Mel Tucker took a football coaching job last week at Michigan State. This happened, as we know, a few days after he pulled his name out of the running for the position.
This abrupt change suggested _ accurately, it seems _ that a sweeter second bid, for about twice what he was making at the University of Colorado, with a blimp-sized budget for hiring staffers, induced a 48-year-old man to reconsider his earlier Colorado commitment.
He finally said yes. And, then the wailing:
What a mercenary, this Tucker gent must be.
Or, maybe he did exactly what most folks do in their professional lives. He took a better job. For more money.
The nerve of him.
It's OK if I scoot on my current employer for greener grass. But if you're a coach, no, this is not acceptable. Not to a university's football fans.
The coach only gets to leave when fans want to fire you, which, as history has shown us, even in East Lansing, can be quite sudden.
The flip side never seems to count. No, a coach, fans argue _ at least when they're not demanding he be axed _ must "keep his commitments to players."
This is high ground, the old "but what about the children?" mantra. So, a reminder: The coach's pledges to recruits don't seem to count for much when fans, or the coach's bosses, have decided he should leave. Their intolerance for him carries more weight than that supposedly inviolate pledge he made to incoming, or resident, players.
This has been something, this Tucker outrage, flowing from so many corridors of Righteous Indignation World.
Tucker, of course, had earlier said to MSU: No, thanks. And when it wasn't foreseen that a six-year deal for $33 million was yet coming his way on a later try, he said, because it then was true, that he would stick in Boulder and get on with business begun in his first year as head coach.
He spoke honestly. Until, that is, an offer that most of his critics would also have jumped on, came his way.
Saying yes to MSU has since branded Tucker as a hired gun, concerned only about the money.
Uh, no. Not in any overall context.
