wbtfg wrote:http://billingsgazette.com/sports/colle ... ff11e.html
he career of Woody Hayes, the combative, legendary coach at Ohio State, came to a shocking end when he punched a Clemson player in the throat in the final moments of the 1978 Gator Bowl.
The incident, which ignited an on-field melee, remains the most blatantly egregious example of misconduct by a coach in the history of college football. Hayes, a supposed leader of young men, never walked the sideline again.
These days the list of coaches behaving badly is as long as it is public. But Rob Ash is nowhere on it.
Ash is entering his sixth season as the coach at Montana State. It will be his 33rd year as a collegiate head coach. His time with the Bobcats has so far been highlighted by vastly improved academic performance by his players, a renewed commitment to community service and sustained success on the field.
It's all part of Ash's blueprint for football prosperity, a mission statement he and his staff drafted when they came to Bozeman to reshape the Bobcats.
MSU posted a .661 winning percentage in Ash's first five seasons. The team's Academic Progress Rate has improved some 60 points in that time, too. Beyond that, the Bobcats logged 1,000 hours of service this year, expanding their already significant role in the community.
"We're right at the five-year mark, and I'm very happy," Ash said recently. "We've set up our goals to try to win on the field, in the classroom and in the community. And we're doing it in all three areas."
The line between the proper treatment of players, the demand for high standards of conduct and the desire to win football games can sometimes be blurred. But Ash does things the right way.
Character and integrity lie at the heart of Ash's coaching philosophies. And he's proving you can win without compromising those values.
"We have a lot of requirements on our coaches that come down from my personal beliefs," said Ash, who has won 19 games and shares of two Big Sky Conference titles in the last two seasons. "We want to coach every guy like he's a member of our family, like I'd want my son to be coached. We don't ever cuss at our guys. There's a very, very minimal amount of swearing that ever goes on on our field. Negatives are usually quiet, positives are usually loud.
"We try to be teachers, not cheerleaders. In practice we try to help guys get better at technique and assignments so they can execute better in games. And we try to stay calm in games so we can be poised and play with intelligence. Our job as a coaching staff is not to coach hustle or effort or emotion. That has to come from (the players). Our job is not to pep them up necessarily, but to teach them how to play the game better. The players have got to bring the emotion, and luckily our guys do."
Quick. Name the last coach you've heard of with so much self-control that he won't even swear on the practice field or the sideline. Some guys — Brian Kelly at Notre Dame, Bo Pelini at Nebraska and Will Muschamp at Florida come to mind — would make better sailors than coaches.
Ash's methods stand in stark contrast to a number of recent incidents surrounding player treatment that ended up costing some high-profile coaches their jobs.
Jim Leavitt was fired as head coach at South Florida not long after the 2009 season when it was discovered that he slapped and choked a player during halftime of a game against Louisville. Reportedly, Leavitt was angry at the player for making a mistake earlier in the game.
Around that same time, Mike Leach was dismissed from Texas Tech for allegedly barricading a player in a dark equipment shed as punishment for not practicing through a concussion.
Such winning coaches as Mike Price, Jim Tressel and, most recently, Bobby Petrino, also crashed and burned in the face of public controversy. But the litany goes far beyond them.
Ash declined to discuss what goes on at other programs, though he did admit to keeping tabs on what his contemporaries do.
"There's been some things in the news recently about some various team policies on some issues you have to deal with as coaches that come up. And I can say that our team policies are much more strict than the ones I've been reading about in the paper," Ash said.
"But I believe in that. There's two things you have to do with discipline: One is you have to be totally consistent and fair. And the other thing is you make sure it's black and white, that everybody understands it."
Ash and his staff have tried to guard against poor player conduct by implementing a contract system for discipline. If a guy has a minor conduct issue, he'll meet with Ash to discuss it. If things build up beyond the initial problem, the player must sign a contract promising to shape up. If another incident occurs after that, the player is dismissed.
The Bobcats also use a curriculum titled "Winning With Character." Commissioned by Mark Richt, the curriculum was originally written for the University of Georgia but has since spread nationwide. It purports to provide character, ethics and leadership training to high school and college programs.
Ash swears by it (although not literally).
"Coach (Bo) Beck brought it to us," Ash said. "When we got here we had a reduced amount of practice time because of the APR penalties, and we had to put in programming that was nonfootball time to replace those lost practice hours. One thing we implemented was the ‘Winning with Character' program.
"We started it as an APR deal to try to improve the behavior of our team. And after we got our practice time back and no longer had to do it, we still kept doing it. That was a decision the staff made. So we're spending extra time on it now, but we think it's that important."
That's not to say the Bobcats haven't had their off-field issues. A handful of players — from Connor Thomas to Eric Homec to Roger Trammell — have strayed from the coach's stringent character demands, and they all got the boot.
The difference between MSU and so many other programs is the expedient process with which these incidents are handled. If you screw up bad enough, there is no vote. You're gone.
Ash describes himself as a perfectionist, and there's no doubt he is disciplinarian. But he doesn't crack a whip. There's not a hint of Woody Hayes in him. Ash is unique in his own manner.
And it's his way or the highway.
"It's a different environment than a lot of other programs, I think. But it's part and parcel of what we do," Ash said.
"Guys who want a character-based, disciplined program ... they gravitate towards us. The guys that want to party or want a yeller or a screamer type of a coach, they'll go somewhere else. Which is fine. After a while it becomes self-perpetuating because the guys you want on your team are the same guys that want to be part of this type of program."
