Wolverine247 Board

OUR.

Jerry Kill can kiss my left nut

I wouldn't make too much of it. I doubt Kill is much different from a lot of coaches. We all know it happens. In this instance it goes public because this kid doesn't have a scholarship, so he has no reason to ride it out, he knows he's probably not gonna play in the NFL and seems to be from the background where he can accept that, so he has no reason to stick with the usual routine.

Remember college football is a schizophrenic environment, coaches are supposed to be mentors and teachers but it's also a multi-million dollar industry in which coaches are solely judged based on wins and losses. A coach is also your boss, as in, he expects you to do a job for him and if there's problems with that he has to answer the question whether he is earning his salary from officials, donors, the media, fans. In an office, there's always going to be manipulations, like being "encouraged" to work certain shifts or much longer than scheduled, where vacation authorization can be used as the carrot as well as the stick. Coaches manipulate players (and subordinate coaches) all the time, it's part of handling a competitive situation and around a hundred employees - a good portion of whom are very young men with very questionable judgment. There's nicer words for it, but from the perspective of someone on the "downside" of it, it's manipulation. The situation is made particularly dicey by the fact that football teams have a quasi-military atmosphere to them. So while coaches are meant to care for their players, it's also to some extent accepted and condoned that they will treat them like crap at times akin to a drill sergeant in boot camp.

Different coaches will have different approaches to all that, some will be fair but tough, others will be nice but passive-aggressive, another one will sound like a TV preacher or used car salesman whereas others act like the CEO of a trucking company. It's a personality thing. Honestly, I think in this instance you have a personality conflict. Even through the lines of a frustrated and angry kid what Kill said sounds very "coach-like". You know who was famous for alternating threats with praise in pretty quick order? Vince Lombardi. I think if any of us worked for a Lombardi character in an office, we'd hand in two weeks notice within days. But football coaches are in that small category of jobs where "old-fashioned" pre-1960s conduct is still acceptable. The thing is that a kid like Barker isn't from a background where that still is acceptable and you're going to see more of these stories coming up in the future because of that gap between the "football standard" and the "21st century middle-class standard".