Our Stupid Sports Apology Culture

I'd like to begin by saying that I don't know anything about the University of Wyoming's football program. The last time it entered my thoughts was probably when I was using the team in a PlayStation college football game several years ago. You know when you've gotten so good at a certain sports game that you start using inferior teams just for a challenge? Yeah, that was Wyoming.

I know even less about Wyoming's head coach, Joe Glenn, except that he's the latest victim of a pathetic apology culture in sports, one in which genuine expression and honest emotion have been replaced by robotic political correctness.

Here's the situation: Glenn's team had lost three of its last four games, and he wanted to fire things up. So he told a gathering of Wyoming students at a luncheon last week that he guaranteed his team would defeat Utah in the teams' Mountain West Conference game.

Word trickled back to the Utes, who weren't all that pleased to hear this brash prediction. "That is just what he is going to say, good for him," linebacker Joe Jiannoni told the Salt Lake Tribune. "What can I say? I could guarantee he is not [going to beat us]. I'm not supposed to say anything because I'll get in trouble, but it gets my blood going."

Against Wyoming, Utah got everything else going as well: 10 points in the first quarter, 30 (!) in the second, and then another three in the third. The fans in Salt Lake City started taunting Glenn and his team about the now slightly inaccurate guarantee. Which really didn't sit well with him.

Neither did what the Utes did with a 43-point lead: attempt an onside kick. Wyoming snagged the ball and went on offense; the Cowboys' coach, however, was just plain offended. So he did what anyone whose ego had been marinating in embarrassment, disappointment, and rage for three quarters would do: he flipped the Utah sideline the bird.

It wasn't even an emphatic one; according to the highlight I saw, it was sort of that quick-from-the-holster, drive-by middle finger you might flash at a friend after a lousy joke. It certainly wasn't the kind of long-lasting flippage you see during a rush-hour merge on a D.C. interstate. (Never cut me off. Never.)

After Wyoming lost 50-0, Glenn lost his right to human expression. He was publicly scolded by his athletic conference, and no doubt by some friends of the program who chided him for poor sportsmanship or obscenity or some other nonsense. Which sent him spiraling into a string of apologies that was one mea culpa short of an appearance on Larry King.

Yet any discussion of sportsmanship begins and ends with the actions of Utah's coaching staff. If I've already had sand kicked in my face to the tune of 43-0, with fans taunting me around the stadium, and someone decides an onsides kick is the next logical progression of my personal pain, giving the finger would be practically kind; a more reasonable response would be to sprint across the field and swiftly hand the opposing coach his own ass. But referees frown upon that sort of thing, I suppose...

Hyperbole aside, Glenn shouldn't have apologized for anything. Not for poor sportsmanship or for bad judgment and certainly not for the dreaded "setting a bad example for the kids" business. Kids aren't stupid; they know when it's dad's job to yell and scream and drop some F-bombs, and they know it's not cool to do the same until they're old enough.

Someone decided a few years ago that society needed to hit the mute button on self-expression in sports. End zone celebrations. Candid quotes to the media. Honest assessments of peers. None of it is allowed lest the person stepping out of lock-step be chided for grandstanding or showboating or speaking out of turn. We are left with a sports landscape in which surprises are few and the next cresting controversies are as predictable as so many of the over-hyped games that are played.

A sports landscape seeded with constant, unending apology. Even when the offending action was honest, harmless and, above all else, understandable.

Greg Wyshynski is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].