College football coach in Texas admires players accused of stealing newspapers

Guy Morriss sounds like quite a guy. Casual college football fans might remember Morriss for coaching moribund football teams like Kentucky and Baylor and elevating them to simply bad. But for the last year, he’s been toiling at Texas A&M-Commerce, a Division II school with a title that sounds more like a credit union for the flagship university than an educational institution.

Morriss is back in the news for applauding players on his football team for stealing as many campus newspapers as they could on Feb. 25. Those copies of The East Texan were carrying a front page article about players on the team getting accused of drug charges.

When police investigated the newspaper incident, Morris had this to say about his players and their behavior:

“I’m proud of my players for doing that,” Morriss said, according to a police incident report. “This was the best team building exercise we have ever done.” — via The Associated Press.

The university’s student newspaper editor, James Bright, believes the loss cost about $1,100. But don’t tell that to Morriss. According to the AP report, Morriss told police that he couldn’t understand how or why boosting 2,000 copies of a newspaper so that no one could read its contents would constitute stealing.

Hilariously, that school’s athletics director told investigators that the incident flummoxed him in part because he “didn’t think they were smart enough to do this on their own,” according to an investigative report.

Well, at least the apples don’t fall far from the tree in the Texas A&M-Commerce football program.

Looking stupid isn’t anything new to Morriss. Perhaps his most enduring image from the days when he coached big time college football was when his Kentucky Wildcats were about to upset heavily-favored No. 14-ranked Louisiana State in 2002. In that game, Morriss’ Wildcats had a 30-27 lead late in the game, prompting Morriss to get a Gatorade bath from players celebrating victory before time expired.

But then LSU launched a Hail Mary pass with no time left from 82 yards away, whereupon an LSU receiver eluded Kentucky’s inept defenders and dashed to the touchdown for an improbable victory. Morriss got to stand there on the sideline, soaked and cold, reflecting on his brilliantly-drawn up last play and the irony of his victory bath as LSU celebrated.

Check it out for yourself in this video clip, particularly the :56 second mark.

And then Morriss went off to what he thought were greener pastures at Baylor, which hasn’t had a winning season since 1995. There, he racked up an 18-40 record before getting cast aside like any one of those 2,000 newspapers his current squad allegedly stole.