Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Well, Tommy Bowden was fired* by Clemson after a 10 year run, Ty Willingham was ousted in Washington (but will coach out the season), and now Phil Fulmer will also be out at Tennessee at the end of this season. Those are some pretty high profile firings so far this year, and there’s still 4 weeks to go!

Bowden, who had just signed a contract extension at the end of the 2007 season, was 72-45 overall at Clemson, with 8 bowl appearances in his 10 years. His downfall, however, was a failure to ever win the ACC title. His firing has not been without repercussions, as the Tigers have already lost 5 “name” recruits who had committed to Clemson before Bowden was let go and who now want to take their skills elsewhere.

Fulmer’s firing is a head scratcher on the face of it. His career record is 150-51 (.766), he was 10-4 in 2007 and 9-4 in 2006, has taken Tennessee to a bowl game 15 of his 16 seasons, and only had 1 losing season in 16 years when he went 5-6 in 2005, though he was 10-3 in each of the two seasons before that. Fulmer’s downfall, similar to Bowden’s, would seem to be struggles within conference despite overall winning records; Tennessee is only 14-12 in their last 26 SEC games and hasn’t won the SEC since 1998.

Tyrone Willingham’s is by far the easiest of these to understand in my opinion. Since his arrival in Washington Willingham has not had a single winning season, going 11-32 over the past 4 years (including 0-8 this year, and counting) and has, obviously, not taken the team to a bowl game during his tenure. Add to that his losing record his last two years at Notre Dame (and two bowl game losses there) and, despite him being by all accounts a great guy, he is arguably just not a very good coach… at least not since he left Stanford.

*technically he “stepped down”, but that is in name only and we all know that he was forced out in reality.

I hear this comment, or something similar, far too often when talking with people about basketball and how it is officiated:

“You should never expect the officials to make a game-deciding foul call in the final seconds. It’s not going to happen, nor should it.”

I should “never expect” a call in the final seconds? “Not gonna happen, nor should it”?! I am sooo sick of that attitude. I think it is complete BULL$#!@ to say refs should “swallow the whistle” just because it is (1) a star player, (2) the end of the game, (3) a playoff / championship game, (4) insert your own excuse du jour here.

That “sliding scale” attitude about when a foul should be called is just wrong. If you’d call it in game one of the regular season, you should call it in Game 7 of the Finals. If you’d call it in the first 2 minutes of a game, you should call it in the last 2 minutes… either it gets called always, or not at all. A foul is a foul is a foul.

People argue that the refs blowing the whistle in a last second situation would be taking the game out of the hands of the players and having the officials make a game-deciding call. Well, I say that officials not calling a foul in that situation is just as much the officials deciding the game by allowing a foul to take place with impunity.

I hear this one a lot too:

“Officials who do make calls in those situations are going to catch major heat and be ridiculed.”

So what?!? So they shouldn’t make a correct call just because some pundits, talking-heads, and homers will blast them and make fun of them? That is ridiculous! Hey, I don’t want sour-grape “whining” in my sports, but I do want justice. And if an official doesn’t have the cojones to make the tough call at the end of a game / in hostile territory then they shouldn’t be officiating. Period.