I know a lot of you liked watching Two-A-Days, MTV's high school football show about the boys of Hoover, Ala., so if you missed it, you might be interested in this news:
Rush Propst, Hoover's coach, has resigned.
I first read something about this a couple weeks ago in SI, which reported that Propst was under fire for pressuring teachers to change grades for his players and for using an ineligible player. He was also apparently adulterous and supported a second family in another town. His staff has also been accused of spying on one of its rivals. He resigned a week ago.
To all these improprieties alleged and proven I say "Nooooooo, really?"
On the MTV show, Propst seemed like he was an actor portraying a high school football coach on a TV show or movie, sort of like Jon Voigt in Varsity Blues (it's playing a lot on Showtime nowadays). His ranting and raving, while certainly seen in other coaches and probably not a total act, appeared amped up for the cameras.
As for grade tampering ... don't want to make too many assumptions, but how could those clones read anything or see the chalkboard with their identical brown-hair-hanging-in-their-eyes haircuts?
What bugs me about the accounts of his resignation speech is that he seemed to fixate on the affair that he had while glossing over the competition-related misdeeds. It reminded me of a couple years ago when Jim McGreevey resigned as New Jersey's governor and the big news was that he was gay, not his questionable appointments and involvement in extortion scandals. Typical American story control - throw out salacious sexual details and the more substantive issues get pushed to the side.
Interesting Wikipedia write-up of the first season: Alex, easily my least favorite Buccaneer, was arrested last summer, and is engaged to marry that freshman cheerleader he started dating at the end of the season. Isn't she still in high school? Max was the only kid to earn a D-I scholarship, "despite many references to college football throughout the show," as Wiki notes. Repete walked on at Auburn, Cornelius plays at Troy (underrated), and Goose stopped playing football to actually pursue something that will help him later in life, chemical engineering. God bless him.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Rush Propst - gone at Hoover
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
4 comments:
I love it- Thanks for the update. Forget the NBA- this is the kind of stuff I can get into.
Good call on those front Mullets..WTF is that anyway?
Hi Scott -- Great blog! I didn't realize you were such a huge sports fan. We could have had a fun rivalry going for the Penn State-Wisconsin game. Hope all is well with you. Sue
Taps,
You raised a couple excellent points. I thought the same thing about the affair highlighting the accounts of his resignation speech. However, I wonder how much of that was spun by the writer or by MTV. I like how they quote him at the end of the article;
"We've been able to do a lot of positive things here. ... We've been able to do things that no other program has done, and we've done it the right way."
Yeah right.
Which brings me to my next point. Why is does the general public continue to be surprised when allegations of cheating, grade tampering, etc. arise with competitive athletics? I'm not saying that everyone is as crooked as Lombard Street, nor am I condoning it. It just seems that if you're not cheating you're not trying. Only the blatant abusers get caught.
I was born and raised in Hoover, Al. I moved away from there 3 years ago to accept an assistant coaching job at a SEC university. The thing that bugs me the most about all this about Rush is that coaches are brought to schools for one reason and that is to win. A coach could be clean as a whistle, his players could go to church every week, feed the hungary, and send their allowance money over to Africa for AIDS research and if that coach wins 2 games in three years he's fired. And as for the D-1 scholarships, a DL got one for Alabama this year. 4 more have them for other D-1 schools, that's five just in this senior class. And like Coach Propst has said on numerous occasions the players have to have responsibility for themselves at soem point. Great blog by the way.
Post a Comment