See if you can follow this: Dave Arslanian desperately wants to coach a football team, but he gets paid to coach a team he doesn't coach. Technically, he's unemployed — at a rate of about $7,500 a month — but he manufactures ways to work in football.
Welcome to the odd world of Arslanian, who is enduring his first fall without a football team in about 35 years. Football is his passion. "I can't ever remember a day I wasn't involved with football," he says. It's in his blood. Arslanian's father, Sark, has coached at the junior high, high school, college or pro levels for 50 years. At 76, he's enjoying his retirement — as a high school coach with a salary of $1 per season. Dave's brothers, Paul and Jim, played college football, and Paul is an assistant coach at San Jose State. Dave played college football, then coached at Arizona State, Snow College, Weber State and Utah State, and now here he is, a coach without a team.
"On opening weekend I sat in front of the TV and watched games all day, nonstop," he says. "It was a shock to me. I had no idea there were that many games on TV on a Saturday."
That was one of the few Saturdays he's spent at home. The 50-year-old Arslanian travels the country, studying quarterbacks and offenses, watching college games and visiting coaches to "get his name out there" for a job. He tried to get a position with the new XFL but didn't get it. He tried to get a position with NFL Europe but struck out again.
"I'll eventually find something," he says.
He concedes it won't be easy. He's got the coaching equivalent of a scarlet letter tattooed on his forehead — a large F, as in FIRED. In a shocking move last winter, Utah State fired him with two years remaining on a four-year contract. His record: 7-15.
"I've got to overcome the 7-15 record and getting fired two years into a contract," he says of his job search. "Even though it's not fair, the people doing the hiring will say, 'What's happening here.' "
What's happening here? Arslanian will have to do some fast talking during interviews with prospective employers.
He could explain, if he took a really big breath, that Utah State has had eight coaches in 25 years and in all that time none of them left town with an overall winning record, and the reason Arslanian won only seven games was because he was rebuilding an undertalented program with freshmen recruits with the understanding that he had time to build for the future, and that meanwhile his teams had to play Kansas State, Georgia, BYU, Utah, Boise State, Colorado, Oregon State and Washington.
He could explain that so far, his replacement isn't having any better luck than he did.
Of Arslanian's nine assistant coaches, eight have found other coaching jobs around the country. But the head coach is still without a job. He's the fall guy. He's the one who has 7-15 typed on his resume.
"I've pursued a lot of head-coaching possibilities," he says. "The (USU) contract was supposed to give me time to land on my feet and find something comparable."
(Arslanian's attorneys recently filed a lawsuit against Utah State over a number of issues, including payment of his contract, which expires in Dec. 2001. He declines to comment on the suit.)
"People don't realize how difficult it is to get a head-coaching job, and it's always easier to get one when you've got one," he says. "If (USU) hadn't waited until December (to fire him), I could have found something."
Arslanian is staying as close to the game as he can. He says he's working on "some football projects," but he is vague about the details other than to say he is evaluating talent on a free-lance basis and studying quarterbacks and offensive schemes.
He flew to Atlanta this weekend to watch the Georgia Tech-Wake Forest game. "There are some teams I want to watch," he says. He plans to visit Norm Chow, the new offensive coordinator at North Carolina State, and watch his team play. Earlier this season he flew to Los Angeles to observe the USC-San Jose State game. But as close to the game as this brings him, it's not the same.
"It seems really strange to go into a stadium without a team," he says.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com