Dirty Harry Meets Gene Chizik 2.0

Dirty Harry
BobLee
September03/ 2015

What did Harry Callahan, John Tenuta, Dave Huxtable and Dr Laurence J. Peter all know….. that Gene Chizik and Bobby Collins learned The Hard Way?  Listen up my friends and you shall hear….

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I’ve not met him and likely never will; but I’ve heard nothing but good things coming from amid the lofty pines about Gene Chizik 2.0 …. the version now “coaching the defense” over in Chapel Hill.   You probably know who he is.

Gene ChizikActually I HAVE heard some un-good things about Coach Chizik.from ABCers who have never met him and likely never will.  “They” portray him as “Eeeeevil on a soda cracker”….. the personification of Allll the multitudinous  malevolences running rampant across Big Time College Football…. the poster-boy for cheatin’ and shady doins’…. a for-real low-down dirty bird (war eagle?) for certain.   Again, I can’t say…. I’ve not met the man.

BE ADVISED:  If Billy Graham, The Pope and Mother Teresa were driving down I-40 to da beach; and took Exit 270 for a bite of lunch…. went into Sutton’s Drug Store for chili dogs and were spied by a lurking ABCer who snapped their pic…. and posted it on PPride.   St Peter would receive 10,000 emails demanding that Billy, Pope and Terri all be denied entry thru His Pearly Gates for even setting foot “over yonder”.  Being hated by ABCers ain’t that hard to do.  It happens to me about every six weeks or so.  🙂

Could Gene Cizik be the long-awaited messiah who as a lowly DCoor will awaken the “sleeping giant”, smite Damn Dan Kane and stir up the echoes of Choo Choo and LT? ….. “echoes of Choo Choo and LT” ????

Laurence Peter….  OR…. Could he simply be a fellow who “Peter Principled” ….. succeeded so well as he climbed the career ladder that he took one more step than his skill set was designed for?  That is what Dr Laurence J. Peter’s infamous Principle means….

 

“going one step beyond where your skill set / competence was designed to carry you…. where the wheels come off the previously fine-tuned motor car.  Succeeding to your Level of Incompetence.

Did you know the TWO most worn-out cliches in the 70s were (1) “Peter Principle”, and (2)I’m a people person“.  Aaaarrgghhh.

Did the cruel unforgiving Football Gods keep whispering in Gene Chizik’s ear….. “You are such a fine Defensive Coordinator, you’d make an excellent Head Coach with all it’s glory and celebrity…. Go For It.   Sure being a Head Coach is completely different from Coordinating, but what the heck Go For It….. so, like most who hear that siren’s song Gene Chizik did Go For It.

BobLee, what does this have to do with Dirty Harry.   Patience Young Grasshopper.  Patience.

The corporate world is littered with Peter Principled corpses who “went for it”.   Outstanding salesmen who turned out NOT to be very good CEOs.   Outstanding “finance guys” who could not lead a troop of Boy Scouts around the block…. but went for “the corner office” and flopped.   And outstanding Coordinators who lacked just one /two of the inherent personality traits necessary to be a Head Coach…. at least on The Big Stage.

Rare indeed is the man (or woman) who can self-evaluate and admit:  For all the reasons I’m pretty darn good at “doing this”, I would not be very good at all “doing that”.

From my own experiences I’d say it is rare indeed.  You are doing what you like to do and doing it very well… funny how those two things seem to go together.  Yet you are compelled to go just one step beyond…. thru the career portal into a world that demands you be who you are not, doing things you are not very good at doing.

The swaggering “gunfighter” litigator who dazzles’em in the courtroom…. who makes a gawdawful senior partner.   The most excellent classroom teacher who delights in lighting the learning lamp…. who forsakes where he/she is so very content…. to be a Principal forever burdened with “paperwork” and administrative crap and as far from the self-satisfaction of “lighting learning lamps” as possible.

An oft-told tale in every field of endeavor.  Let he who has not tasted that bitter reality throw the first stone at Gene Chizik…. or at Carl Torbush…. or at John Bunting…. or maybe at Mike O’Cain ….. at Chuck Amato.   Did Smilin’ John Tenuta and Dave “Must Die” Huxtable know something they did not know?

Dirty Harry?   Patience Young Grasshopper.

A classic example from days long gone by would be Bobby Collins.  Somehow a good ol’ boy from One-StopLight, Mississippi who liked “coachin’ football” getting down in the trenches and blowing his whistle and yelling at kids….. woke up one day in the early 80’s on Beverley Drive in toney Highland Park, Texas on the campus of fru-fru Southern Methodist University as Head Coach of The Mustangs .   If Gene Chizik ever gets to bemoaning HIS FATE, Gene should call Bobby Collins.

I knew Bobby Collins…. and I was living right outside Highland Park TX in the early 80s.  If EVER there was a more awkward fit than Bobby Collins and SMU, it has yet to be dreamt of in the mind o’ man.   …. Julia Roberts marrying Lyle Lovett?  Touche.

Bobby Collins

Gene won a national championship at Auburn…. made millions for 4-5 years…. got a cushy buy-out…. and now is the 4th highest paid employee at The Flagship (do I mean 3rd?  No, you forget Bill Roper who runs UNCHealth Whatever).

And Bobby Collins now in his late 70s is back in Mississippi being “weren’t you that coach that got THE DEATH PENALTY?”

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As so often is the case, we turn to San Francisco Homicide Detective Harry Callahan.   NOT Police Commissioner Callahan…. NOT Mayor Callahan…. just Homicide Detective Harry Callahan.

-Dirty-Harry-Callahan-dirty-harry-34346969-200-200

Dr Laurence J. Peter and Harry Callahan notwithstanding; Gene Chizik COULD indeed be “Eeeevil on a soda cracker…. “a mercenary on a mission” to drive the final nail in the Tar Heel coffin…. John Blake on steroids.

….. OR just “a football coach” who lost his way.

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Time away from football showed Gene Chizik how he wanted to return

, USA TODAY Sports 4:02 a.m. EDT September 3, 2015

 

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — There are scars on Gene Chizik’s career that will never completely go away, circumstances he can’t reverse, feelings that lingered for a long time about the way Auburn dumped him two years after delivering the school’s first national championship in more than a half-century.

But when Chizik makes his return to coaching Thursday night as North Carolina’s defensive coordinator in a nationally televised game against South Carolina, he will do so as a man empowered to be the one thing that was so hard for him to pull off as a head coach: Himself.

The aloof, dispassionate caricature that Chizik struggled to escape during turbulent times at Auburn has been replaced by a version unafraid to share his personality and thankful to go back to his roots as one of the finest defensive minds in college football.

“I look back on things, and there’s parts of this profession that I did not enjoy when I should have,” Chizik said. “I look back on that and feel like I’m going to enjoy whatever I’m doing (now) because I don’t have to do it. This is my choice, and I won’t choose to be miserable. I just want it to be different.”

READ MORE….  http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/acc/2015/09/03/gene-chizik-north-carolina-defensive-coordinator-returns–coach/71598520/

 

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