http://www.sltrib.com/sports/ci_2411828
Article Last Updated: 9/12/2004 01:45 AM
Ex-Weber coach Mike Price seeking redemption at UTEP
By Gordon Monson
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
EL PASO, Texas -- Mike Price is fully aware.
That anonymously attributed notion, made so clear to him by mistakes perpetrated
one infamous night at a Florida strip club and in a nearby hotel room, leading to the
loss of his dream job, its $10 million salary package, and a good name built over
three decades of coaching college football, stays with him now nearly nonstop.
On this day, though, for a couple of hours, Price is neither suffering, nor
attempting to renovate his reputation. He is receiving therapy. At the close of
another practice, this particular one tailored to beat his old employer, Weber State,
on Saturday, he is standing in a buzzard-hot sun, in a place called the Sun Bowl,
sweating through a white UTEP T-shirt and blue shorts, watching his team work its
appointed drills. Offensive drills, defensive drills, kickoff-coverage drills,
punt-coverage drills, field-goal drills, PAT drills, and, man, it's tedious and hot
and smelly and, to Price, glorious.
He feels renewed, if not rebuilt.
"It's great out here," he says. "This is fun. This is exciting. I live for these
two hours of the day. This is why I got into coaching in the first place. I get paid
for everything else. I'd do this for free."
At afternoon's end, with the heavy lifting done, Price calls his University of
Texas-El Paso Miners together on the 50-yard line of the Sun Bowl, a football venue
carved into the scraggy, barren hills of Southwestern Texas.
Before the meeting adjourns, his players burst into laughter. Their head coach is
telling jokes.
Price, who on the first day of fall camp with his new team hammered a miner's pick
into the field, wants to move and motivate his players to work hard, have fun, and get
over themselves.
Not that there's much to get over. UTEP was 2-11 last year, 2-10 the year before,
and 2-9 in 2001. Traditionally, it is a laughingstock of a program, and one of
Division I-A football's coaching hellholes. It is a place where top-drawer athletes
have not wanted to come and where the funding hasn't flowed freely, in a town on the
Mexican border that has a healthy dose of respect for diligence, but only a meager
dose of self-esteem.
It was a desperate, but hungry place.
The perfect place, then, for Price to redirect his personal life and re-float his
professional career.
Maybe the only place.
"It reminds me of Ogden," he says.
More on that later.
The head coach never would have landed here had it not been for his ascension
through other desperate college football programs that started with eight seasons of
success at Weber State, went through Washington State, including two Rose Bowl
appearances and a national-coach-of-the-year honor, and wobbled off the tracks a
year-and-a-half ago at Alabama.
Price previously thought he would finish his coaching career in Pullman, where he
had transformed the Pac-10 sadsacks into a perennial winner. But when the Crimson Tide
called after the 2002 season, he couldn't refrain.
"The lure of Alabama, to be a part of that tradition, was too much," he says. "Ten
million dollars over seven years meant financial security for life. It's a good
football job. They give you every opportunity to win. I'd never been to a place where
I had everything. I wanted that chance. I knew we would win there. That's not even a
question. So, I figured, 'Ah, what the hell. What's the worst they could do, fire me?'
No, the worst would be embarrassed administrators firing him before he ever had a
chance to coach a game when Sports Illustrated reports - and Price has steadfastly and
vigoorously denied - that he was involved in all kinds of bad behavior after drinking
up a storm in a strip club at Pensacola, Fla.
According to the report, Price went back to his hotel room with two women with whom
he engaged in aggressive sex, hearing exclamations from those partners like, "Roll,
Tide!" and, then, screaming back, "It's rolling, baby! It's rolling!" And having at
least one of those women later order up $1,000 worth of room service while he's out
playing in a charity golf tournament. And, then, becoming a national joke of sorts,
becoming the target of columnists and commentators from coast to coast who are stunned
and appalled at such antics. Finally, having to work it out with family members,
including his wife, who are more concerned with knowing the truth than his sudden fall
from college football's grace.
That would be the worst.
And it was the worst.
In the wake of the episode coming to light, Price fell into depression. He couldn't
eat, he lost 30 pounds, he sought the appropriate help and took medication, he
searched his soul. He blamed himself for what he considered some mindless
indiscretions.
"I made a mistake," he says. "I know that . . . I beat myself up for it. But . . . "
Price pauses to allow the backed-up plumbing in his eyes to drain.
" . . . But that's personal. I came through the personal stuff."
Still, he did not want to take the blame for things that were reported in the
magazine that he claims did not occur. He filed suit against Sports Illustrated for
$20 million and awaits his day in court.
"What was reported was grossly incorrect," he says. "We intend to prove that in
front of a jury - sometime next year. I feel like I was wronged. Time-Warner has a lot
of lawyers. I have one."
Regardless, Price was given the heave-ho at Alabama and fell into his personal and
professional funk.
For the first time in more than three decades, he abided last season without a team
to coach. He moved back to the Pacific Northwest, spending time in Idaho and
Washington, and keeping tabs on the happenings in college football, knowing he wanted
to return to coaching.
He went to many of Washington State's games, including one when he attended by
himself, cloaked in sunglasses. "I snuck in," he says. "Nobody knew I was there."
Price planned on doing some TV work, but the sidelines kept calling out to him,
even though no school administrators did.
When the University of Arizona job opened, he wanted it badly, but Arizona
president Peter Likins quickly pushed a large rock over that possibility, telling the
Arizona Daily Star: "[Price] is not in the picture, has never been in the picture, and
will never be in the picture."
That's protective administrative speak for We will not touch that public relations
nightmare.
Price knew the staircase of opportunity was steep, in fact it was darn-near
vertical, but he also knew he could coach and win, and, despite that sordid night, he
could be a bonus for some university.
That part of the track record was crystal clear.
Weber State was Exhibit A.
He came to the school in Ogden as a 34-year-old first-time head coach in 1981,
beating out Dennis Erickson for the position. Price had worked as an assistant at
Washington State, Puget Sound, and Missouri before taking the job on account of the
fact he wanted to be his own boss and spend more time with his young sons.
"I took the worst job in America to do it," he says.
The Weebs had suffered through multiple losing seasons, a dreary, repressive time
in Wildcat football, according to Brad Larsen, a longtime athletics department
spokesman.
"When Mike came in, we had had eight years of losing football," he says. "It was
bad football. The morale wasn't good. The former coach, Pete Riehlman, who was a
former Marine, once locked the players in their rooms during fall camp. He brow-beat
them.
"Mike came in and it was like, 'Wow.' He lightened everything up, made it fun.
Instead of locking guys down in a prison camp, he had Popsicle and watermelon breaks
in the middle of practice. It was like the Berlin Wall coming down."
Price once showed up for practice in a bright orange wig. Another time, he had his
team practice in the parking lot of the Dee Events Center because he said that week's
opponent had lousy turf and he wanted his players acclimated to it. Beyond the humored
perspective and the jokes, Price started to win.
He assembled a remarkable coaching staff at Weber State that included assistants
Dave Campo, who later became the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, Mike Zimmer, who
became a coordinator for the Cowboys, Bob Bratkowski, now with the Cincinnati Bengals,
Gregg Brandon, who replaced Utah coach Urban Meyer as head coach at Bowling Green, and
Dave Arslanian, later the head coach at Weber and Utah State.
Price had studied the one-back offense being run by Jack Elway, John's father, at
San Jose State, and committed himself to it. The Wildcats opened the throttle on the
offense, often throwing for 300 yards a game.
The victories emerged, so did recognition.
The magic?
"Mike has a way of making everybody around him feel important," says Arslanian.
"He's honest, sincere and genuine. The kids at Weber loved playing for him. He
accomplished things there that hadn't been done. He went on to do things at Washington
State that nobody has done. He'll do the same at UTEP."
Two years after taking the Wildcats to a 10-3 record, and their first win in the
Division I-AA playoffs, Price left Ogden for Pullman, where he may have taken the
second-worst coaching job in America.
Under-funded and unrespected by the power schools in the Pac-10, in a godforsaken
environment, he installed and utilized the same strategies that worked in Ogden to
bounce Washington State upward, too, reeling in three 10-win seasons to reconfigure
the lowly Cougars' fortunes. Price's teams made the aforementioned Rose Bowl
appearances, including the one at the end of the 2002 season that inspired his
ill-fated hiring at Alabama.
The quick stop in Tuscaloosa was weird for Price even before it got real weird. He
wasn't used to having limos take him wherever he wanted to go, having office space the
size of the 18th green at Augusta, having fans chase him down for his autograph,
having every coaching luxury.
Owing to the fact that he stepped out of appropriate bounds, he unwittingly caromed
his career back where it began when he signed at UTEP in December 2003.
The Miners were hopeless enough to want him.
Lord knows, in his awful state, he wanted them.
It was a deal made, then, in desperation. A place in which Price was completely at
ease.
And both sides are thrilled.
"We had a list of five great candidates," says UTEP athletic director Bob Stull.
"We went through a thorough process. I wanted Mike. He did a great job at Washington
State, a more challenging place to win. And we think he can do it here. He's
well-respected with other coaches, he's great in the community, and he has a lot to
offer student-athletes.
"He carries a great message. You can do good things your entire life, and, then you
do just one [bad] thing, and it defines you. It's like: 'I threw away $10 million by
doing something stupid. Don't you do that.'
At UTEP, Price earns $225,000, plus incentives. It's not all bad. He drives a new
Escalade, lives in a large home and belongs to two country clubs as a part of the
deal. But the football, like his frame of mind a year ago, is rock bottom.
So, the renovating of his name has begun, alongside the rebuilding of the program.
On both counts, it will take time. The Miners were crushed last week at Arizona State,
41-9. Then, they got Weber State at home.
"This is a compassionate, forgiving kind of place," Stull says. "People here
understand that a person can make a mistake and go on. And they're excited about what
could happen. Mike is the hottest thing in town."
Spirits in the dusty desert, indeed, are soaring.
"Coach Price has changed us," says senior middle linebacker Robert Rodriguez, at
the end of the day's practice. "We know he has a tremendous work ethic. We know he's a
caring person. He acts like we're all doing something for him. But he's really doing
everything for us. He's more than a coach, he's a blessing."
Funny how one school's embarrassment is another school's blessing.
Either way, Price, having survived his worst moment, will ride the circle, the
cycle, from Weber to UTEP, that has saved his own psyche. And appreciate the chance,
too.
As he stands, sweating in the post-practice sun, in the bottom of the steamy Sun
Bowl, he grins and says: "I'm more humble than I've ever been. I've learned a lot. My
family is important to me. This is important to me. I'm happy here. That's the most
important thing."
Even more important than resuscitating a reputation.
Price resume
Born: April 6, 1946 (Denver)
Hometown: Everett, Wash.
Education: Bachelor's, Puget Sound; Master's, Washington State
Family: Wife, Joyce; Children, Eric, Aaron, Angie
Hired: Dec. 21, 2003 by Texas-El Paso
Career: 1989-2002, head coach, Washington State
1981-1988, head coach, Weber State
1969-1980, assistant coach, Missouri, Washington State, Puget Sound
Somebody far away from this dusty desert town once said: "Your reputation for a
thousand years could depend on one moment."
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