Pat Forde--Pal to the Prosaic and Plastered Alike

Pat Forde has written an interesting article on what he calls "the cult of the coordinator." He makes some good points on what, perhaps irrationally, offensive and defensive signal-callers mean to today's college football fan. Around here, people are sure that Joker Phillips, UK's offensive coordinator, will lead Kentucky to breathe the rarefied air atop the SEC East, despite the fact that, just last season, made some truly indefensible play calls in winnable games (See Georgia, Mississippi State, and especially Tennessee in overtime). But it's one of the article's throwaway paragraphs that grabbed my attention:

"The cameras find [coordinators] routinely, whether on the sidelines or in the booth. It would be an absolute drunkfest if you played a drinking game tied to camera shots of coordinators wildly signaling plays by hand or furtively calling them into their headsets while covering their mouths with play sheets."

Pay attention, aspiring sports journalists. The article is well researched and written, peering into a recent sports trend with an inquisitive and skeptical eye, Forde playing the sports fan's Woodward. At the same time, he appeals to a core demographic of college football: drunken fools. Reading the article, it struck me that both sentiments appealed to me about equally. I wonder whether the sometimes exorbitant salaries college coordinators are paid today (Norm Chow is reportedly getting over $1 million a year as UCLA's offensive coordinator) really do translate into success on the field, when raw talent is at least equally responsible for a football team's success. At the same time, when I read the description of Forde's drinking game, my first thought was, "I wish I had thought of that about seven years ago." And now, planning the logistics of that game for the last Saturday in August, when Lynn will be out of the house for most of the day at a wedding shower, has quickly taken precedence over pondering the so-called cult of the coordinator.