How to Be an Awful Football Coach and Retire a Happy Man

I have a bit of free advice for you. If you love hard, back-breaking, mind-bending work with little or no appreciation, go into coaching. Any type of coaching--from Pee Wee to college football. It all boils down to the same thing: If your team does well, they get the kudo's and if you suffer a few sorry seasons, you won't have to wonder if you will be fired at season's end or not.

It's that simple. I always liked jobs that were uncomplicated and had no room for technicalities and small talk that wastes your time and those doing the talking.

Coaching a college football team fits that description. The only talk you, as coach, will have to worry about is the mandatory team meetings you have each week before your next game and a few scoldings of rebellious players and assistant coaches who despise work. The rest is up to you and on your shoulders entirely. The recruiting, scouting, meeting with a prospect's parents and so on and so on.

And with your 60-hour weeks (those short ones) the only monetary raise you might expect might arrive from your trustees, athletic director and college president provided that your team has a near-perfect record on the field and no record off the field.

Then after several monotonous, thankless seasons, something strange and unexplainable happens. You, your staff, family or pastor can come near to telling you why this mysterious thing happened. But it did. Your athletic director meets with you in a private meeting one sunny morning and sums all of this up in one sentence: "Buster, the reason we decided to give you a $100,000.00 raise was not because of a one-loss season or because your players know the cops on a first-name basis. No, sir. It is simply because you know how to do things without any glory or fame. To that I say, 'nice job."

Then when your next season begins another strange thing happens. You happen to see one of the upper echelon college coaches who pull down a few million a year and always make it to the play off's talking about how the game of football could be made better. For who? Not you, "Mr. Money Sacks," you have enough dough put away that if you were to just quit and head home, you would never have to work again.

"This millionaire college football coach is always getting himself in the news," you mutter to yourself as you get your game plan ready for another season of pretty much the same thing: playing teams that are as mediocre as yours and hoping that you might get to the play off's. Not an unreachable dream if you can grab ahold of it.

"I wish that coaches like, uhhh, me, would get a little taste of that stuff they call publicity. Just once. That is all I ask. Then I could retire in nine more years a happy-but-beaten-nan," you say with conviction.

So begins your campaign of

How to Be an Awful Football Coach and Retire a Happy Man

• Never have your team to practice before any game. Tell them it causes stress which can cause a heart attack.
• Tell your athletic director that you have went into a new religion and have to have two months off each year before football season begins.
• Take up drinking hard liquor on the job and let the members of the press catch whiff's of it on your breath.
• Have lots of angry spats with your wife over the phone.
• Openly-accuse innocent cheerleaders or students of stealing from the team's lockers.
• On game day, you only wear a sports shirt, sneakers, and boxer shorts.
• On certain days of the week, run your car as fast as possible around the college campus causing chaos among the student body.
• Take up smoking cigarettes on the job, in front of the press, and in the cafeteria.
• Speaking of cafeteria, each time you dine there, be ready to complain about the food being a week old and other hurtful things.
• Hold a press conference just so you can tell some funny jokes.
• Hold a press conference one day to introduce your new coaching assistant, the former Miss Georgia 2014. She gets $300.000.00 a year, furnished BMW, apartment and food allowance.
• During one game, you replace your star running back and tell those around you that you had rather be hurt than see a young person hurt.
• Dare the college president to fire you for openly telling people how he mismanages money.
• Make inappropriate passes at the college president's wife in public.
• Use school money to throw one of your single male assistants a huge bachelor party.
• Get your football team, cheerleaders, and band to meet in front of the Dean's house and shoot fireworks all day long and this is in the middle of April.
• Throw water balloons at visitors to the college.
• You stand at the entrance to the main office of the college and if the people are there to make a donation, you demand a 10% cut of the money or they can go home.
• Let the local paper snap photos of you and the head cheerleader in embarrassing positions and get the rumor started that you and her are to be married.
• Turn several wild dogs loose in the athletic department and tell the college president that you need all of your football team for two days to help you catch them.
• You demand that the cafeteria employees personally-deliver your meals to your office.
• You and your male visitors and football team are always watching a great supply of raunchy porno films that you say are game films from the weekend before.
• Take up chewing tobacco on the job and spitting where you please.

Then one day it happens. You are paid a visit from a group of people from one of the most-powerful and rich colleges in the country and they offer you what you want for a salary and other goodies to be their football coach and for one reason . . .

You are THE most-colorful and interesting football coach they have ever witnessed.