Examples set by coaches Carroll, Brown need to be followed

With the college football bowl season winding down, some thoughts.

Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, coaches at Penn State and Florida State, are one and two, respectively, in wins among coaches in NCAA Division I football history. They are 79 and 76 years young, respectively. They met in the Orange Bowl last week in a five-hour game that ended at 1 a.m. Both joked it was the latest they had been up in ages.

In the week leading up to the game, they both said that if they had come into the coaching ranks in the last 20 years, neither would have survived at their schools. Both have absorbed heavy criticism in the past five years with storied programs that were not living up to “fans'” (read that as boosters who have no life but do have money) expectations.

The parking lot at the Orange Bowl in Miami was packed with people by noon for an 8 p.m. kickoff. Before the game, riot police had to break up a free-for-all in the parking lot involving hundreds of well-oiled fans.

If you attend football games anywhere, you have seen these fans. Drinking anything and everything they can get their hands on and using the football game as an excuse to be obnoxious, they are ubiquitous in sports.

Both the colleges and the pros refuse to see the problems they create. There are lots of beer ads and sales bringing millions into the coffers of football teams and the television networks that covers the games. A day of reckoning will come on the drinking issue.

To get there, we will need a monster tragedy resulting from the football and drinking onslaught. It will come, and everybody will go, “How could that have happened?”

It’s already happening, but there is too much money being made by those who could do something about it for anything to be done.

At the Rose Bowl, coaches Pete Carroll of USC and Mack Brown of Texas brought a relaxed sideline to their game. Carroll saw the back stabbing and undercutting in the NFL coaching ranks where he worked before going to USC. He vowed to bring a better perspective to the college game.

He has done so by refusing to make the games the end-all. Perhaps easy to do when you are winning, but he means it and lives it.

Brown learned to relax this year when personal tragedies moved him over to Carroll’s position that there is more to life than Saturday afternoons. He loosened up with his players, even listened to players’ rap music to try and understand where they were coming from.

When we talked during the season, Brown said, “I want to enjoy my job and the kids. I was too removed from them, too demanding without knowing what they cared about and were trying to do. I like myself a lot more now.”

A national championship will have a lot of folks who are Texas fans liking Brown a lot more, too.

Meanwhile, the pressure to win in college sports grows as the money and attention expand exponentially each year. That’s why the balance and rational leanings of Carroll and Brown more than ever need to be heard.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.