Gunzlingr
05-05-2003, 03:09 PM
An intriguing name has prominently popped up on the radar screen regarding the suddenly vacant head-coaching job for the University of Alabama football program. There’s no question that ex-NFL coach Tom Coughlin, out of work since being fired by Jacksonville following the 2002 season, is a proven commodity as a coach, recruiter and rebuilder of football programs.
But is he the right fit for a school that’s reeling as it searches for its third football coach in six months?
After the revelations of the past week that ’Bama head coach Mike Price, on the job for a scant four-plus months, ignored warnings from athletic director Mal Moore to be on his best behavior at a Champions Tour pro-am in Milton, Fla., in mid-April and spent several hundred dollars at a strip club — and that a woman in a Pensacola, Fla., hotel room registered to Price ordered $1,000 worth of room service — it’s clear that Alabama is likely leaning toward getting a more disciplined, dependable coach who can be counted on to set a proper example for the young men wearing the Tide’s crimson jerseys.
In that regard, I think Coughlin would be an excellent hire for a ’Bama program that needs the brand of discipline, direction, accountability and dependability that has marked Coughlin’s tenure every place he has coached before, particularly in his last three stops — as an assistant on the Super Bowl XXV-champion 1990 New York Giants, as the architect of Boston College’s turnaround from struggling program to top-25 team, and as the leader of an NFL expansion franchise in Jacksonville, twice leading the Jaguars to the AFC championship game in eight years at the helm.
MORE (http://www.profootballweekly.com/PFW/College+Football/College+Football+Extras/2003/holbrook050503.htm)
But is he the right fit for a school that’s reeling as it searches for its third football coach in six months?
After the revelations of the past week that ’Bama head coach Mike Price, on the job for a scant four-plus months, ignored warnings from athletic director Mal Moore to be on his best behavior at a Champions Tour pro-am in Milton, Fla., in mid-April and spent several hundred dollars at a strip club — and that a woman in a Pensacola, Fla., hotel room registered to Price ordered $1,000 worth of room service — it’s clear that Alabama is likely leaning toward getting a more disciplined, dependable coach who can be counted on to set a proper example for the young men wearing the Tide’s crimson jerseys.
In that regard, I think Coughlin would be an excellent hire for a ’Bama program that needs the brand of discipline, direction, accountability and dependability that has marked Coughlin’s tenure every place he has coached before, particularly in his last three stops — as an assistant on the Super Bowl XXV-champion 1990 New York Giants, as the architect of Boston College’s turnaround from struggling program to top-25 team, and as the leader of an NFL expansion franchise in Jacksonville, twice leading the Jaguars to the AFC championship game in eight years at the helm.
MORE (http://www.profootballweekly.com/PFW/College+Football/College+Football+Extras/2003/holbrook050503.htm)