You know, as illiterate as he was in reading a room, this (now former) unnamed assistant coach at Indiana wasn't entirely wrong. Modeling his mentorship style after a man that orchestrated the targeted extermination of well over five million Jewish people and countless others that dared to so much as disagree with his beliefs doesn't exactly speak glowingly of him as a person or a professional. However, given the hierarchy of college football, history provides much worse (not be confused with more evil) leaders to look up to. Be it through horror or hive mind, Hitler was unquestionably successful in getting others to absorb his wrathful wish as their command. Unfortunately, you'd have to flat out lie to yourself to believe that, to a much lesser degree, some of the same scare tactics aren't used at a level of coaching that can occasionally border on the dictatorial. To be clear, the nameless coach in question is undoubtedly an ignorant buffoon who's probably capped out his on upward mobility if spin-zoning the "positive" elements of the Holocaust was his best attempt at trying to rally players of all races, colors, creeds, and religions. Football inherently has more than enough of its own problems without sharing a sentence with genocide. Still, all he really did was invoke the obvious, which is that some of the most accomplished coaches in college football prescribe strictly to the "my way or the highway" approach. Hell, look no further than how quickly some of those very same coaches flame out of the NFL when forced to relinquish a portion of their power to players whose long overdue paychecks offer them the slightest bit of autonomy. Now, implying that Hitler would have made for a heck of a coach if he focused his attention on running gassers on an undergraduate gridiron instead of inside enclosed chambers of the unlawfully imprisoned is as much of a stretch as referencing him as "great" in any context. That said, there's plenty of former Penn State football players that still believe in nothing more strongly than the innocence of the winningest coach in NCAA history who admittedly enabled a pedophile for decades on end. I wish Zander Diamont weren't overly optimistic in presuming that all "great" college coaches have emotional intelligence in common, but - sadly - it's naive to pretend that instituting a cult-like mentality that forces players to blindly follow as opposed to adapting hasn't worked out pretty damn well in the past.
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