A Man For 25 Seasons Osborne Coaches Final Game, Ending Era Of Trying Change

A few weeks ago, Tom Osborne called Dean Smith to thank him for what he’s done not only for college basketball, but all of sports.

Smith left North Carolina before the start of the season, the most victorious basketball coach in NCAA history. And now Osborne takes his turn.

Tonight’s Orange Bowl, in which his No. 2 Nebraska (12-0) plays No. 3 Tennessee (11-1), will be Osborne’s last game. Last month, after 25 seasons and 254 wins, he said it was time to go.

If he needed any pointers on what to do with all the time that will soon be on his hands, Smith might have had a word or two of advice. Likewise, Eddie Robinson, who last month retired from Grambling as the winningest college football coach.

“I know Dean and Eddie, but it isn’t like we take vacations together,” Osborne said Thursday. “I probably talk to both of them two or three times a year.”

Osborne is one of the last successful coaches to devote himself to a single school at a time when winners hop from job to job and losers are shrugged off and often forgotten.

Robinson coached Grambling an astonishing 55 years and Smith left Chapel Hill after 36 seasons. Osborne is departing two days after Marv Levy retired after 12 years with the Buffalo Bills, and at 72 the NFL’s oldest coach.

But the rarity of the long-term, one-school coach isn’t the only change in college sports. The players, Osborne notes, have changed, too.

Osborne said recruits today often carry the burden of coming from broken families. He recalled that in the early to mid-‘60s when a player came from a single-parent home it was invariably because of a death in the family.

“Now, probably 50 percent of the players we recruit are from single-parent homes,” he said. “Often it’s the mother only and they have an absence of a father figure in their lives. As a result, young people are a little bit more insecure, a little more troubled.”

Osborne also cited a drug culture that barely existed in the early ‘60s, and an increasingly violent society.

“Football players are people, so they live in a culture and they’re affected by it,” he said.

But, Osborne says, today’s players are more gifted athletes and better suited to deal with the pressures of college sports.

“It takes an exceptional human being now to be all that you’re supposed to be as a college athlete,” he said.

“You’re supposed to be good as a student. You’re supposed to be able to pass a drug test every week if necessary. You’re supposed to excel on the football field and you’re supposed to be a great role model. You’re supposed to give time to the community.

“To balance all those things is very difficult, and the expectations are very high.”