Fighting Chance

Well we had another incident of fighting between coaches. Mike Locksley, the head coach of the New Mexico Lobos, has been reprimanded for getting angry and punching wide receivers coach J.B. Gerald. Most of you will remember back on August 5th of this year when Oakland Raiders head coach Tom Cable, allegedly, broke the jaw of Raiders assistant coach Randy Hanson. Now maybe its just me but isn't the head coach of a football team supposed to be the stable and steady one? I did play football in high school and I understand the need for the head coach to be passionate about his vision for the team but this is getting out of hand. Lets look at this from the point of view of a business. What would happen to a CEO that did not like a marketing strategy that was proposed to him during a meeting and he just decked the Marketing director of the company? That CEO would be fired, charges would be filed and most likely he would go to jail. Not to mention the loss of faith of the employees of their organization and the consequences it would have on their stock holders. Why is it different for these head coaches? Is this going to become just an acceptable part of the football landscape? I don't think that it will impact the Raiders as much as it could impact the New Mexico program. Lets face it, the Raiders are a terrible organization run by a relic of an owner that cant get top free agents to come in because of the way things are ran around there. The news of their coach lashing out and punching someone is almost accepted. But how is coach Locksley going to be able to go into the living room of a high school player and convince him and, more importantly his parents, that he is going to mold him into a respectable young man when he himself cant even control his own emotions? If I were the AD of the New Mexico program, I would seriously consider a change in the off season. Incidents like this are not acceptable but because of the violent nature of the sport, this will not get any major coverage other then being mentioned once on SportsCenter when it happened and maybe once for a follow up. You cant even find it on the main page of ESPN anymore and it happened yesterday! I'm not faulting ESPN for not keeping the story on the forefront but I am blaming sports fans for just sitting back and acting like this is no big deal.