The Case for Rich Brooks

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The Case for Rich Brooks

August 14, 2005

In a Southeastern Conference rife with outstanding coaches, there are only two men currently in the league that have received the Paul W. ‘Bear’ Bryant award, one of the most prestigious coaching awards in college football. I will be happy to spot you one, Tommy Tuberville in 2004. The other? Steve Spurrier? Phil Fulmer? Urban Meyer? No. No. No. All three have received national coach of the year honors, but none of them have received the Bryant honor. The name you are looking for, and may not come up with in your extra three guesses (unless you happen to follow West Coast football), is Rich Brooks. That’s right, Kentucky’s Rich Brooks. The same guy that everybody in the local, regional, and national media wants to paint as a doddering old incompetent was once honored for having done the finest coaching job in the land.

And I can hear the critics now: “Yeah, but that was in 1994, at Oregon, and in the Pac-10. Now Brooks is 63, and he doesn’t have the energy to build a winner at a basketball school in the SEC.” Well, maybe he does, and maybe he doesn’t. But if he fails at Kentucky, it won’t be because the man can’t coach. Because for over 40 years he has done just that and he has done it very well.

Any suggestion by anybody that Brooks is in over his head at Kentucky is preposterous. We are talking about a guy that held the head coaching job at Oregon for 18 years. He took the Ducks to their first winning season in nine years in 1979, and the program’s winning campaign in 1980 would give them their first consecutive winning seasons in 16 years. Brooks would guide the Ducks into the national rankings in 1987 for the first time in 17 years, and their bowl berth in 1989 was the school’s first in 26 seasons. Brooks would cap off his career in style in 1994, when he led the Ducks to a Pac-10 championship and a Rose Bowl berth, the school’s first since 1958.

Now again, the critics are going to point to the fact that Brooks record at Oregon was under .500 at 91-109-4. And that is a fact. But I am going to point out to you that the man put Oregon football back on the map, and he provided the foundation that would make Oregon one of the West Coast’s strongest programs. Keep in mind that when Rich Brooks got the job at Oregon he inherited a very weak program competing against some of the nation’s finest college football programs. UCLA, USC, and Washington all were very strong on the national scene and in the Pac-8 (Ok, so Coach Brooks has been around for a day or two…), and the conference’s depth only got better when Arizona and Arizona State joined to make the league the Pac-10. Brooks still found a way to have success, but it took time. Twelve years, in fact, to reach his first bowl game with the Ducks. And isn’t that some notion? An administration giving a coach the time to build a weak program into a strong one…what a quaint concept.

And that is exactly what the situation at Kentucky calls for. Give Rich Brooks time. I know that the knee-jerk reaction is to think that Brooks is too old for the rebuilding job (I can remember thinking the same thing when I heard he had been hired). But the more I look at Brooks’ tenure at Oregon, the more I feel certain he is the right man for the job. Because as I look over the 18 years Brooks spent in Eugene, I keep hearing one word: Commitment. Rich Brooks stayed on the job at Oregon until he got the program where it needed to be, and thank goodness the administration at Oregon had the good sense to let him do the job. Because since Rich Brooks left the University of Oregon, his former assistant, Mike Bellotti, has led the Ducks to eight bowl games in nine years. That slate of success includes finishing number two in the country in 2001. Without taking any credit away from Coach Bellotti, there is little reason to believe that any of that would have been possible without the long-term efforts of Rich Brooks.

He knows the terrain, folks. Rich Brooks has never had one of the cushy, ready-made national title contender jobs. He knows what it is like to have to build from the bottom up against adversity. And that is just one of the reasons he should have the opportunity to coach the Kentucky Wildcats as long as he likes. Another good reason is desire. Rich Brooks wants to be at Kentucky. He is not one of these hot young coaches just using the job to parlay it into a higher-paying, higher-profile job (sound familiar, Louisville fans?). Rich Brooks is there because he loves coaching football, and he wants to do it at the University of Kentucky. And I think that is a pretty good reason to keep the man around.

My last reason for keeping Rich Brooks around in Lexington for the long haul is right back where we started. The man can flat out coach. And he hasn’t forgotten how in the decade since he was the national coach of the year. Brooks gets criticized because he didn’t win in his two seasons as head coach with the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. Nobody doubts Steve Spurrier’s ability to come back to college football and win after his disastrous stint with the Redskins. And Spurrier is 60 years old. He’s an AARP guy, just like Brooks. But I don’t see anybody acting like he has lost touch or lacks the energy to turn the Gamecocks into a winner. Rich Brooks, by the way, after his firing by the Rams, didn’t go running back to college football, either. He just picked up and became assistant head coach and defensive coordinator for the Atlanta Falcons, helping Atlanta to the Super Bowl in 1998.

That’s a couple of times I have mentioned energy. I do so because the inspiration to defend Coach Brooks came from an ESPN.com piece (who else?) listing college football coaches on the hot seat this season (We cannot confirm the rumor that Bob Petrino saw the list and immediately applied for every job mentioned.). The piece was written by a gentleman named Todd McShay, who if I had to guess, has been on the planet less time than Rich Brooks has been coaching football. But McShay, not content to simply say that Brooks needed to win more, suggested that Brooks was responsible for the sorry state of UK football and that he had trouble relating to players and lacked the energy to turn the program around. And you know that McShay knows nothing about either. He simply makes a ridiculous generalization because Brooks is 63 years old. He also fails to mention that Brooks inherited a program on probation or that Brooks was the program’s third head coach in 22 months. While I am sure that Coach Brooks does hold himself and his staff accountable for the state of the program, it is completely unfair for the rest of us to use either of the last two years to weigh the job Rich Brooks has done at Kentucky.

So what will get Rich Brooks off of the proverbial hot seat? I am not sure there is a record out there that can do that. Kentucky faces a very difficult schedule in 2005, beginning with a Louisville team loaded with talent. They have the usual power trio of SEC East foes in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee (The Cats are 4-56 against those three since 1984), as well as Auburn and the ‘Ol Ballcoach at South Carolina. But I am also not sure that Brooks is on any hot seat. While the media and a percentage of the Cats fan base may grow impatient, one can only hope that Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart and President Lee Todd understand that only now can one begin to truly evaluate what Brooks can do without the shackles of probation.

You know, it wasn’t that long ago that Louisville had a football program in disarray and completely off the national radar. And they were turned into a program of significance by an old veteran coach by the name of Howard Schnellenberger. That should serve as a note to Mr. McShay and others that sometimes it is the wise, experienced man who is best suited for the arduous task of building in the face of adversity. And maybe, just maybe, the administration will follow the same path of patience and put their faith and trust in a man named Rich Brooks. Who knows? UK football just might have a very Rose-y future…

You can reach The Chief Justice at chiefjustice@thehighcourtofsports.com

(Rich Brooks’ bio at UKAthletics.com was used for background material.)