Legendary Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer has some incredible stories from his time as the head coach fo the Sooners. On Thursday, Switzer discussed how he handled player conduct issues, particularly when it involved legal authorities, in a conversation with USA Today Sports.
Before online arrest records, coaches would often try to take care of minor legal scuffles with as little publicity as possible. In Switzer's day, with some help from a friendly sheriff, that could be done with no publicity.
"I’d have local county people call me and say, 'One of your guys is drunk and got in a fight and is jail down here.' And I’d go down and get him out. Or I’d send an assistant coach down to get his ass out," Switzer told USA Today Sports. "The sheriff was a friend of the program. He didn’t want the publicity. He himself knew this was something we didn’t need to deal with in the media or anything with publicity."
Switzer maintains that he was unaware of any similar coverups during his time as the head coach of Dallas Cowboys (1994-97), but was happy to share his methods for dealing with those incidents at the college level.
“I’d get his ass up at 5 o’clock in the morning for two weeks in a row and run his ass, up and down the stairs, the stadium steps,” he said. “And the (assistant) coaches would be so pissed off that they had to get up and do it that they wore their ass out because they had to be the ones that run them. And a couple of the guys that were star players, I ran their asses off. So I had to be there at 5 o’clock in the morning.
“We could handle things internally in an era 30 years ago that you can’t today. You get a traffic ticket today, it’s everywhere. No one escapes what we have today, the attention and technology we have today.
“It was a different era, a different time.”
A different era indeed.
