Ron Franklin, you will be missed

If you are the type of sports fan who just watches the game without paying any mind to who is broadcasting it, then you probably heard of Ron Franklin for the first time this week.

ESPN fired Franklin today for comments he made to colleague Jeannine Edwards at a production meeting before the Chick-Fil-A Bowl in Atlanta last Friday.

Reportedly, Franklin referred to Edwards as "Sweetcakes" during a discussion unrelated to football. When she rightfully objected, he called her "asshole."

That may be all most people care to know about this story.

But there is more to be said about an excellent play-by-play announcer who should not have lost his gig because of one high-profile mistake.

I have never met Franklin and probably never will. But I will miss hearing him on ESPN's coverage of college football and college basketball.

Franklin's college hoops partner, Fran Fraschilla, is someone I used to cover for Gannett Newspapers when Fraschilla coached at Manhattan College. Fraschilla and Franklin made an excellent team on Big 12 Conference games.

The Franklin-Fraschilla duo gave us no hype, no screaming, a few deadpan jokes and plenty of substance. They were consistently a good listen.

With a Texas twang, Franklin's booming voice easily cuts through crowd noise. Hence, he never screams at his audience. He knows football and hoops, and has an understated play-by-play style in the Ray Scott/Jack Buck tradition.

In today's era of screaming boyish chatterboxes in the play-by-play chair, people like Franklin are valued by sports fans like me.

Did I know Franklin was capable of obscene, sexist comments? No.

Did he deserve to be suspended? Yes.

Did I think he would be fired? Never.

At age 68, Franklin may never get another network gig, which has more to do with the way the business of sports television has changed than with any perceptible decline in his skills.

Considering that Vin Scully is in his 80s and still going strong as the voice of the Dodgers, Franklin might have been able to go another 10 years on ESPN had the network allowed it.

Franklin, who was a star sportscaster in Texas before joining ESPN 25 years ago, may decide to go local again. If that's the case, I hope to find one of his games on satellite sometime soon.

Finally, on the subject of what may have triggered Franklin's ugly comments toward Edwards, I say this not to try to excuse the inexcusable but to make this point: The ESPN of today--with sideline reporters as eye candy on football games despite the ladies' glaring lack of football knowledge--bears little resemblance to what ESPN used to be.

Franklin, I suspect, resented having to share air time with someone who lacked the credentials to be on a football telecast, someone with whom he never had to work back in the day.

Sideline reporters on ESPN, women such as Edwards, Erin Andrews, Heather Cox and Lisa Salters, add absolutely nothing to a game telecast.

Sideline reporters on football games are so irrelevant that CBS does not even use them on its NFL telecasts, and nobody misses them.

Eye candy disguised as sideline reporters exist, as former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson once told me, to give guys something pretty to look at.

Well, I don't need any more candy.

For me, the game is enough and it always will be.

I suspect Ron Franklin, a play-by-play man from the old school, felt the same way.

Hence, it did not take much for him to snap.

It's just too bad Franklin did not complain from a seat at the hotel bar like everyone else who strongly dislikes what the hyperbolic, shallow, always-be-selling ESPN has become.

In College Football, Even the Nitpicky Rules Matter

There are still 11 days until college football’s national championship game between Oregon and Auburn in Glendale, Arizona.

Let’s hope head coaches Gene Chizik of Auburn and Chip Kelly of Oregon are reminding their players that not following every rule on the field could be the difference between becoming national champs and becoming, well, the Buffalo Bills of college football.

Even the nitpicky rules matter in college football, something we were reminded of during Thursday’s Pinstripe Bowl between Syracuse and Kansas State at Yankee Stadium.

Let’s hope Kelly and Chizik show their players the video of Kansas State wide receiver Adrian Hilburn catching a touchdown pass that cut Syracuse’s lead to 36-34 with 1:13 left after which Hilburn cost the Wildcats a legitimate chance to tie the score because of an “excessive celebration” penalty.

According to the rules, any action by a player that draws undue attention to himself is guilty of excessive celebration, resulting in a 15-yard penalty.

How did Hilburn break the rule?

He raised his right hand to his helmet and saluted the crowd in the back of the end zone.

So what, you say?

You’ve seen other players do much worse than Hilburn without being penalized, you say?

I agree with you.

The night before, in the Alamo Bowl, Oklahoma State wide receiver Justin Blackman decided to run parallel to the goal line for several seconds just to call more attention to himself before he scored a touchdown.

Blackman was not penalized.

But he should have been.

Whether you like the excessive celebration rule or not, it exists and it’s supposed to be enforced.

If not for Hilburn’s act of self-aggrandizement, Kansas State would have attempted a two-point conversion from the 3-yard line as usual. But the penalty pushed the ball back to the 18-yard line.

From the 18, a low-percentage pass by Kansas State into the end zone fell incomplete and Syracuse held on to win.

Never mind that Hilburn’s behavior in the Pinstripe Bowl was not nearly as self-absorbed as Blackman’s in the Alamo Bowl.

Never mind that the way zebra-shirted officials call college football games is wildly inconsistent.

What matters is the excessive celebration penalty has been on the books for years, yet players continue to violate the rule by diving into the end zone, or dancing, or pointing contemptuously at an opponent, or pointing vaingloriously to himself in nearly every college game.

Since coaches don’t know whether the crew officiating their game will be strict or lenient until play actually begins, the best thing to do is remind players not to do anything stupid on the field—something that could cost the game a national championship and force that player to wear a figurative pair of goat horns for the rest of his life.

Think about it. The only thing saving Hilburn from a lifetime of national ridicule is he committed his selfish act in the inaugural Pinstripe Bowl, a game most sports fans didn’t bother to watch.

But if an Auburn Tiger or an Oregon Duck who worships at the Shrine of Kanye West decides to behave like Hilburn on January 10 and costs his team a chance to win or tie the national championship game, then he will deserve every bit of criticism that comes his way.

And so will the head coach who should have taught him better.

Cam Newton: The Cloud over College Football

I don’t have a Heisman Trophy ballot, but if I did it would look like this:

(1) Cam Newton, quarterback, Auburn

(2) Andrew Luck, quarterback, Stanford

(3) LaMichael James, running back, Oregon

(4) Kellen Moore, quarterback, Boise State

(5) Patrick Patterson, safety, LSU

Since I’ve been paying close attention to college football all season, I would have to vote for Newton because the field leader of the undefeated Tigers is undoubtedly the best player in the sport.

I would vote for Newton even though he appears to be the second coming of Reggie Bush—the first Heisman Trophy winner ever to give back the award because all the dirt on how he came to be a running back at USC threaten to bury him.

Bush has done extremely well in the NFL, helping the New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl in February, and I’m sure Newton will do well in the pros.

I’m also sure Newton will be a pro in 2012 because he’ll have no reason to return to Auburn, whether he was paid to play there or not.

For now, he’s a 6-foot-6, 250-pound cloud over college football.

By now we know that his father, Cecil Newton Sr., spoke with someone supposedly representing Mississippi State about a pay-to-play arrangement for his son.

That Cecil Newton Sr. is a pastor only makes this story more obscene than the average big-time college sports recruiting scandal.

Newton did not go to Mississippi State. He went to Auburn…after leaving the University of Florida, where he reportedly stole a laptop computer and was caught cheating on three separate occasions, and a Texas junior college, where he played last year.

Cam Newton “is a great man,” Auburn coach Gene Chizik said after Newton led the Tigers to a 49-31 victory over Georgia last Saturday.

A great college quarterback? Yes. A sensational athlete? Absolutely. But a great young man? Hardly.

Newton may well be remembered as the kamikaze who took Auburn football to heights even Pat Sullivan and Bo Jackson—the school’s two Heisman Trophy winners—could not reach in the 1970s and ’80s, only to cause the school’s program to crash and burn after his departure.

Auburn is likely to lose everything because of the Newton affair: a Southeastern Conference division title, an SEC championship, an undefeated season, a national championship and a Heisman Trophy winner.

It would violate NCAA rules if Newton—or anyone representing Newton, e.g., his father the pastor—received money or financial incentives to attend Auburn.

Trouble is we’re not likely to find out if Newton got anything, and how much, and from whom before December 6, the final day on which Heisman votes can be submitted.

So voters have to vote for Newton based on what they’ve seen him do on the field. But voters also have to think harder this year about who their second choice would be—because he could well become the 2010 Heisman Trophy winner by default in a year or two.

Texas Tech Snubs Ruffin McNeill

Not every touching story in college football has a happy ending.

Take the story of Ruffin McNeill, a football lifer who deserves better.

After leading Texas Tech to a 41-31 victory over Michigan State in the Alamo Bowl last Saturday night, McNeill should have had the word “interim” removed from his job description and been named head coach of the Red Raiders.

That would have created a scene as heartwarming as anything in The Blind Side, the Sandra Bullock film about NFL player Michael Oher and the white family that adopted him as a homeless teen in Memphis.

But it appears McNeill will not get the chance to become the first black “non-interim” head coach in any sport in Texas Tech’s history.

Instead, the good ol’ boys stand to get their way again.

Tech is courting Tommy Tuberville, who spent 2009 working for ESPN after being paid by Auburn University to resign following the ’08 season.

Tuberville, 55, has had success in college football. He won the Bear Bryant Coach of the Year Award in ’04 after leading Auburn to a 13-0 season.

He also has failed on the big stage.

He also has played fast and loose with the truth.

In 1998, he sought to dispel rumors he would leave Ole Miss by saying, “They’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box.”

He signed with Auburn two days later.

Were it not for that 300-pound gorilla on the field known as race, Tuberville would not be considered a better choice for Texas Tech than McNeill.

Tuberville has no ties whatsoever to the Big 12 school in Lubbock, Texas. His past strongly suggests he would try to parlay any success at Tech to land a more glamorous gig somewhere else.

McNeill, meanwhile, has served with distinction at Tech for the past 10 years: first as a special teams coordinator hired by Mike Leach, then as the defensive coordinator.

When Tech fired Leach last week for mishandling a player diagnosed with a concussion, McNeill was named interim head coach.

“We all want Coach Ruff to get the job,” running back Baron Batch said after the game in explaining why Tech players walked onto the Alamo Dome field arm-in-arm with McNeill.

Batch, 22, is African-American, just like the vast majority of skilled players at Texas Tech and every other major-conference school.

Most of them will never see a black man in charge of a major-conference football program.

This sad reality makes it more difficult for these student-athletes to ever visualize themselves in such a position.

Batch, a senior in 2010, deserves to play more than one game for McNeill.

McNeill deserves the same opportunity Bill Stewart received.

Stewart, a career assistant coach, was named interim head coach at West Virginia days before the 2008 Fiesta Bowl after Rich Rodriguez abruptly signed with Michigan.

Mountaineers players took the field that night arm-in-arm with Stewart. They played hard for Stewart. They beat Oklahoma for Stewart.

After the game, Stewart was named head coach. He still has the job.

But the racial dynamics were different at West Virginia; Stewart is white.

McNeill is 51. His father, a retired high school football and basketball coach, played football at Johnson C. Smith, a historically black college in Charlotte.

McNeill’s mother played basketball and softball before earning her degree from Barber-Scotia College in Charlotte, a school founded in 1867 as “an institution for the training of Negro women.”

McNeill played strong safety and was team captain at East Carolina from 1976-79 before getting into coaching as a graduate assistant at Clemson. He holds a master’s degree in sociology.

If there is not room in the head coaching ranks of major college football for Ruffin McNeill, then the sport is sicker than you could imagine.

McNeill was candid and engaging with the media before and after the Alamo Bowl. He approved a daring quarterback change in the fourth quarter that sparked the team and made gutsy decisions to go for it on fourth-down plays that sealed the victory.

Afterward, McNeill’s players, black and white, doused him with Gatorade and gave him bear hugs as if he were their father.

But the administration, boosters, alumni and other friends of the program at Texas Tech evidently would rather pony up to Tuberville.

Never mind that Tech needs athletes who look more like a young McNeill than a young Tuberville to keep their program from becoming irrelevant.

There are 119 colleges competing in the Football Bowl Subdivision, formerly known as Division 1-A. Of those 119 schools, only a dozen have black head coaches.

This is not an accident. It is a scandal…a scandal that continues with the apparent snubbing of Ruffin McNeill at Texas Tech.

Does Mark Mangino Eat His Players?

The cult of the dictatorial football coach goes back as far as the game itself.

There’s nothing new about a coach using any available tactic to try to motivate his players.

Take, for example, Vince Lombardi, the coach whose name graces the National Football League’s championship trophy.

Lombardi (a fellow graduate of my alma mater, Fordham University), transformed the Green Bay Packers from perennial door mats into NFL champions in the 1960s by any means necessary.

As Packers guard Jerry Kramer wrote of Lombardi in the book, Instant Replay, “He treated us all the same…like dogs.”

Lombardi is probably an icon to Mark Mangino, the 450-pound head coach at Kansas University.

But it is likely that Mangino’s means of motivating players through fear and intimidation sorely lacks Lombardi’s well-known compassion for those who turned his teachings into victories on autumn Sundays.

Beneath Lombardi’s crusty exterior was said to be a fatherly figure who loved his players unconditionally.

Beneath Mangino’s crusty exterior appears to be an overabundance of girth and mean-spiritedness.

Current and former players—each of whom is African-American—are speaking out about cruel, despicable remarks allegedly made by Mangino.

Why now?

Kansas is losing, 1-6 in the Big 12 Conference, two years after winning the Big 12 and representing the conference in a BCS game, the Orange Bowl.

Players who have long incurred the wrath of Mangino now see blood in the water and want nothing better than to harpoon him.

Former player Raymond Brown, whose brother had been shot and wounded, said Mangino told him, “I’ll send you back to St. Louis where you can get shot by your homies.”

Former linebacker and team captain Joe Mortensen said Mangino threatened him by saying, “I’ll send you back to the ghetto. You can stand on the corner and drink out of a paper bag.”

Former Kansas wide receiver Dexton Fields said he heard Mangino tell another player, “You want to be a lawyer? You’re going to be an alcoholic just like your dad.”

For a college student of limited means on an athletic scholarship, the threat of having that scholarship revoked creates a chilling effect.

It is nothing short of psychological torture.

My attempts to reach former Kansas All-America Aqib Talib, now a rookie cornerback with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have been unsuccessful.

But I’ll keep trying.

Mangino brought his demoralized Jayhawks to Texas last Saturday night, where they were slaughtered by the Longhorns 51-20.

One Texas fan brought the following sign to the game:

“Mark Mangino Eats His Players.”

Whether the players’ allegations are spot-on or exaggerated, Mangino appears to be a goner at KU.

How can he (or any assistant) walk into the home of an African-American recruit whose background approximates those of the players assailing Mangino and convince a parent that their son would be in good hands?

That Coach Mangino would care for their son as if he were his own?

Too many players, past and present, are making too many of the same allegations about Mangino for them to be purely coincidental.

On a radio show last week, Mangino claimed “99 percent” of his players at Kansas have had no problem with him.

Well, where are they?

So far, I have heard just two Kansas players defend Mangino.

Quarterback Todd Reesing told the Associated Press, “He came here to a team that was undisciplined and a program that lacked it and he established discipline and got guys to work hard and believe in themselves.”

Reesing may be accurate in describing his relationship with Mangino.

But it’s worth noting that Reesing is not African-American.

Nor is he from a family of limited means or a hardscrabble neighborhood.

Mangino probably has never spoken to Reesing in the same disrespectful tone he is alleged to have used with the black players.

Perhaps Mangino bullies players without displaying any tough love to try to compensate for his own shortcomings.

The unmistakable fact is when Mangino stands on the sideline he resembles a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float at rest.

Clearly, this morbidly obese man is not able to manage his own body, which would make it impossible for me to entrust him with my progeny.

While Mangino does not literally eat football players, he also does not seem to nurture their spirit or teach them anything that will make them better men.

A Lombardi he most certainly is not.

Today's College Football Playoff KOs Oregon, Iowa, LSU, Notre Dame

The easiest column for any sportswriter is one calling for a playoff system in major college football, especially since President Barack Obama says he’s for it.

Forget it. It won’t happen, nor should it happen.

Every major college football team plays at least 12 games now. To add a four-team or eight-team playoff to determine a national champion would prolong the season to almost-NFL length (without paying the athletes) and make a mockery of the idea that these players are really student-athletes.

There has to be some time left for class lectures, term papers, research projects, mid-term exams and finals, right?

Here’s what is good about the current system in college football: The regular season acts as a de facto playoff tournament—weeding out the unworthy teams every weekend while allowing a dark horse or two to play its way into one of the five Bowl Championship Series games (Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, BCS Championship Game).

Here’s what is not so good: The Associated Press media poll, the USA Today Coaches’ poll and the computer-generated polls that all weigh too heavily toward teams from the six so-called “power conferences”: the Southeastern Conference; the Big 10 (which actually has 11 teams); the Big 12; the Pacific 10; the Atlantic Coast Conference; and the Big East.

Many people hate the current system.

But you know what? It works. Every week, the system separates contenders from pretenders.

Today’s games knocked out four pretenders:

· Oregon, coming off a devastating 47-20 romp over USC last week, showed it’s not quite ready for prime time, losing at Stanford 51-42;

· Iowa was 9-0 before losing at home to Northwestern, 17-10;

· LSU, which could have won the SEC crown and staked a claim for a national title berth, lost at Alabama, 24-15; and

· Notre Dame, the greedy football independent that plays every home game on NBC and every road game on another major network, was humiliated at home by Navy, 23-21.

So now we know, on the second weekend of November, that one of four teams will win the national championship: Texas (Big 12), Florida (SEC), Alabama (SEC) or long shot Cincinnati (Big East).

The rest of the season will determine which school’s 300-pounders get to hold up the fancy crystal football on the field in Pasadena, CA on January 7.

A school from one of the power conferences will win the national championship every year. That’s just the way it is in college football.

Media conglomerates such as Disney (owners of ESPN and ABC), Viacom (owners of CBS) and News Corporation (owners of Fox Sports) pay billions of dollars to televise major college football.

And the power conferences, major bowl committees and mid-major conferences—in that order—are sharing those billions for producing mostly exciting games that garner high TV ratings.

Hence, there is no incentive for the NCAA to use January to stage a football version of college basketball’s “March Madness.”

It is better to be a Gonzaga or George Mason in college basketball than to be a Boise State or TCU in college football.

In football, the best that Boise State of the Western Athletic Conference or TCU of the Mountain West Conference can hope for is to get into a BCS game in January.

It just won’t be the national championship game.

Last year, Utah of the Mountain West crashed the party—and then embarrassed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

The year before, it was Hawaii of the WAC—and then the Rainbows got eviscerated by Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

And the year before that, Boise State played party-crasher and stunned Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl—one of the most exciting bowl games ever.

So, I’m sorry, Mr. President, but major college football will basically stay the way it is, with a little tweaking here and there to give the Boise States and TCUs more of a reason to hope audaciously.

(How does he find time to watch college football? I need health care.)