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Behind the Mike: DiNardo's past doesn't make him bashful

Big Ten Network football analyst and ex-coach not afraid to be critical

Mike Lucas  —  8/21/2008 10:21 pm

Shortly after Gerry DiNardo arrived on the Notre Dame campus as an impressionable freshman, he was the beneficiary of some sage advice from Ara Parseghian, the legendary Irish football coach. Parseghian was addressing the role of the media in shaping the minds of young athletes.

"Don't necessarily buy into the good stuff that people are saying about you," Parseghian instructed DiNardo, a highly regarded offensive guard whose brother, Larry, had been an All-American for the Irish under Parseghian. "Because if you buy into the good stuff, then you're going to have to buy into the bad stuff. And you're better off not buying into any of it."

That message stuck with DiNardo, who also garnered All-American recognition and played on the Irish's 1973 national championship team. But it especially relevant for DiNardo when he became a head coach and ran his own programs at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State University and Indiana. Each presented some unique challenges as far as media coverage and demands.

"Bloomington (Ind.) was pretty soft on its football coach," said DiNardo, now a football analyst on the Big Ten Network. The network is already booked to televise the University of Wisconsin's first two games this year: Aug. 30 against Akron and Sept. 6 against Marshall, both at Camp Randall Stadium.

"There may have been more about basketball than football in the newspaper during the football season. Vanderbilt was a private school, and the University of Tennessee dominated the news in Nashville."

By sharp contrast, LSU was a fishbowl for players and coaches alike in Baton Rouge and the state of Louisiana. "It was pretty hot and heavy," DiNardo said of the overall media scrutiny. "But I still read the newspapers because I wanted to know what my players were reading."

DiNardo brings some valuable perspective to his television assignment, whether in-studio or on location. In critiquing a team's execution or a coach's game management, he knows what it's like to be critiqued by someone else. He also knows what it's like to fall short of expectations. He was fired at Indiana and LSU.

"As a coach, you can isolate yourself from it (the criticism); 90 percent of what is said about coaches you don't have to hear," DiNardo noted. "I got up at 4 in the morning. I was in the office at 5, and I didn't get home until 11 at night. So, I could totally isolate myself. But the first issue is, do you want to hear it? And if you do, then you'd better deal with it."

Given his coaching pedigree, how does DiNardo, the TV analyst, handle being a critic of a coach's decision-making?

"As long as you can back up what you believe, you're representing your feelings," he said. "If I'm critical of someone, and I say why I'm critical, everybody here (in the Big Ten) is a big boy making a lot of money (to coach). But I think if you say something and don't back it up, then you're doing the wrong thing."

Having coached in the Southeast Conference and the Big Ten, DiNardo can speak to the differences. If you study 10-year cycles, he believes that all of the Bowl Championship Series conferences, save for the Big East, are basically equal. However ... "The bottom half of the SEC,'' he said, "has more talent than the bottom half of the Big Ten."

The 55-year-old DiNardo has a firm understanding of why some programs have a chance to succeed and others are destined to fail. His wife is a University of Wisconsin graduate and still has family in the Madison area. So when DiNardo looks at what the Badgers have been able to do since 1993 -- the first Rose Bowl under Barry Alvarez -- he sees a model.

"We all know how good of a coach Barry is," DiNardo said. "But Wisconsin's legacy is chancellor Donna Shalala, athletic director Pat Richter and Barry. She got it, Pat got it, and Barry obviously got it. That's the lesson learned. Until you partner up at a university, it's not going to happen. Barry with a different AD and different chancellor might have been a different story."

What does DiNardo miss the most about coaching? "I miss the players," he said without hesitation. "That's probably been the biggest transition -- not being able to watch an 18- to 22-year-old grow up."

Broadcasting has helped fill that void. "More importantly, I've got a 15-year-old son who's about to start high school," he said. "For the first half of his life, I wasn't home. My wife often says, 'You've got your most important coaching job right now, and it's coaching your son.' "

Mike Lucas  —  8/21/2008 10:21 pm