Head Buc needs coaching up

For the first time in over a decade, I made a concerted effort to watch MTV last night, in order to catch the premier of Two-a-Days. It's a behind the scenes look at the 2005 Hoover Bucs, a powerhouse prep football team at my wife's new high school.

The school (officially anyway) has been going gaga over the show's debut, packing out a local movie house at $20 a ticket (gotta pay for that trip to Oklahoma somehow). The show dominated the sports talk radio in town today, a not unimpressive feat considering Bama and Auburn kick off in a little over a week.

But if I were a Hoover honcho, I wouldn't be entirely thrilled. The football players and cheerleaders came across OK. Head coach Rush Probst on the other hand ... not so much. It wasn't the occasional bursts of profanity (they didn't help) but the overall arrogance that made me cringe. At one point, he's shown talking to a football mom who's trying to get her son excused from practice. King Probst decrees that he needs "four different doctor's notes." Good thinking coach. Any three doctors can forge a note.

Probst is a highly successful coach, and a lot of his genius was tapping into a funding model that made the booster club the most powerful in Alabama. But he has rubbed a lot of other coaches the wrong way with his arrogance. More than a few Bucs fans are troubled also, but an awful lot of them excuse it as long as he wins games.

It doesn't have to be that way. As a reporter, I saw coaches who acted like Probst and won, but I also saw other programs that won big with class. And even Probst seemed to sense that in an interview with WJOX this morning, talking about how he didn't like everything he saw of himself.

It would be nice to see him mature. But even if he does, Hoover has seven more episodes of Two-A-Days to endure first.