Geography and hiring coaches

Iowa's selection of Siena's Fran McCaffery on Sunday is not only a home-run hire for a downtrodden program; it's another blow to the notion that all choices must adhere to geographically based constructs. He's an "East Coast Guy" or a "West Coast Guy" is as not as silly or destructive as the rapper feuds that made headlines a decade ago, but it is generally a concept without merit.
In the summer of 1961, the University of North Carolina promoted a 29-year-old assistant coach to the top job. Said assistant was three years removed from his first gig in coaching, which included the direction of the golf team at the U.S. Air Force Academy, which didn't even have a campus much less a golf course at that point.
The young coach was born, raised and educated in Kansas. You know him as Dean Smith.
The hire worked out pretty well. It's just one example of how it's about how you get there, not where you're from.

As for McCaffery, he's got Midwest ties from 11 years as a Notre Dame assistant. His wife is from Minnesota. But that's not all that important. History says he'll turn around the Hawyeke program.

* As a 26-year-old, he coached Lehigh to the NCAA tournament in 1986.
* In 1999, he took the job at UNC Greensboro, which had lost 59 games in its three previous seasons. In his second year, the Spartans were in the NCAA tournament.
* When he took the Siena job in 2005, he had four scholarship players on the roster. The Saints are now three-time defending champions of the MAAC.

It's interesting to watch St. John's struggle to find a coach. The school has appeared burdened by the presumption that the next coach has to be a New York guy who can massage the seedy underbelly of the city's AAU crowd. Now comes word that the Johnnies are interviewing Steve Lavin, who is as West Coast as anybody can get. The guy lives two blocks from Venice Beach. But he'd be a great hire. I'm not sure it would be the best move for Lavin, who has a good thing going as an ESPN broadcaster, but ignorance of the geographic labels is the first step in the right direction for any school that needs to change its losing image.

Principal Skinner is out at BC

So Boston College has whacked basketball coach Al Skinner. In and of itself, that's not shocking. Coaches get fired for losing too many games all the time.

What's amazing about this story is that it lived underground for nearly a week. Gene DiFilippo, the athletics director, confirmed this morning that he and Skinner agreed to part ways last Wednesday and that all parties agreed to keep the dismissal hush-hush so that the coach could pursue the St. John's job without being dogged about BC. (If he had accepted the job and if word of his termination has gotten out, he would have been off to an impossible start on his new job.)
Staff reductions in mainstream media may have contributed to the story's secrecy. Blah. Blah. Blah. I get that. What's odd -- and somewhat encouraging -- is that the unlicensed, unfettered world of Twitter didn't let loose with some form of unsubstantiated gossip on the topic sooner. After all, BC says it began contacting other schools regarding Skinner's replacement last week. You'd think that somebody at some school would have blabbed to their teenage kid, who then posted the news on some social-networking site.
Top-secret stuff can have a lifespan of a fruit fly in many cases.

Doubts about Urban renewal

The new, mellowed-out, in-touch-with-priorities Urban Meyer is off to a great start, isn't he? In dressing down a reporter for accurately conveying a player's quotes, the Florida coach is already in mid-season paranoia. And it's March.
In at least one columnist's opinion, the failure of the beleaguered reporter's comrades to leap to his defense indicates the demise of modern, traditional media. That's a fair point. Access is more of an issue and more prized than ever.
Something else is at play more than ever: the idea that journalists report news; they don't make it. Getting involved in the fray in an age of YouTube and other do-it-yourself media forms would make immediate news and would subject the participant to charges of overstepping boundaries.
The mantra of reporting news and not making it has been around for decades, but it's really taking hold now. Witness the Associated Press' abstinence from the formula that determines the BCS national champion in college football.
With Everyman empowered, journalists are policing themselves at pretty high levels. And this brings up another question: How slippery is the slope of this mountain? If reporters can't exercise their expertise, how long before they are subtly discouraged from writing in-depth pieces that analyze their beats? If we assume there is still power of the press a decade from now, will any writing that might tend to turn up the heat on a coach and lead to his dismissal be shunned for fear that it's "making news"?

For those who want to clock Big Ben ...

Let's get this straight right away. Ben Roethlisberger recently invited trouble when he spent his 28th birthday partying with college chicks in an apparently seedy bar in a previously sleepy town.

But those who claim NFL majordomo Roger Goodell must meet with him now in the name of racial justice are off-target.

A frequent claim is that Goodell must suspend or otherwise admonish Big Ben in order to remain consistent with previous adjudication of Michael Vick and Pacman Jones. The truth is this: In waiting to scold Roethlisberger until the justice system has done something, the commissioner is displaying a consistent policy.

A brief history lesson:

L'Affaire Vick began when search warrants were executed on the now-infamous home of Bad Newz Kennels on April 25, 2007. Before ordering Vick to stay away from Atlanta Falcons training camp on July 23, 2007, Goodell allowed all of the following elements of the criminal-justice system to play out: the execution of a second federal warrant (June 7); the filing of paperwork by U.S. Attorneys detailing the dog-fighting ring (July 2); a third federal search (July 6); indictment (July 17); and the establishment of a July 26 arraignment date (July 18).

Only then did the commissioner step in.

Jones was arrested more than six times before Goodell finally had enough.

Now people want him to discipline Roethlisberger before the authorities have issued a single page of any report on the alleged incident. The Steelers' quarterback hasn't been arrested. He hasn't been charged. Not once.

Let's remember that the events that led to the civil suit in the Lake Tahoe area never produced an arrest or anything more than an cursory police investigation that went nowhere.

Because that suit is still alive, Roethlisberger was foolish to spend his birthday in very public revelry with women of his sister's age (20 to 22) whom he had never met. That kind of behavior justifiably raises his employers' concerns about his dedication to his work. It creates the appearance of impropriety and serves the interests of vultures. It does not mandate immediate sanction by itself.

Some are claiming a racial double-standard exists; the force of these claims alone should compel some sort of action, pundits say. The logic here is failing. It's like saying the Senate should have suspended the convention of the electoral college and held up the inauguration of Barack Obama simply because some desperate, paranoid and fearful segments of blogworld were questioning Obama's credentials as a citizen.

As a people, we've gone down this road before. JFK assassination conspiracy theories got so out of control in the 1970s that the House of Representatives felt compelled to impanel a select committee on the topic. Millions of dollars and years later, the committee said there "probably" was a conspiracy in the killing. In 2003, further investigation refuted the acoustic evidence that had led to the House committee's finding. .

In other words, you can't let public suspicion govern public policy by itself.