The pavement Rick Neuheisel currently is pounding has led him to Baltimore, where the former Washington Huskies head football coach interviewed Thursday for the Ravens’ offensive coordinator job.
Maybe Rick’s finally getting it.
A recent, troubling interview with The Associated Press gave the impression that he still believed he had a shot at landing a head-coaching job at an NCAA Division I school.
For the good of big-time college football, not to mention Rick Neuheisel himself, Neuheisel would do well to stay clear of any NCAA connections and dive headfirst into the NFL.
Talk about bad marriages. Sheesh! Neuheisel was a menace to college football and college football gave Neuheisel too many temptations. If Neuheisel wants to coach again in a position other than as a volunteer assistant at Rainier Beach High School, the NFL is his logical and only possible outlet.
Neuheisel had best limit his visit to the Ravens and keep the rental car from straying up to Syracuse, where athletic director Daryl Gross is looking for a young, energetic, charismatic coach to replace the fired Paul Pasqualoni.
Under normal circumstances, Neuheisel is the perfect one for the job. But Gross shouldn’t want Neuheisel to coach his field hockey team.
Because Lord knows, little about Neuheisel is a normal circumstance.
As glib, intelligent and persuasive as Neuheisel is, university presidents and athletic directors do well to keep their doors locked, because Neuheisel can talk a baby out of his rattle in about seven seconds.
Neuheisel is his own worst enemy. He’s smart and he knows it. The trouble is that he thought he was smart enough to stretch recruiting regulations to the breaking point and get away with it. That, along with his love for living on the edge, led him to make stupid decisions that constantly landed him in the NCAA doghouse.
Neuheisel treated recruiting as a playground. He did so at Colorado. He did so at Washington.
He told AP that he wanted to sit down with any given set of university officials and tell his side. He was confident that officials would understand and respond favorably.
Had he ever gotten that far, I imagine he’d leave out the following:
* That, three weeks after his hiring at Washington, he was investigated and later busted for illegal contact and visits with recruits.
* That the NCAA prohibited Neuheisel from off-campus recruiting for a year because of his role in more than 50, yes, 50 violations at Colorado.
* That the American Football Coaches Association censured him after its board found a lack of remorse for his part in the Colorado violations.
* That he lied to the media and to former UW athletic director Barbara Hedges about interviewing for the job as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
And that’s not even counting Neuheisel’s participation in a college basketball pool, for which he pocketed $12,000, but somehow failed to understand it as gambling.
After all, the UW gave him the green light, or so he claimed (a claim the NCAA grudgingly agreed with). Then-compliance officer Dana Richardson issued the memo saying it was OK, despite a constant barrage of ads, seminars and lectures by the NCAA that outlines what gambling is and, by God, the warning that coaches and everyone else had better steer clear.
In the NFL, Rick Neuheisel obviously won’t have recruiting to get him in trouble. And as far as gambling is concerned, the NFL laughs off little personal vices as boys-will-be-boys mischief.
After all, the NFL looked the other way when former Philadelphia Eagles owner Leonard Tose sued Atlantic City’s Sands Hotel &Casino because, Tose said, it helped him lose $10 million by supplying him with free drinks.
He lost the millions and the lawsuit.
Whatever wild oats Neuheisel still has to sow, the NFL, not college football, is the place to sow them.
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