Tommy Tuberville and America’s mythology of the college football coach

Readers, did you know that Tommy Tuberville — the US senator who, until last week, had spent 2023 mounting a quixotic one-man campaign to destroy the GOP’s claims to be the party that supports the troops — used to be a college football coach?

No? Neither did I. But it seems that I’m in a relatively small minority here in the USA. For anyone who obsesses over college football, and there are a lot of people in America who do, Tuberville was a familiar figure long before his foray into politics. After a brief playing career between 1995 and 2016, he was employed pretty much continuously as a head coach at various US universities.

The salaries Tuberville received for his head coaching positions weren’t particularly unusual for college sport, but remain startling nonetheless. At Texas Tech, where he was head coach from 2010 to 2013, he was paid $1.5 million for his first season and $2 million a year for the others. When he moved to Cincinnati in 2013, he pocketed $2.2 million a year. Nice work if you can get it.

These seven-figure sums contrasted starkly against the $0 a year paid to the players Tuberville coached. The arguments against paying college players have always been that college sports are amateur pursuits, that college football can lead to a very well-remunerated career in the NFL, and that players on athletic scholarships — which is all of them, at least at all the big sports-focused universities — get a free education. But not everyone goes onto the NFL, and for those who have a realistic chance of doing so, every college game comes with the threat of an injury that might sabotage their prospects. Indeed, potential injury hangs over every player like the goalposts of Damocles, because if you can’t play any more, your scholarship goes bye-bye.

Anyway, readers may well wonder what any of this has to do with politics. The answer is: nothing! There is precisely nothing in Tuberville’s background that provides any sort of qualification to act as a senator. He’s spent 40 years as a handsomely remunerated white man yelling at a bunch of unpaid, largely Black players. His one post-football foray into business — running an asset management fund with former Lehman Brothers broker John Stroud — resulted in him being sued by seven of the fund’s investors, who claimed to have been defrauded of some $1.7 million. (Stroud was eventually convicted for fraudulent use of customer funds and sentenced to 10 years in prison; Tuberville was not charged.)

Nevertheless, the voters of the fine southern state of Alabama decided in 2020 that Coach Tommy was the perfect man to send to the US Senate. His policies, such as they were, comprised a grab-bag of Republican tropes: climate change denial, election denial, transphobia — and, fatefully, anti-abortionism, which led to his announcement in February this year that he was unilaterally blocking appointments of senior US military officers.

Such promotions require unanimous consent from Congress, which — until Tuberville came along — had always been a formality. Coach Tommy explained his actions were a protest at a Pentagon policy that allowed service members to claim reimbursement for costs incurred travelling out of state for an abortion. (The only reason they might need to do so, of course, is the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022.) And as weeks turned into months, Tuberville dug in his heels ever deeper, and the whole US military started grinding slowly to a halt.

Ten long months later, Tuberville has finally packed in his one-man stand. Why? Well, it wasn’t because of the pressure placed on him by pretty much everyone in politics, including the Pentagon and even the most rabid of his fellow Republicans, who if nothing else understand that pissing off the military doesn’t play well with the GOP’s base. No, if anything, Tuberville’s decision seems to have come because his fellow Republicans were so fed up with him that they were open to supporting Democratic efforts to alter the law to circumvent his blockade.

But then, it’s not surprising that Tuberville isn’t especially disposed to listen to anyone else’s opinion. In the world of football, especially, the coach’s voice is one of unquestioned authority: if the coach says something, you do it even if that means working yourself to death. Literally. As of 2021, a total of 22 college footballers had died of overexertion during practices since 2000. Precisely no-one has been held accountable for any of these deaths.

Tuberville isn’t the only former college sports coach in Congress; Jim Jordan, who was briefly a candidate for the position of speaker in the House of Representatives, is a former Olympic wrestler and was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University between 1987 and 1995. His tenure coincided with that of Richard Strauss, the team doctor, who died in 2005 and who was found in 2018 to have sexually assaulted 177 student athletes. Several victims have suggested that Jordan must have known of the assaults, and one alleges that Jordan “begged him” not to report his experience; Jordan denies this.

The Ohio State assaults, like those committed by former US gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, occurred in an environment where the people in charge had absolute authority over those on the team. In the latter case, the stick was missing out on the Olympics; in the former, it was being cut from the team and being turfed out, sans scholarship, on the street. With all this in mind, there’s an argument to be made that time as a college sports coach is a pretty terrible thing to bring to Congress, where — in theory, at least — the environment is meant to be one of discussion and compromise.

But the Republican Party has long since abandoned any pretence of being interested in either discussion or compromise. (This makes the Democrats’ insistence on maintaining the charade all the more frustrating, as your commitment to bipartisan consensus isn’t much use if the people with whom you’re trying to reach a consensus are a drooling death cult.) From that point of view, until the day that the GOP is able to run an actual mule as a candidate, Coach Tommy is the next best thing: a deeply stubborn and deeply stupid man who is used to absolute authority, is convinced of his own rectitude, and has evident contempt for anyone who disagrees with him. These traits served him well in football: why shouldn’t they do the same in Washington?