaves.

“It is a very sad state of affairs,” Josephson said. “Lily Tomlin used to say, ‘The trouble with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat.’ ”