Yet another reason to like football…..

Wall Street Journal 9.2.09

Why Your Coach Votes Republican

American politics are rich with characters and stereotypes—Joe the Plumber, Harry and Louise, Nascar dads and hockey moms, to name a few. But one persistent type hasn’t gotten much attention: the Republican football coach.

During the 2008 campaign cycle, college and NFL head coaches (and their wives) contributed a total of $13,286 to John McCain and the Republican National Committee. From that same group, Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee received just $4,600—half of it from Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears and the other half from San Jose State’s Dick Tomey.

In all, 20 coaches active in the 2008 season gave to Republican candidates seeking federal office. Three donated to Democrats. This disparity is even more striking given that, among the individual donors in the ’08 campaign cycle, Mr. Obama outraised Mr. McCain by more than a 5-to-1 margin.

Ohio State Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel was a donor to the Republican Party in the 2008 election.

Some coaches display their largely conservative instincts in non-financial ways. Jack Del Rio of the NFL’s Jaguars led the crowd in the pledge of allegiance at a Sarah Palin rally in Jacksonville last fall. Longtime Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs addressed last summer’s Republican National Convention. Lou Holtz fired up congressional Republicans with a pep talk in 2007 and recently flirted with running for Congress in Florida. Ralph Friedgen, the portly University of Maryland coach, good-naturedly called one of his Canadian players a socialist last fall.

There’s no evidence that coaches with a conservative bent are better coaches or more likely to get jobs. Football coaches aren’t the most diverse group, which may help explain their political similarities.

Still, could it be that football coaches, just by the nature of the job, are more comfortable on the right end of the political spectrum?

“I’d say that sounds likely—very likely,” said Bobby Bowden, the longtime Florida State coach and an outspoken Republican.

Mr. Bowden, a 79-year-old native Alabaman, describes himself as a lifelong conservative who—like many white Southerners of his generation—migrated from the Democratic Party to the GOP a few decades ago. There is, he says, a natural connection between his political and coaching philosophies.

“In coaching, you’ve got to have more discipline and you’ve got to be more strict and just conservative, I think. It fits with the Republicans,” he said.

Mr. Holtz, who coached Notre Dame to its last national championship in 1988, draws a parallel between the standards and rules that most coaches set for their players and the Republican vision of how American society ought to operate.

“You aren’t entitled to anything. You don’t inherit anything. You get what you earn—your position on the team,” Mr. Holtz said. “You’re treated like everybody else. You’re held accountable for your actions. You understand that your decisions affect other people on that team…There’s winners, there’s losers, and there’s competitiveness.”

Tom Osborne, who coached the Nebraska Cornhuskers for 25 seasons before serving three terms in Congress as a Republican, suggested that football coaches probably look at their own lives and careers as testaments to the conservative principle of self-reliance.

“There’s an awful lot of people who want to be in coaching for the number of jobs,” he said. “It’s highly competitive. And many of them have had to spend a fair amount of time as graduate assistants, interns—as much as four, five, six, seven, eight years—making very, very little money to get into the profession. And they will work 70, 80, 90 hours a week during the season.

“I think that background—adherence to discipline, sometimes sacrifice, loyalty to core values—those things tend to have people move in that direction.”

Some cite geography—the fact that so many coaches have roots in the South, a staunchly Republican region. Others point out that Republicans tend to revere strong, singular executive leaders—a pretty good description of a coach.

‘Not a Dictatorship …’

“That definitely does fit the football coaches’ mold,” said Mr. Bowden. “It’s not a dictatorship, but it’s on the verge.”

Mr. Osborne even noted that most coaches are ex-players, joking that “I’m sure many who are more liberal would say it’s because they got hit in the head too much.”

There are, of course, exceptions. Mr. Tomey, the only college head coach to donate to Mr. Obama last year, said he’s never really paid attention to the political leanings of his fellow coaches and that he was “shocked” to learn how many of them seem to favor the GOP.

With successful runs at Hawaii, Arizona and, since 2005, San Jose State to his name, he’s clearly no less committed to hard work, discipline, and accountability than his GOP colleagues.

But Mr. Tomey estimates that he’s only voted Republican “about three times” in his life (for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Arnold Schwarzenegger this decade, and maybe one other time).

When Mr. Tomey was at Arizona in 1990, state voters rejected a proposed Martin Luther King holiday. “Our players were really upset with that, and I remember asking them how many of them had voted and, like, two of them had,” he recalled. “So we decided as a staff that from that time forward we were going to get our guys registered to vote,” an effort he has maintained since then, although he stressed that it’s non-partisan in nature.

Some Democrats, Too

There are some other Democratic coaches, too. Southern California’s Pete Carroll, for instance, openly proclaimed his support for Mr. Obama last year, and George Perles, who coached Michigan State from 1983 to 1994 (before helping launch the Motor City Bowl), is waging a long-shot bid for the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Michigan.

And when Mr. Obama was running last year, several African-American coaches—including Ty Willingham (then at the University of Washington), Herm Edwards (then with the Kansas City Chiefs), and Mr. Smith of the Chicago Bears—expressed their support.

Some coaches keep quiet about politics to avoid alienating boosters and other higher-ups.

This is what led Jim Tressel, Ohio State’s head coach, to declare last fall that, “When it comes to political endorsements about candidates, it’s out of bounds.”

But while he was publicly mum about the ’08 election, Mr. Tressel did do some talking with his bank account—cutting a $1,000 check to the Republican National Committee a month before Election Day.