Todd Golden: Coaches like Tom Allen are best when they can coach 'ball', but changes take focus off field
INDIANAPOLIS — Most of my career has been spent with a focus on college basketball. That remains so. When you’re in Bloomington covering Indiana athletics, your focus is on basketball first.
However, football drives the financial train at the Power Five level, and if you ever needed a reminder of that, attending an event like Big Ten football media days will drive the point home. It’s a riot of gloat and bloat. Why have a press conference dais inside Lucas Oil Stadium’s ample, behind-the-scenes meeting space when you can do it on the field on what amounts to a small concert stage? Why have video monitors set up in a meeting space when you can use Lucas Oil Stadium’s gigantic videoboards? Big Ten branding was everywhere, much of it out of camera view.
There were Big Ten mannequins duded out in team uniforms to greet you as you entered the field. Why? Apart from an admirable creep-out factor, who knows? A Big Ten branded elevator door for the media to enter and leave from? Why not? It illustrated how important football is in the grand scheme of college athletics as well as how much money is at stake in the enterprise. Financial ramifications, whether it be conference realignment (welcome back to the Big 12, Colorado), gargantuan media rights deals or the recent money-related phenomenon to sweep through college athletics like a cyclone — name, image and likeness –--are all paramount, and football drives it all.
That doesn’t mean everyone is wallowing in the riches with the same glee. No one, and I mean, no one, embodies the central casting stereotype of a football coach quite like Indiana’s Tom Allen. You could spend your whole life in vain trying to find someone who is a better representation of what we all collectively think of a football coach.
From the close-cropped hair cut, to the well-appointed suit, to the loud-voice inflection when it comes to speaking about all-things gridiron, Allen is football to its core. Not one shred of it is phony. Allen has this internal fast-forward he speaks with.
Once in a while, he speeds up and condenses his words because he’s so excited to get them out when it comes to talking football. It’s endearing. Given that, it broke my heart when Allen made an off-hand comment during his press conference on the big stage related to giving up defensive play-calling this season.
“I chose to call (defensive plays) a year ago because I felt that was best for our program at that time, but I’ve not called it obviously with all the different things that are going on and with the portal and the NIL and just the complexities you now deal with, even at a high level in that position,” Allen said. What I sensed in Allen’s words was a bit of his soul being crushed. A football coach living in a football world where so much of his job is not about football.
Later, when Allen had another press conference in a more intimate setting, I asked him what it was like for him to have so much of his focus devoted to non-football things. “I think that’s always the Catch-22 of being a head coach over being a coordinator. I got into this game for two reasons, to impact kids’ lives and because I love coaching ball,” Allen said.
“I really enjoy the process of getting ready for an opponent. I love studying film. That doesn’t tire or wear me out.
It takes a lot of hours, but I enjoy it. It’s the part I miss when I’m not calling (plays). ” College athletics is evolving to try to let coaches focus more on actual coaching.
We’re seeing staff members devoted to NIL or the transfer portal. That’s healthy. Let people play to their strengths.
In Allen’s case, and many more coaches like him, that strength is being on the field and in the locker room, coaching and impacting lives. None of that means the buck shouldn’t stop with the head coach. The CEO definition of being a head coach has never been more apt, but the demands of the job are light years different than they were even five years ago.
The changes have outpaced the people expected to implement them. The Tom Allens of the world, who got into this profession with a burning passion for the sport first, likely never dreamed they’d be re-recruiting their own players to keep them out of the portal or being de facto general managers collaborating with NIL collectives. Of course, Allen is paid extremely well to do what he does.
Football coaching is no different from any other profession in that unexpected duties crop up that take the fun out of the core part of the job. There’s a that’s-life-in-the-big-city aspect to this. Allen doesn’t shrink from it.
“As a head coach, you have a tremendous opportunity for impact on a lot of people’s lives. So I put a lot of value into that,” Allen said. “That’s why I still feel energized, even if I’m only doing one of the two things that drove me into this profession.
“I’m in a position to have a maximum amount of impact not just for players, but for coaches and their families. That still gives me tremendous purpose. ” Despite Allen’s words, there’s a still a part of me that pines for when it was simpler, and I sense Allen wouldn’t disagree.
A time when coaches like him could scheme, draw up plays, blow a whistle and mold players into the best people they could be. Where everything was devoted to what happened on the field. That job was big enough.
“I’m still very involved defensively, even if I’m not calling it. If I didn’t get a chance to be a part of that at all schematically, it would be kind of hard,” Allen said. The external focus on what football coaches do takes precedence among fans.
How many kids did a coach keep out of the portal? How many did he get in? Is he glad-handing the collectives the right way? It seems the emphasis has become colder, more distant, more cutthroat, more distracted by matters away from the games. We all know money talks. But when it shouts even louder than Tom Allen waxing poetic about football, it’s kind of a shame.
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