FanHouse

FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in the history of Big Ten football.

Of all the ephemera associated with college football, probably the worst is that dreadful institution, the coach's TV show. While I can hardly claim to have seen them all, the ones I have seen have been (a) pretty much all the same, and (b) terrible. The production values are just a notch above something you'd see on the public access channel. The game film is nothing but the highlights your local news showed the night of the game. The commentary from the coach is usually empty of any non-obvious content. And you just know they only pick the fat, juicy hanging curveballs for the "Ask the Coach" segment. The shows are just a way to generate some additional income for the coach, because as we all know, college football coaches at the Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision level don't get paid very well.

So today we turn our attention to what might be the only interesting moment in the entire history of these wretched programs. It involves a coach who ... well, he made a rather curious decision about how to remind people that the season wasn't over yet.

The coach in question is Don Morton, remembered in Wisconsin as "the guy before Barry Alvarez." Morton coached the Badgers for three seasons, from 1987 through 1989. These were not great seasons for Wisconsin football. Morton had been quite successful in previous stops at North Dakota Sta.te and Tulsa. In fact, he'd never had a losing season.

Of course, there's a first time for everything.

Morton went 3-8 and 1-10 his first two years in Madison and, in the middle of a 1989 season which wasn't any better than 1987 and 1988 had been, Morton seemed like a dead man walking. To convince the remaining Wisconsin faithful that he hadn't packed it in and still had hopes that he could turn it around, Morton tried a little stunt on his TV show. He opened the program by emerging from a coffin and proclaiming, "I'm not dead yet!" It might have made for a great moment, if not for the fact that his (non-interim) predecessor Dave McClain had died on the job three and a half years earlier.

Morton might not have been dead, but his career at Wisconsin certainly was. After rattling off five straight losses to end the season (four of them blowouts), Morton was fired and you know how the next guy worked out for Wisconsin.

Don't feel too bad for Don Morton, however. North Dakota State brought him back as a fundraiser for a few years. He eventually left for the private sector, taking an executive job with a Fargo-based software company. That company eventually got bought out by Microsoft, and today Morton is the Site Leader of MSFT's Fargo campus. I'd call that landing on your feet.