Alright, so I have been following the story much like everybody else around here has been about the drama surrounding the current head coach of our beloved Jayhawks, Mark Mangino, and his “abusive” behaviors which result in a lot of yelling, screaming, and now poking of players. I haven’t been throwing my thoughts out there much, since I feel like I have an inside position, since I used to work for KU Athletics for the last three years (which I left in May of this past year.) Now that I am starting to see a bit of a backlash against Lew Perkins, I feel like it is time to say my piece.
Everybody is making a huge deal out of the fact that this is all coming out during a losing season, where our team of talented offensive seniors are not delivering on the goods the way they should have. Yes, our season sucks, and our hope of a third tier bowl game relies on beating Missouri this coming weekend. In reality this is not a new thing, but actually a continuation of a process that began over two years ago when we were putting together the phenomenal season which brought home the Orange Bowl trophy. It was an exciting year, the team was enjoying the new football facilities, and on the outside everything was coming up roses. That is until the parking attendant incident which blew the cover off the behind the scenes operations.
To make a long story short, Mangino was assigned a parking space all of 20 feet from the brand new building. It seemed that he preferred to park his Navigator underneath the overhang which was squarely in the middle of the loading dock area. Every single day, we would have to offload shipments of gatorade or equipment by forklift in the parking lot, and then ever so carefully ferry them around his huge ass Navigator because heaven forbid anybody would want to risk scratching it, or dare to ask him to move it. Well that is, until the day that some young college student working for the parking department decided to tell Mangino that he could not park under the building and gave him a ticket for it, (or so the story that got back to us was something along these lines.) Most head football coaches don’t take kindly to being told they “can’t” do something, and throw in some serious anger management issues and boom you have one Mark Mangino cussing out and basically irately jumping all over this parking attendant. The attendant reported it up the chain, which then notified Lew’s office, and voila we have an apology issued by Mangino, and the thing seemingly blows over.
That is the public side of the story. The insider’s view is that this confrontation got Lew to thinking he needed to take a closer look at how the football department was relating with a lot of the support functions. He started asking a lot of questions, and heard story after story of mistreatment and abusive situations where the employees felt harrassed and belittled by members of the coaching staff. One gentleman in particular, the director of football operations, George Matsakis, name seemed to come up a lot. I can tell you that from my personal experience, that he is the capital A in asshole. I can think of a whole lot of stories that involve him asking people to jump through extreme hoops, with about as much tact as an elephant in a china shop. The more people that Lew talked to, the more issues he found out about.
This review resulted in an Athletic’s wide meeting of all the support staff headed by Lew. In this meeting, he expressed extreme displeasure with everybody for putting up with the abuse for so long, and not bringing it to his attention. He went on to say that he had a zero tolerance for it, and that if in the future he found out that an abusive situation had occured between the football staff and a support staff member, and it was not reported immediately to him, the support staff who suffered the abuse would be fired. It was made clear to us that the football staff had been warned, and that they were being placed on probation with a zero tolerance for any future outbursts or belittling actions towards any of the staff.
I think that in light of this backstory, it is easy to see how as reports are starting to surface today about allegations of things getting a little too far out of control with the players of the team, this is a serious matter. Lew has already dealt with this same issue in a private matter within the organization, and given the coaches a chance to shape up. If the pattern continued, and in some ways it is even worse because it involves the student athletes that Lew knows we have to value above all else, it will come as no surprise if this is the end of Mangino’s tenure as the coach.
We can all argue about where tough love crosses the line into abuse, but I can tell you that everyone walks on total eggshells around the man, because they are afraid they will be the recipient of one of his famous tirades. I do not think it is healthy, and I think we can find a competent coach with a better disposition which will lead the Jayhawks onto victory in a way that will make the university proud.
Our Father, who art in Lawrence,
♥ Kimberlee ♥
Dave
Recent Comments