College Football

Coaching Vagabond Update: You're not really a football coach unless you
have
worked in many places and at some point been fired following a winning season.
Larry Coker meets these qualifications. He coached at two high schools, then at
Tulsa, then Oklahoma State, then Ohio State, then at Miami. As the Hurricanes'
headmaster, Coker went 60-15 and won the national
championship -- and was
fired, because boosters were furious that Miami wasn't winning every game by 30
points. Boosters assumed that with Miami's recruiting advantage in Florida high
schools, source of much of college football's speed, a volunteer from the
audience could coach the Hurricanes to a top-10 finish. Since firing Coker,
Miami is 24-18, has a losing record in its conference and is 0-2 in bowls. But
Coker had to go; we weren't winning every game by 30 points!

What became of the gentleman? For the past two years, Coker has been working on
establishing a Division I-AA football program at the University of Texas-San
Antonio. Practices began in August, though the team does not play this year.
The Roadrunners first will take the field on Sept. 3, 2011, versus Northeastern
of Oklahoma, then face Bacone College and Minot State later
that year. If all
goes well, UTSA will advance to Division I sometime in the decade. UTSA
practically rolls out the red carpet for walk-ons.

If you are a football factory college looking for cupcake opponents and
automatic wins, surely you are thinking, "How do I contact the University of
Texas-San Antonio?" Some big schools have already thought of this: Arizona,
Houston, LSU and Virginia already have scheduled UTSA, a program that's never
played, for cupcake dates. Wouldn't it be amusing if, by Sept. 7, 2019, when
UTSA is scheduled to appear at Baylor for the purpose of being pounded in front
of Baylor's home fans, the Roadrunners had become a monster team? It's
what
Coker's résumé would lead you to expect. Unless by then the Roadrunners are
already a ranked team and Coker has been fired because the boosters are furious
that UTSA is not winning by 30 points!