Dan Mullen will walk out on reporters if they ask about injuries

Real dick move from a coach I thought was one of the good guys:

And he and every other paranoid coach are wrong, dead wrong: the media, and through us the fans, have every right to know about injury status of players. One of the great wrongs about the NCAA in football now is that they don't have a uniform injury reporting system like the NFL. From what I've been told (and I've never been able to get anyone to go on the record .. yet) is that one of the college football scandals waiting to happen are the number of student trainers and managers who are feeding injury info to gamblers, or using the information themselves to bet. It's really the easiest thing in the world, because the gamblers/bookies can probably pay them peanuts. They're college kids, for crying out loud.

Something else: coaches hate bloggers and fan sites and message boards, especially when they break injury stuff. They get it wrong a lot. Well, if the coaches want the right info out there and want to stop the internet guessing game and speculation, be honest and forthright about it. Not holding my breath, however.

 

Dan has enjoyed a little success at state and now its gone to his head. He's a good coach. Not a great coach. There is a difference. And as far as asking about injuries, he knows that is part of the business.
A real dickhead move on his part that will come back to haunt him.

 

Real dick move by him.

Has anyone ever dealt with a coach that's actually with about talking about injuries?

 

"one of the good guys" is a complete oxymoron when referring to football coaches.

 

I thought coaches and schools didn't give out injury info, hiding behind citing HIPPA?

 

And Mullen DOES talk about injuries. He answered, at length, a question about two injured players (Malcolm Johnson and Marcus Green) during SEC media days last month.

http://www.myfoxal.com/story/19057717/sec-media-days-miss-state-head-coach-dan-mullen

But he's like most coaches — he'll be a dick in small groups, but when the national TV cameras are on, he puts on a different face.

 

Good pull. So he's a hypocrite as well as a dick. Well, doesn't make him any different from 99 percent of the football coaches out there.

 

Rich Brooks, when he was UK, started every postgame presser with an injury report, and talked about them during the week.

 

I've always wondered what made football coaches so paranoid. You don't see it to the same extent in other sports.

The basketball coaches I've dealt with have never been that paranoid about injuries, and in most cases, an injury to a basketball starter can be more far-reaching than a football one is.

I've always thought it was really misplaced. I had the football coach I cover ban me for a week because I witnessed an injury in practice and reported it. (Then I banned myself for most of the next week and he whined that I wasn't around)

His rationale, as it is for most coaches, is that reporting an injury gives the other team a gameplan edge.

I suppose, but it's not like the opposing team isn't going to figure out on the first snap the player is missing and adjust on the fly anyway.

Football gameplans are constantly morphing through a game. Football coaches act like/think we're stupid and perpetuate the notion that there's a script that can't be deviated from by the opponent and that revealing an injury will alter that almighty script ... even though we all know that's not true.

 

I realize colleges have HIPPA rules and such - but you would think this would be fertile ground for gamblers to infiltrate college athletics - they don't even need to entice a player to shave points, just slip some cash to a grad assistant trainer.

 

Bubbler -- I truly believe it's because football fancies itself to be a branch of the military. Their coaches are drill sergeant types more than any other sport's are, and obviously the NFL's marketing of late has been in that direction. Whether Winslow's "soldier" or Al Davis referring to his team as a paramilitary organization, there's a mentality there that leads to the freakish control of information.