Bulldogs' coach has rough night at The Hump'

By By Will Bardwell/staff writer
February 8, 2004
STARKVILLE Party at Rick Stansbury's house on Wednesday night.
Somebody else will have to buy the pizza and drinks, though, because if Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive has any guts, Stansbury will be suspended without pay after a moment of idiocy on Saturday afternoon.
Stansbury's Mississippi State team will be in Columbia, S.C., taking on South Carolina in an important road game, but after the one-man circus he put on in Humphrey Coliseum, he won't be there and he doesn't deserve to be.
With one technical foul already under his belt five minutes into the contest against Ole Miss, Stansbury watched senior point guard Timmy Bowers go down after tripping over a defender's leg. Bowers' forehead slammed against the floor, and down he stayed for several seconds.
As it turned out, Bowers was okay. Oddly, Stansbury was the one who seemed to suffer a head injury.
While trainers checked on Bowers, a furious Stansbury screamed at officials from the sideline. Then he marched to half court, shrugged his shoulders and scowled, and that's all it took. The refs called a second technical foul on him, and he was automatically ejected.
After the Bulldogs' 80-56 win, Stansbury joked about it, saying the only thing he regretted was watching the rest of the game from baseball coach Ron Polk's smoke-filled office. No apology. No regret. All pompous.
Wrong, Rick. You deserved it, just as any coach who walks to half court and shows up a ref deserves a tech. And for the show you put on after being ejected, you deserve a lot more than a whistle being blown at you.
Because when the second tech came down, Stansbury's aforementioned head trauma took over. Stansbury kept screaming and pointing at the officials and even had to be escorted off the floor by MSU athletic director Larry Templeton.
Here's a general rule of thumb you can use in everyday life: any time your boss has to put his arm around you and walk you off the job site, you've done something wrong.
But not if you asked Stansbury, who continually made light of it after the win.
Gotcha, Rick. The next time I get punched out for giving someone the bird, I'll remind them I didn't say anything. All will be forgotten, I'm sure.
And as if he hadn't already made an idiot out of himself, Stansbury glared at the officials as he left, then stopped and grabbed his throat in a choke.
I half expected him to throw a chair.
I'm not throwing Stansbury into the same class of lower life as Bobby Knight, but what the Bulldogs' head coach pulled on Saturday was nothing short of Knight-esque. And for what? To show up a referee? Why?
The media has been good to Stansbury this season. Web sites have published feature stories on the Bulldogs and national magazines have also spotlighted the team. The Bulldogs are a scrappy team that can play with anybody the kind of team people like to root for.
What people don't like, though, is a jerk and that's what Stansbury was on Saturday.
I can completely understand where Stansbury was coming from. The referees made more than one questionable call in the first half, and they made no call at all when Bowers got tied up and fell. Whether or not the play warranted a whistle is debatable, but Stansbury had seen enough so much so, in fact, that he was willing to act like an idiot to make himself feel better.
Now, it's up to the league office to say it won't be tolerated. Stansbury may or may not be fined by the league office I doubt it but he probably deserves it. What he unquestionably deserves is a suspension of at least one game.
One of the first questions posed to Stansbury after the game was whether or not he expected to be disciplined by the SEC.
No, the other guy who made a fool of himself.
Yeah, Stansbury, you might. If Slive has any guts at all, you might. And you might want to think twice before pulling a stunt like that again.