Firing of BC coach exposes 'flawed' system

Like a crusty, latter-day Clint Eastwood character, Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo has taken a hard stand against softened values.

DeFilippo created an intriguing scenario that has a lot of people talking, but is the world he envisions any more real than Eastwood's Hollywood fantasies?

I understand the adrenaline rush a story like this creates. DeFilippo dared Jeff Jagodzinski to make his day, so to speak. He warned his football coach not to talk with the Jets. When Jagodzinski did, DeFilippo fired him.

Boom! Coach gone. Disloyalty punished in the extreme.

Now the AD is something of a hero to people who got fed up a long time ago with coaches treating contracts like toilet paper.

DeFilippo gave Jagodzinski his first head-coaching job. Gave him a five-year contract. In return, he asked for five years of loyalty. After only two years, Jags took that fateful interview.

To DeFilippo, it was treachery.

"When somebody looks you in the eye and shakes your hand and tells you something, that to me is as important as a contract," he said to the Boston Globe.

"When somebody gives you a break and then after two years, the first chance you have to go interview, then you're going to take off, it hurts,

especially when you really like this guy, and I like him."

Coaches are usually fired for losing; BC's coach - a likeable guy - was let go over a matter of principle, we've been told.

Naturally, coaches should honor their original commitments, but that's not the reality of big-time sports. Schools are virtually powerless to stop coaches from leaving. The system isn't built to stop them.

"The whole process is flawed, there's no question about that," Old Dominion athletic director Jim Jarrett said. "It's a double-edged sword in that if you don't let them go, you worry about how good a job they're going to do in the next year or two.

"If you start a contest about it, it's worse. Somebody will say you're driving him away if he takes the job, and if he doesn't take the job, you've got a mad, unhappy coach because you won't give him a raise or extend his contract."

Coaches want it both ways, of course. (We all would if we could swing it.) They desire the security that comes with a long-team contract, though not at the expense of career flexibility.

As Jarrett said, "coaches get more protection and have more of an ability to leave than the university has to keep them."

The way the game usually is played, flirting with another team gains a coach an extension or raise. Not at BC. Holding a coach accountable for a handshake? What a concept. Sounds like a scene from a Disney movie.

Don't get me wrong, the image of an AD dropping the hammer on a coach with a wandering eye is amusing. Great if it works for BC. But it wouldn't for other schools.

And I'm not clear how this helps BC in the long run, except to establish that DeFilippo is the boss.

Ambiguity is a frustrating impediment for a typist straining to make a point, but I've been straddling the issue here.

On the one hand, good for BC and its principles. But under the rigorous standards of loyalty now in effect, what candidate from the outside would want to coach there?

One possible choice to emerge is Mike London, who in his first year at Richmond led the Spiders to the Division I-AA national championship. According to the Boston Globe, London is a candidate for the vacancy.

If true, it could mean that DeFilippo is entertaining the possibility of bringing in a coach who is under contract at another school.

Is it possible that in BC's world, loyalty only works one way?

Bob Molinaro, (757) 446-2373, bob.molinaro@pilotonline.com