Rogers Reaches a New Height in Being Low

By RICK REILLY

Feb. 11, 1985 12 AM PT

When it comes to scruples, college football coaches generally weigh in somewhere between Don King and guys selling cures for baldness. But Darryl Rogers, the recently vamoosed Arizona State coach, has taken his species into new frontiers.

Rogers fled the Pac-10 for the NFL and the Detroit Lions last week, which made news. What didn’t make news was the swath of lies he cut on his way out the door.

On Tuesday, you’ll recall, the press upset our Mister Rogers by showing up in his neighborhood and asking if it was true that he was a candidate for the Detroit job. They shouldn’t have done that.

“I am not a candidate,” he sniffed. “I have not had any discussions with anybody in Detroit. I was not in Detroit. . . . I don’t know how all of this got started.”

The next morning, Rogers marched into the office of ASU Athletic Director Dick Tamburo to make sure Dick had it straight. Nobody was going to put Darryl over a barrel. Dick insisted he had it straight and told reporters that Darryl Rogers was not going anywhere, by gum. How do these things get started? Tamburo’s statement ran on the Associated Press wire sometime later that afternoon.

Exactly 16 minutes later another story came over the wire. This one said that Mister Rogers had agreed to take the Detroit job.

Can you say liar ?

If we are going to be fibbed to and then catch the fibber with his pants down, we at least expect to hear a reasonably creative excuse. We at least want Rogers to tell us he had an orthodontist’s appointment and didn’t have time to tell us the truth or that his dog threw up on the Detroit contract and he couldn’t see his signature on it or at least that the computer was down. Something.

But no. Rogers just smiled like a cat with a mouth full of canary feathers.

“It just came up,” he said. “One minute you’re not in it and the next minute you are.”

Well, shucks, that will happen. Hardly a night goes by when I’m not sitting at home and the phone won’t ring and the voice on the other end will say would you or anybody in your household be interested in this no-obligation, one-time-only offer to coach the Detroit Lions for $1.8 million over the next five years and please take five or ten seconds to think about it.

When the truth was finally told (through no fault of Rogers), it was revealed that Rogers had spoken at length with the Lions the week before on the telephone. Everything about the deal was ironed out except for a few wrinkles which could not be ironed out. Funny, but they were ironed out just minutes after Rogers had told a gaggle of press in his living room that he wasn’t going anywhere.

OK, so Rogers is not the first coach to stand over broken glass and a baseball and explain that the wind did it. No, here is where Rogers out-sleazed even his considerable self.

It seems that Rogers and the Lions wanted to keep the whole affair a secret until after ASU’s recruiting was finished this Wednesday. “Unfortunately, it leaked,” Lion General Manager Russ Thomas said. “So we decided to go ahead with the announcement of it.”

Think of it. Rogers was ready to tell high school kids how dedicated he was to them and to ASU football, knowing full well that in less than a week he’d be as welcome in Tempe as a Datsun in Detroit. For all we know, that is how he operated for weeks.

And what does Bobby Bluechip think when he shows up at ASU on Freshman Orientation Day?

“Well, here I am,” Bobby says. “Say, where is Coach Rogers?”

“Ahem, well . . . he’s preparing for his first game,” someone will say. “Unfortunately, it’s against the Chicago Bears.”

The whole squalid scene has not only given college football one more splotch mark, but has netted Rogers a few less admirers, starting with former ASU coach Dan Devine, who heads the program’s alumni support group, the Sun Angels.

“I’m a friend of Darryl’s, but what he did was very unfair to the kids he was recruiting,” Devine said. “He was not justified. . . . To me, it’s deceitful, making a kid believe you’re going to be there when you aren’t. I think it’s a moral obligation on the coach’s part to tell them.”

Sigh. They don’t make many like Divine anymore. They make ‘em like Rogers and more’s the pity.

Still, Rogers will no doubt have his fans. Some folks like him. They say his face reminds them a little of Roy Rogers.

Personally, he reminds me of Trigger.

From the southern end.