Hello, Tim Walz, and welcome to Chicago and the Democratic National Convention!
Let’s get to the important stuff: football.
You’re the old high school whistle-tooter who astoundingly gave up coaching to become governor of Minnesota and now the Democratic Party’s candidate for vice president of the whole United States.
Great playbook there.
But let’s note that Minnesota is also the state that elected former pro wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura governor in 1998. Supposedly, “The Body’’ watched movies most of his term. No matter, because we’ll all remember his inspiring battle cry from “Predator,” the Arnold Schwarzenegger jungle movie in which, after being zapped by a space alien, Ventura snarls, “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
Anyway, Tim, you were the defensive coordinator for Mankato West High School when it won the Minnesota 4A state championship 25 years ago. Here’s what Lance Resner, a linebacker on that Scarlets team, told the New York Times about how you fired guys up: “Tim came in with a different swagger. We were pretty dog [crap] for a long time.”
So what would you do to stop Caleb Williams and the Bears, a team full of expectations but also coming off a pretty dog-poop past?
Got a scheme, coach? Your old players said Mankato West didn’t pass the ball much. And your defense likely never saw a quarterback with Williams’ cannon arm and elusiveness.
But if you could game-plan past Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly and our own big lineman, JB Pritzker, to win Kamala Harris’ running-mate nod, perhaps you can figure out Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron’s stacked offensive scheme.
Looking at your old Scarlets roster, it seems you had mostly normal-sized fellows on your title team, although a 6-4, 230-pound running back/linebacker is a pretty big dude. The players all say what made the difference from their past struggles was your enthusiasm.
You showed some of that Sunday when you were in Pennsylvania and gave a pep talk to the Aliquippa High School football team on its home field, telling players, “Politics isn’t much different than this.” You were talking about effort, teamwork and winning, of course.
And maybe you’re right — if you count kicking, biting, eye-gouging and rubbing opponents’ faces in mud as coachable tactics. Indeed, the thought of anything in sport being as grotesque and disheartening as our current political scene is kind of like finding out Bronko Nagurski was also a meth dealer.
Coach, you already have a feud going with fellow coach-turned-political animal Tommy Tuberville, the U.S. senator from Alabama. He’s about as conservative as you are liberal. And he follows in the line of the football-coach politicos who came before him, like Gerald Ford and Tom Osborne.
You called yourself “the anti-Tuberville,” saying you hoped “to show that football coaches are not the dumbest people.” That’s locker room bulletin-board material if I’ve ever heard it.
And, yep, Tuberville — 159-99 at Ole Miss, Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati in 21 years of head coaching — rose to the bait like a safety on a stretched-out tight end.
“I think he’s trying to make himself look good,” Tuberville said, adding, “If he had been any good, he would’ve been a head coach, to be honest with you.”
Ouch.
But football guys pick themselves up, dust themselves off and get back in the fray. While you’re rearranging your pads, think about what any team could (and possibly will) do to stop young Williams and talented Bears receivers DJ Moore, Keenan Allen, Cole Kmet and Rome Odunze. We’d like to know.
Imagine it’s Tuberville you’re game-planning against and you just heard he doesn’t respect you because you’re a guy who “kind of conned his way up the totem pole.” You just spoke in Aliquippa, home of Mike Ditka. What would Da Coach do? You gonna take that?
But then, you’re a consensus, one-team, all-oars-in-the-water man.
“We have more in common than we have separated,” you told those Aliquippa players. If you become VP, maybe you and Tuberville can even sit down and form a common bond. How wild would that be in these fractured days?
Nick David is head football coach at Mound Westonka High School outside Minneapolis. I talked to him after practice Monday, and he said Mankato West football is now the envy of all.
“They’re phenomenal,” David said. “Their kids bought into the culture. It’s something we all strive for.”
Coach Walz, you’ve said football and politics are pretty much the same. Beware the headhunters and cheap-shot artists. They lurk.