Littwin: Barnett may be near end of rocky road

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 8, 2005 at midnight

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You can call it historical inevitability. Or maybe poetic justice.

Pick your own literary device.

But Gary Barnett had to go. (Actually, he hasn't gone anywhere quite yet. But you've read the stories.)

This is the way of the world. I don't have to tell you that.

If Barnett is actually out, this would be the dropping of the final CU recruiting-scandal shoe - and at CU they've got dropping shoes like Ralphie's got clomping hooves.

Count along with me: Byyny, Tharp, Hoffman and now, reportedly, Barnett.

How could Barnett, the football coach, survive a football recruiting scandal when everyone who wasn't the football coach had to go?

You can think the scandal is not really a scandal. You can think Katie Hnida was a terrible football player - and applaud Gary Barnett for his, uh, candor. You can think it's just fine for a football coach to respond to an accusation that one of his players had raped someone by getting that player to write a letter of apology.

But whether you want to give Barnett every break, that doesn't mean you can ignore all the rules of engagement.

And yet, Barnett, from all we've read, very nearly did.

He has nearly survived, in defiance of every storytelling norm.

It looks like he was, in fact, this close.

Well, maybe not that close. But he was definitely closer than the Nebraska-CU score. And a whole lot closer than the Texas-CU score.

A month ago, according to Barnett's own words, he was close to signing a contract extension.

A week ago, it was being speculated that Barnett, like him or not, was too expensive - as opposed to too valuable - to let go. There was a survival bonus of something like $1.6 million - there's a real reality show - that CU had to pay Barnett if it did fire him.

But the cost structure must have changed.

If Barnett is going, it's because CU decided that he was too expensive to keep.

It isn't that he'll be going out in a Betsy Hoffman limo. (You'll like this: The CU regents were at a black-tie Christmas party Wednesday night. I can't wait to read the price structure of the pate de foie gras.)

You can carve out your own theory to how we've reached this point.

The speculation has been that this would be a football decision. You lose your last three games, including the 70-3 embarrassment against Texas, and suddenly everything you've ever done looks like a 70-3 embarrassment against Texas.

What's the song lyric - everybody loves a winner, so nobody loves me?

You lose 70-3 and and the sound you hear is alumni, after they've called the bank to cancel their annual contribution, rushing outside to scrape the CU stickers off the back window of the SUV.

Now you can add to the speculation the story in today's Rocky of charges against Barnett - charges from a former CU athletic department employee that are so explosive that I don't even know what to say about them. I know that they've gone to Hank Brown's desk and to a desk at the FBI.

I have no idea whether they're true. I do have an idea, though, that big-time college athletics are so corrupt that it's too easy to believe any charges against virtually any coach.

And, worse than that, we all know that people are ready to believe that every discouraging word about CU football is true.

How much credibility capital does Gary Barnett carry with him?

On the talk shows, they argue about Barnett as a coach because they have to talk about something.

But, even knowing college sports fans and even knowing sports talk shows, I was still surprised to think that Barnett might lose his job before the season even ends. (There's a bowl game left, remember. I know you're on the line with your travel agent now.)

Did everything change with one game?

It isn't as if CU could hire a replacement who will come in and win 10 games next season and beat Texas.

And it isn't as if CU couldn't have fired Barnett for any number of reasons long ago.

This isn't a Ward Churchill situation. Football coaches don't have tenure. They have, in big-time programs, big-time contracts. Ask any English professor if he wouldn't take that deal.

But if it's not a Ward Churchill situation, it is a Hank Brown situation. CU chose Brown to be interim president - and will almost certainly make him permanent president - for one reason: in order to borrow some of his credibility.

When Ref C was on the ballot, and higher education was facing fourth and long, Brown was summoned to save the day.

This was an easy choice. If Brown could make himself the public face of CU, people might not remember the ugly underside they've been staring at.

The Brown era is supposed to be the post-scandal CU era.

The Brown era is supposed to be the pro-transparency CU era.

The Brown era is supposed to be the clean-up-whatever-mess-he-inherited CU era.

Where does that leave Gary Barnett, very much of the pre-Brown CU era?

The last anyone saw of him Wednesday night was sneaking out the side door of the Dal Ward Center. It was inevitable.

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