the football coach--4/24/2026

24 Apr 2026

the football coach--4/24/2026

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Today's selection-- from Football by Chuck Klosterman. The cliché of the football coach:

“With the possible exception of used-car salesmen, there's no vocational stereotype quite as fixed as that of a football coach. There are endless examples of real-life coaches who contradict this stereotype, but almost none in fiction, where a coach's personality is always the same. Negative depictions of football coaches (Dazed and Confused, Varsity Blues, The Slaughter Rule) present characters with the same core sensibilities as those depicted positively (Eric Taylor in Friday Night Lights, Ted Lasso in Ted Lasso). Even when a portrayal strives for ambivalence (as with Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday), the caricature stays locked. Craig T. Nelson played a problematic antagonist in the movie All the Right Moves and an affable protagonist in the TV sitcom Coach without changing his baseline persona at all. There are certain traits all football coaches are expected to possess: They're demanding, unapproachable, and obsessed with detail. They are patriarchal realists with juvenile interests. They're emotional, but only demonstrative when the emotion is anger or pride. They refuse to engage with hypothetical questions. They work long hours and are immune to inclement weather. In the morning, they drink whole milk with their kids. In the evening, they drink beer from aluminum cans, alone on the couch. They constantly get fired and are never surprised when it happens. Most critically, they are unsentimentally mired in the past-mistrustful of modernity and indifferent toward the future. Like Tony Soprano, they are history buffs who hate nostalgia; instead of seeing the past as something to remember, they see it as the way things should continue to be done.

“What makes this caricature significant is the begrudging acceptance that all of these qualities are necessary, but only in combination and only if possessed by a man whose job is coaching football. It is hard to understand how and why that happened. When a youngish coach like Mike McDaniel or Brandon Staley doesn't fit the archetype, the genuine details of his personality receive less attention than the blanket categorization that he 'doesn't come across like a traditional football coach,' an optimistic description on the day he gets hired and a pejorative explanation on the day he gets fired. The image matters more than the resume, even when the resume is genuine. When Kamala Harris was running for president in 2024 and selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it was partially because Walz was once employed as an assistant high school football coach for Mankato West High School. During preelection rallies, Harris referred to Walz as 'coach' more regularly than she called him 'governor,' and it became impossible to find any long profile about Walz that didn't note this specific aspect of his biography. In theory, the partnership was supposed to help Harris tap into male voting blocs. In practice, it destroyed her credibility among the specific demographic she wanted to persuade. Walz wasn't pretending; he really was a former football coach. He patterned himself after Nebraska's Tom Osborne, implemented a 4-4 defensive attack, and won a state title. But Walz only seemed like a football coach to voters with no preexisting relationship to football. His image embodied the liberal conception of nontoxic masculinity, a reverse Margaret Thatcher.

Nick Saban was the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team from 2007 to 2023.

“What has happened, it seems, is that the meaning of 'football coach' has adopted an unusually conflicted taxonomy. As a generic term for a faceless figure, the connotation is bad: The football coach is a retrograde bully, a nonintellectual devoid of empathy. In a more functional scenario, the connotation is good: A football coach gets things done and leads by example. But in a specific sense, when the coach is a real person and not an abstract idea, the negative traits of the generic image become the positive traits of the functional image. A football coach is old-fashioned on purpose, because he understands that objective truths don't change. A football coach is not intellectual, but only because he's smart enough to realize you can't learn to plow by reading a book. A football coach is a hard man who believes pain is weakness leaving the body, and what is now considered bullying is what he classifies as motivating. What's crazy is that football coaches (and particularly assistant coaches) who embody problematic traits tend to have longer careers than coaches who do not, even if they experience less success. A traditional coach is seen as an asset even when he loses. A nontraditional coach must win to survive.

“In the civilian world, a football coach is granted the status of Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men. Jessep throws around terse aphorisms like 'You want me on that wall' and 'You need me on that wall' and 'You can't handle the truth.' He's the bad guy in the movie, a chunk of human garbage, but everyone secretly fears he might have a point. Iessep's contention is that certain hard things can only be achieved through the old ways, even if those ways conflict with what society prefers. In A Few Good Men, such thinking results in a murder, a suicide, and a prison sentence. But the story's subtextual lesson is perhaps more troubling: The reason [essep's truth can't be handled is because it's an immoral truth, and the prospect of something both necessary and immoral requires too much cognitive dissonance to casually accept. Such problems can, however, be considered through the many [essep-like men who coach football, where the stakes are lower but the song remains the same.”