By Will Vandervort.
With all that has gone down with Clemson baseball coach Jack Leggett in the last two seasons, I have wondered to myself at times, would Frank Howard have lasted 30 years at Clemson in today’s sports culture?
Howard was a good ole boy from Alabama that did things his way. He never backed down from a fight and from what I have heard about Coach Howard, he stood up for what he believed in and the way he did things.
That, plus 10 straight mediocre seasons before he retired in 1969, might not have rubbed off well in today’s sports world where some fans, not all, simply feel they are entitled.
You can ask the same question about longtime baseball coach Bill Wilhelm. Would he have lasted 36 years when his program failed to make the NCAA Tournament from 1982-’86 and was only 36-30-1 in 1985?
I doubt in today’s social media world he would have.
Wilhelm was more of a fighter than Howard. I can only imagine how he would have handled a sassy reporter who thought he knew more about the game and what was better for the program than Wilhelm.
It’s probably a good thing Howard and Wilhelm coached in a different era or maybe they would not be the Legends that they are in their respected sports today. Odds are Leggett is one of the last of a dying breed.
Very rarely do see a Jack Leggett or a Mike Martin at Florida State make it to 20 years at one program. Once a coach, who helped set a certain standard at a school, slips a little or has a few bad seasons or so it is perceived to be, fans and some media members start calling for his head.
It isn’t just happening at Clemson, it happens everywhere. Go look at Texas and Southern Cal for examples.
When he retired following the 1969 season, Howard said he retired for health reasons.
“The alumni got sick of me,” he would joke.
It was Howard’s go-to line during his speaking engagements, but maybe there was a little bit of truth to it, too.
In the 2008 movie, The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent tells Bruce Wayne that “You either die the hero or you live long enough to become the villain.”
There is a lot of truth in that line in regards to coaching.
When Jack Leggett guided the Tigers to the 2006 ACC Championship, and was the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, he was a hero to Clemson fans everywhere. Later that postseason, he guided his 13th Clemson team to the program’s 11th College World Series appearance, his fifth overall.
Clemson was one of the more dominant programs in the country at the time, and it was hard to find anyone that would say a harsh word about Leggett. In his first 13 seasons as the Tigers’ skipper, he won an average of 47 games per year.
If Jack Leggett would have ended his Clemson career in 2006, he would have left Clemson as a hero. But he did not. Instead, he fought through a mini decline in 2008, which saw the Tigers miss the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1987. But, by 2010, he found a way to take the Tigers back to Omaha for a sixth time in his tenure and the program’s 12th overall.
The Tigers beat No. 1 overall seed Arizona State in the first game of the CWS that year and then beat Oklahoma in the second game to advance to the winner’s bracket. If the season ended right after beating the Sooners, perhaps this year’s rumblings would have been avoided.
But it doesn’t work that way.
Leggett’s Tigers instead lost the next two games to, of all teams, South Carolina. The Gamecocks went on to win their first of back-to-back national championships soon after and Clemson fans have never forgiven Leggett.
On the day South Carolina won its first national championship is when Jack Leggett became the villain at Clemson. I’m not sure if anything Leggett has accomplished since matters to Clemson fans.
Not winning 955 games in 22 years at Clemson. Not having the eighth winning-est program in the country since he took over in 1994. Not taking his team to 21 NCAA Regionals in 22 years and definitely not being a Hall of Fame Coach.
It’s sad this is what it has come to but unfortunately it has.
I was told when that 2010 Clemson team returned from Omaha that June, there was no fan fair at all. No fans met the Tigers at the airport to congratulate them for a great run which allowed them to finish third nationally. There were no fans at Doug Kingsmore when they got off the buses in Clemson either.
Nope, they just all got in their vehicles and drove off.
If Brad Brownell were to take Clemson to the Final Four in basketball, what do you think will happen? They would probably erect a statue in his honor.
But Leggett barely got a thank you from the fans for putting Clemson within a whisper of playing for a national championship.
Leggett’s and Howard’s careers mirror more than you think. More than Leggett’s and Wilhelm’s, though Coach Wilhelm had to overcome a few obstacles too in his career, and he was given those opportunities. I’m not sure he would have been given those opportunities today.
However, let’s get back to Howard and Leggett.
Have you ever heard of the 800-rule? The 800-rule was set by the ACC in 1964 as it required student-athletes to score at least an 800 on their SATs in order to be admitted into their schools. The rule killed competitive football teams in the conference, especially when it came to playing southern powers like Alabama, Auburn, Georgia and Tennessee.
Howard’s Clemson teams, along with the other so-called football schools like Maryland and South Carolina at the time, started to struggle. Though Clemson won three ACC Championships from 1965-’67, they won just 17 games in those three years combined.
The Tigers were 16-4 in the ACC during that three-year stretch, but were 1-9 in out of conference games, beating only TCU, 3-0, in 1965.
The 800-rule killed Clemson’s football program and by the end of the 1973 season, the Tigers were in a streak of six straight losing seasons.
From 1948-’63, Clemson amassed a 101-53-8 record under Howard, winning four conference titles, playing in six bowl games and having six top 20 finishes. It was a stretch that put Clemson on the map in the college football world.
But by 1973, the ACC’s 800-rule which the Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional in 1972, changed the Tigers’ fortunes on the gridiron. From 1964-’76, Clemson had just three winning seasons and complied a 57-77-3 record.
After going 4-5-1 in 1968 and still finishing second in the ACC due to a tie to Wake Forest, Howard had enough and decided the 1969 season was going to be his last as Clemson’s head coach.
As I have documented in several stories this past spring, Leggett is in the middle of a similar situation as Howard was in the mid-to-late 1960s. Whether you choose to believe it or not (which I can’t really understand because recruiting is the lifeline to everything in college sports) the NCAA strapped down program’s like Clemson’s when they changed how the 11.7 scholarships were going to be used in 2010.
Leggett, at the time these rules were changed, even warned Clemson fans, through media interviews, how these new rules were going to affect things in regards to recruiting and how it would change the roster and diminish the Tigers’ overall depth, which has always been so good under Leggett and Wilhelm.
By 2012, the results of these rule changes were already taking shape. The Tigers went from 43 wins in 2011 to 35 in 2012. Though the 2013 team overachieved a bit with 40 wins, Clemson failed to make it out of a regional for a third straight year.
Last year, of course, Leggett started coming under fire for a 36-25 campaign and it didn’t help that his 2015 team followed with a 32-29 season, which ended in Fullerton, Calif., this past weekend.
So here we are. “You either die the hero or you live long enough to become the villain.”
I wonder if Frank Howard would still be a hero if he had to deal with all the scrutiny Leggett has dealt with in this new era of sports media?
I guess we will never know.