"Culture Change"
Have you ever been in a work situation where new management was brought in? Where people all around you were fired under the guise of “reorganizing” or “culture change” when in reality the company just wanted to become more profitable? The arrival of such individuals may bring anxiety to the employees of the actual company, but excites investors who expect that “restructuring” will lead to better returns on their investment. Still, these individuals commonly known as “HR consultants” are far from being celebrated (although George Clooney earned an Oscar nod for playing one) and the public view of them is best described as a “necessary evil.”
As most FBS college football programs finish their non conference schedules, evaluations for the 17 new coaches around the country are starting to roll in and one thing that comes up repeatedly is the promise of “culture change.” Simultaneously, coaches that find themselves on the hot seat or fired are told “the program needed a culture change.” As a lifelong fan of athletics programs with high turnover rates at the football and men’s basketball programs (first Cal, then UCLA), I had accepted talk of culture change as standard coach speak.
Since co-founding CACE, I’ve gained appreciation for how these culture changes look to student-athletes. It’s not exciting, or even vague– it’s Clooney coming in on an airplane, looking to fire people.
Boosters (stockholders) put pressure on the athletic department (the company) to win more games (increase profitability). The athletic department brings in a new head coach (Clooney) to “change the culture” (fire people).
With scholarships guaranteed for Division 1 student-athletes, coaches have to be more creative than kicking people off the team for what they deem to be poor performance on the field. So coaches take extreme measures to get people to quit, they abuse student-athletes. When people leave the program in droves, the coach gets a pass because he or she is “toughening up the team” or “changing the culture.”
Take for example this glowing piece on new Vanderbildt head coach Clark Lea. Keep in mind that Vanderbilt plays in the SEC, (the toughest conference in college football), is an elite academic university, and hasn’t had a winning season since before most of the current players were in high school.
According to one player, Coach Lea told the team “they were mentally weak and his first job was to get that out of there.” His solution was to make the team do nothing but stretch for 2 straight weeks in the cold, in only shorts and a t-shirt. Speaking about two weeks of player abuse where his two best running backs quit and his quarterback said he’d get out of practice feeling like fingers would explode, Lea said “Whatever collateral damage came up in the process, I had to be willing to accept.”
To be clear, nobody at Vanderbilt is mentally weak. The school was ranked 14th on the US News and World Report Ranking, and only accepted 12% of all applicants in the latest admission cycle. That level of academic excellence for a school that has been bad at football for eight years means that the students on the football team are there for more than football. Only a handful of their recruits were 4 stars prospects, none were 5 stars. Most of them are not going to play in the NFL, no matter how many weeks Coach Lea tries to freeze talent into them.
Of course freezing talent into players isn’t the goal. Freezing untalented players out of the program is Lea’s true objective. Because the NCAA doesn’t allow him to cut scholarships for lack of talent or poor performance on the field, Lea turned practice into actual torture sessions. Some players quit, others he could cut from the team for missing their daily torture session.
This is a perfectly logical, albeit inhumane, way to improve a team. If you lack talent, open up as many scholarships as possible so you can recruit better players. And if you can’t fire your players, just torture them into quitting. Lea is running the same playbook as the other coaches who talk about “culture change.”
By the way, Vanderbilt has started the year 0-2, with a loss to FCS East Tennessee State. Keep up the good work Coach Lea.
-Conor