For the past five years, athletic director Tom Collins' decisions have been continually scrutinized, questioned and used as comical fodder. It's been easy to make fun of Collins. One bad decision has preceded the next.
Collins reversed the trend last week.
Ball State's embattled athletic director fired football coach Stan Parrish on Tuesday. With two years and $700,000 left on Parrish's contract — money that will be owed to Parrish — this choice wasn't as easy as it should have been.
Parrish set Ball State's football program back a decade, to a time of 21 straight losses, desperation and plenty of national embarrassment. Those failures came after two straight bowl games and the historic 2008 season. His 6-19 record highlights the most disappointing head coaching tenure in Ball State football history.
But Parrish's termination isn't enough to save Ball State's football program.
True revival is a two-step process. The first was firing Parrish. The next is escorting Collins out the door.
Collins deserves credit for making the tough and right decision — something Cardinals fans are not accustomed to. But we can't forget Collins and President Jo Ann Gora put the football program in this position.
If a movie fails at the box office, does it make sense to blame the leading actor only? What about the director? What about the person choreographing the mess?
A bad movie is a scar on an actor's and a director's careers. Collins and Parrish are equally accountable for the bad movie that has been Ball State football the past two seasons.
Collins is responsible for failing to retain former Ball State coach Brady Hoke in 2008. His decision not to offer a respectable amount of money to Hoke's assistant coaches and not improve facilities gave Hoke no choice but to accept San Diego State's head coach position.
Anyone pay attention to the job Hoke's done in turning that program around? The Aztecs are 8-4 and headed to a bowl game. They were 2-10 the season before Hoke.
Ball State blamed a bad economy for not offering Hoke an appropriate contract. Collins handed a nationally ranked program to someone unfit to be head coach at the college level. Parrish hadn't held the position since 1988, and he had a 27-game winless streak.
Many people — myself excluded — believed Parrish was the right choice. It was Collins' job to know better. He failed.
Now Ball State will have to pay two coaches: Parrish and whoever is hired to fix his mess. In the business world, you don't get a pass for a financial blunder like this.
It would be one thing if the bulk of Collins' time at Ball State had gone smoothly. It hasn't.
This is the guy who pledged his loyalty to former men's basketball coach Ronny Thompson for months before we found out Thompson was insubordinate the entire time.
He's the same guy who led an athletic department labeled "racially hostile." An athletics department constantly in trouble with the NCAA, currently on probation and sued twice by former coaches.
And lest we forget, the guy who fired Parrish just before boarding a plane for Alaska to watch the Ball State men's basketball team in the Great Alaska Shootout.
Collins offered no explanation to fans.
He didn't stick around to answer difficult questions from the media like "Was it a mistake to hire Parrish in the first place?" or "How do you have the money to buy out the remaining $700,000 of Parrish's contract when you couldn't give an extra $50,000 to Hoke's assistants?"
He simply fled to Sarah Palin land, literally and metaphorically.
Collins' educational background and personality characteristics make him unqualified to be a Division I athletic director. He was hired with only a general studies degree. It's well known his greatest weakness is a lack of communication skills. Nothing is worse for a department chairman than that combination.
All this should make it hard to explain how Collins didn't receive a pink slip last week along with Parrish. The reason is obvious.
Collins is Ball State's athletic director because he offers no threat to Gora's supreme power. Like a mother who allows a finger-painting toddler to run rampant in a white-walled room, Gora has allowed Collins to make a mess of the Cardinals' athletics department.
With her successful fundraisers and educational programs, athletics is not important to Gora. If they were, Hoke would have been given the necessary commitment to keep him at Ball State.
Gora wants an athletic director who will stay out of her way and won't challenge for the right to be the face of Ball State Universty. She's a puppeteer. Collins is the puppet.
Students and fans should demand an athletics director who can operate independently. You deserve a football program that has a chance to fulfill its potential.
Gora should fire Collins. If she doesn't, the Board of Trustees must pressure Gora.
Ball State has taken the first step toward football respectability. The entire recovery act is not complete.
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