SALT LAKE CITY — And now we take you live to Hogle Zoo, where football coach Bruce Barnum and his Portland State Vikings are actually having fun.
Is this some sort of hoax?
Fun in football is as stylish as a mullet.
But here he comes — all of him. The Vikings meet Weber State in a Big Sky Conference game Saturday in Ogden, and to borrow another TV phrase, it should be interesting. That’s how Barnum lives.
Sometimes his penchant for fun clashes with a culture in which everyone is offended by something. Take, for instance, two weeks ago as the Vikings prepared to play at Southern Utah. Barnum called Cedar City “Whoville” and declared his team Who-free by staying at Brian Head Resort.
“I don’t like the town, Cedar City,” he told Rip City 620. “ I don’t want to go down to the abyss because it’s about four hours before the Body Snatchers get you, you know, before you pod up. We are going to practice there — just an hour and out. We are not going down in there. We are going to look down on the vortex like the Grinch did on Whoville.”
While this prompted considerable backlash — including a 45-31 SUU win — Barnum says it was only a joke.
There may be no crying in baseball, but there’s no joking in football.
“There were two sides to it,” Barnum said on Thursday. “First off, I got my hands slapped. Whatever politics were involved, they said I didn’t cross the line, but I was right on (top of) it.”
He knows so because he had two police officers assigned to guard him at Eccles Coliseum. Meanwhile, the game sold out.
“I united the town with a simple interview,” he said.
He and SUU head coach Demario Warren had a laugh about the remarks before the game.
Barnum’s approach is as fresh as it is effective. Promoted after the head coach was fired in November 2014, he took a 2-9 team to a playoff berth and a 9-3 record. He was named FCS Coach of the Year. This year PSU is 2-3, with wins over Idaho State and Central Washington and losses to San Jose State, Washington and Southern Utah.
Before arriving at what he calls “my dream job,” Barnum was an assistant at Coast Guard Academy, Cornell, Idaho State and Portland State. Throughout, he has maintained that being a coach involves more than coaching. So he tries to introduce his players to local cultures.
“Why go to a hotel and sit and wait for a game?” he said.
Last season he took them to Alcatraz and a safari park. He even looked into booking a charter fishing expedition. On Friday the team will visit Hogle Zoo and Temple Square in Salt Lake.
“We try to show them a piece of Americana,” he said.
Meanwhile, Barnum maintains it’s OK to enjoy your job, which may or may not entail calling a town of 30,000 "Whoville." What’s the dividing line between big towns and unacceptable ones?
“I cut it off at the turkey farm — Snow College,” he said, clearly grooming an entirely new group of haters. “That will be the Mason-Dixon line.”
Entertaining coaches like Barnum have been almost entirely scrubbed from the big-school landscape. Too much serious mainstream and social media attention, plus all those touchy boosters. After the SUU dustup, Barnum told athletics director Mark Rountree he was ending the jokes because he didn’t want his boss to catch the grief.
"You do and you’re out of here,” Rountree said.
“He even told me, ‘You can crank it up a little bit,’ said Barnum, “but I said no.”
Because he was born in Vancouver, Washington, and coached four years at Idaho State, Barnum knows the West. All the better to schedule field trips. Who knows, he may take his team to the bug museum at UC Davis or Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, later this year.
There’s a big world out there — outside football — to discover.
“I try to make it like a bowl game for these guys,” Barnum said. “You don’t get bowl games in the FCS.”
You don’t get coaches like him, either.
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