In Reply to: Trouble Bruin? posted by TheHappyBurgermeister on June 04, 2026 at 12:09:59
… oldest son was 9. I could share details, but leave it to say that we outscored our opponents that year in the regular season 199 to 18, and 12 of those 18 were scored against us in “scrub mode”.
Carlos Emescua (remember him - I liked and admired him on that CH5 morning news program) coached the Rams, the third best team out of 8 in that league that year. We had beaten his team earlier in the season 37-0, which ended early in the 2nd half due to a 35pt mercy rule. On this day, however, the game went to completion, as we were only up 32-0 when they turned the ball back to us on 4 downs with only 10 seconds to play.
The clock stopped, I called a time out and called my 10 year old QB over to tell him just to take the snap and take a knee. So I was surprised and embarrassed when he called a bomb play and completed it for a touchdown.
I started walking out on the field walking towards my QB, yelling at him “What are you doing?!?!?!?” I could only imagine that Carlos thought that I had called that TO to “Pete-Carroll” the Rams. The QB’s dad walked over and started yelling at me for yelling at his kid. When I tried to explain, he insisted that he didn’t want me to take an edge of his son’s agressiveness. After a minute or two, this public argument subdued.
I was right to feel the way I did, but in the heat of the moment I lost my cool a bit. The 10 year old QB told me after that he was egged on my his teammates in the huddle to do what he did
Why do I tell this story here?
Well, I feel that across all opposing coaches, Cronin has made it publicly clear that he likes and admires Izzo perhaps more than all others. So I believe that when that flagrant occurred in a manner that looked worse than it probably was, and was in somewhat of a meaningless point in the game, he lost his cool, embarrassed that a player of his would do that to his basketball idol.
Cronin later publicly apologized for his reaction, and had to live with an extreme amount of negative national publicity on top of it.
The moral of this story is that no one is perfect, especially not people with a microscope on their every movement. But I do not judge him as a person or a coach for a single misstep, especially one that he conceded was wrong and apologized for.