Melvindale coach should be canned, playoffs or not

For ages, it’s been the perception that football in places like Texas supersedes everything. Of course, that’s typically not the case.

But in the Melvindale-Northern Allen Park Public School District, signs point to that holding true.

The school board for the district, in a suburb outside Detroit, has opted to retain head coach Phil Howard for the rest of the season after one of his assistants circulated a flyer that allegedly attributed racially charged comments — including two uses of the n-word — to an opposing coach for a Week 8 regular season game.

The opposing coach denied making any such comments and his school district has defended him.

The Melvindale assistant coach has since been fired. Howard has not. The catch? The assistant coach is Howard’s brother, Denny. Are you telling me this head coach gets a pass because he didn’t put together the memo himself and didn’t personally pass it out? It’s his staff, his brother!

A head coach needs to take responsibility for the actions of the individuals he brings onto his staff. If this were going to be an issue, Denny Howard never should have been allowed in the locker room with those teenagers in the first place.

Bulletin board material is one thing. Racial slurs are another, especially when it appears there’s no reasonable evidence to support Denny Howard’s theory that the comments were actually made.

And could this possibly have something to do with the fact that his team is 9-0 and his players infiltrated Monday’s school board meeting, threw down their jerseys and said they wouldn’t participate in this week’s state playoffs if the coach was fired? Sounds to me like the school board is setting priorities here.

It shouldn’t matter if the team is 9-0 or 0-9 (they’re one of the top-ranked teams in Division 3). The board’s decision to postpone their actual decision until after the season is done is simply a way of saying, “Let’s see how far we can go and maybe a state title will help all of this go away quietly,” before scolding Phil Howard and letting him get on with offseason workouts.