In a time where social media has increased the amount of information and at the rate we receive it, its hard for anyone to hide anything. People tweet their whereabouts, the who’s and the hows without a second thought, some tweets even coming back to haunt them.
Older generations don’t understand how everything is so open. Growing up you were taught to keep things in-house and the integrity of your reputation is the most important thing. Former Oklahoma Sooner coach, Barry Switzer, has recently amitted that while coaching, he hid a few of his players discretions because making him and the university look bad, wasn’t an option.
“I’d have local county people call me and say, ‘One of your guys is drunk and got in a fight and is jail down here.’ And I’d go down and get him out. Or I’d send an assistant coach down to get his ass out,” Switzer said. “The sheriff was a friend of the program. He didn’t want the publicity. He himself knew this was something we didn’t need to deal with in the media or anything with publicity.”
Coach Switzer said that even though he bailed his players out, they didn’t go unpunished behind closed doors. Sometimes it was even at an inconvenience to him.
“I’d get his ass up at 5 o’clock in the morning for two weeks in a row and run his ass up and down the stairs, the stadium steps,” he said. “And the (assistant) coaches would be so pissed off that they had to get up and do it that they wore their ass out because they had to be the ones that run them. And a couple of the guys that were star players, I ran their asses off. So I had to be there at 5 o’clock in the morning.
“We could handle things internally in an era 30 years ago that you can’t today. You get a traffic ticket today, it’s everywhere. No one escapes what we have today, the attention and technology we have today.
“It was a different era, a different time.”
Im sure Coach Switzer isn’t the only old school coach who has done this, but he’s probably the only who would speak out. It does make you wonder what kind of things he got his players out of and who. The silver lining in this is that they were minor incidents, Coach has not admitted to covering anything large outside of typical college behavior.
