Word: coached
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...Florida fretted about its schools, sprawl and spiraling costs of living half as much as it agonized over its Miami Dolphins, the place might actually be the paradise it claims to be. But for now, it's loudly gnashing its sun-baked teeth at Nick Saban, the oily Dolphins coach who bolted for the University of Alabama this week after telling Miami fans over and over that he would do no such thing...
...Americans do. When I moved here eight years ago, my mortgage broker spent less time explaining 30-year fixed rates than he did showing me all the autographed pictures of his Dolphin player clients - and his customer appreciation gift was a certificate to the steakhouse of legendary Dolphin coach Don Shula, where you order off menus inscribed on footballs. That kind of blind fan ardor lets franchises like the Dolphins get away with pinching families as much for tickets, parking and hot dogs in a football season as Florida hurricane insurers currently charge for premiums in a storm season...
...certainly a huge college football fan; and while you'd be na?ve to suggest that the Division I game was an honest enterprise when I was growing up, you'd be equally innocent not to worry that in the 21st century, money - especially the salaries being lavished on coaches like Saban - may extinguish the few embers of higher-education integrity still left glowing on the university gridiron. Alabama is so desperate to return to the football powerhouse days of its late demigod coach Paul "Bear" Bryant that it will pay Saban $4 million a year. That's a surreal record...
...Such CEO-style compensation can only serve to erode a college's sense of priorities - which is why the House Ways and Means Committee is threatening to look into the current coach-salary arms race, especially at public universities. Congress should go full bore on this one. True, football has always enjoyed inordinately privileged status on most large campuses. To their credit, the programs galvanize a school's sense of community and, in cases like Bryant's, often showcase coaches as exemplary teachers who burnish instead of blemish a school's academic aura. But that's precisely...
...folks in South Bend at least seem to eschew that culture - to believe still in the student athlete ethos. Sure, the Fighting Irish community is guilty of its own bloated football obsessions, including the program's gilded television contract with NBC and the new 10-year contract for coach Charlie Weis that reportedly approaches or exceeds the $3 million-a-year mark itself, threatening to drag Notre Dame into the pigskin salary...