Schnellenberger can get to the top sooner with OU

Sporting News, The, Jan 2, 1995 by Ivan Maisel

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the annual National Football Foundation Hall of Fame dinner is the gossip. In the first week of December, athletic directors are looking for new coaches, coaches are looking for new jobs, and both groups come together in formal wear in the Big Apple. Away from the local media and in the regal atmosphere of the Waldorf-Astoria, they strike deals.

On December 6, the gossip centered around Louisiana State, Oklahoma State and Stanford. Amid the hubbub, Oklahoma Athletic Director Donnie Duncan quietly pulled on a cigar and displayed no anxiety. "We're not going to get anything done before the 15th," Duncan said, ignoring that his deliberation would fritter away two weeks of valuable recruiting time.

Duncan is one of the most capable athletic directors around. He had a reason for waiting. In the relative quiet of New York, Duncan had met with Louisville Coach Howard Schnellenberger. On December 15, Schnellenberger arrived in Norman for formal talks. The next day, Oklahoma made the best hire of the nascent offseason.

Let's not lay it on Duncan too thick. Schnellenberger initially rebuffed Duncan's overtures. But Duncan reeled him in because Oklahoma has a lot to offer. For all the gibes directed at Gary Gibbs, he won almost 70 percent of his games. The cupboard is not bare. More important, it is Oklahoma, with a history of six national championships, of Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer.

Schnellenberger has a history of his own. He played for and apprenticed under Paul (Bear) Bryant. He won a national championship at Miami in 1983. He took Louisville to a No. 14 AP ranking in 1990. He had been with the Cardinals for 10 seasons and every year, the future of independents became bleaker. Yes, he had returned to his hometown to regain his glory. But if you can go home again, you can leave again, too. Schnellenberger is 60 and has spent his entire adult life in coaching. But he has never been the head coach of a have; it has always been a have-not: the Baltimore Colts, a Miami program that barely escaped being put to sleep and Louisville.

"Maybe it's time that I got on the elevator halfway up the mountain," Schnellenberger says. "Now I can focus in on the summit.... It is exciting for a 60-year-old coach that has been coaching for a lot of years to be given the assignment and the trust and the confidence to lead this program."

Schnellenberger brings a record of 95-72-2, including 4-0 in the postseason, to the Sooners. That gulp you just heard came from Rick Neuheisel of Colorado, Bob Simmons of Oklahoma State and Dan McCarney of Iowa State, the other new coaches in the Big Eight.

The addition of Schnellenberger means the expanded Big 12, which will begin play in football in 1996, will have a roster of coaches unmatched in Division I-A: Tom Osborne, R.C. Slocum, Larry Smith, Bill Snyder, John Mackovic, Glen Mason and Howard Schnellenberger are proven winners. In the meantime, until the conclusion of the Copper Bowl, Schnellenberger technically is a member of Gibbs' staff. NCAA rules are such that Oklahoma can't employ one staff to coach and a new staff to recruit. Schnellenberger may recruit because one of Gibbs' assistants, Charley North, already has departed to work for Danny Ford at Arkansas.

Pay for play II

If the latest revelations out of Miami sounded familiar, there's good reason. Stories of a cash pot being available for big plays first surfaced last May. The pot, the story went, had been filled by former Hurricanes who had gone on to the NFL and by the players themselves.

The story reported recently by the Miami Herald told the same plot about the 1991 Hurricanes with one crucial, potentially disastrous difference. Former players told the Herald that Randy Shannon, then a graduate assistant and now a fulltime assistant, had promoted the cash prizes to the players. That would mean institutional involvement, which is what causes the NCAA to pull out the whips and chains.

Shannon denied the allegations, and Coach Dennis Erickson backed him up "100 percent." Nonetheless, Athletic Director Paul Dee said the university would expand its investigation of last spring's allegations to include the new ones. Oh, and Happy New Year to you, too.

Still breathing

Last spring, the NCAA Presidents Commission had the opportunity to push Division I-A into a playoff. Not only did the presidents choose not to do it, they effectively closed the window through the end of the century. Just when all of you playoff proponents out there in the vast talk-radio-calling public fell into despair, the NCAA has opened another window.

OK, that's an exaggeration. But consider this: The NCAA is in the beginning stages of restructuring itself. And in the dark recesses of the new plan there is a method for determining how I-A playoff money would be distributed. And that is why they would play it, isn't it?

Division I-A members want more autonomy. They will get it by guaranteeing the members of I-AAA (Division I schools that don't play football) and I-AA continued access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament and the money it generates. The current methods for distributing basketball revenue will be written into the NCAA Constitution, which means the I-A powers would need a two-thirds majority to change it. Should I-A generate any new revenue, i.e., a football playoff, then the I-AA and I-AAA members have been promised a greater share of the basketball revenue.